When teams start exploring options on how to use Workplace by Facebook, they usually start with big plans for changing how they work, yet struggle to break habits and patterns of work and soon they go back to how things were before. We’re creatures of habit, after all.
Our advice is to start small and see how it works for them; the key is to make sure these actions are focused on solving business challenges, to make sure all team members are finding value with their activities.
As everyone becomes more familiar with the platform, then you can think of migrating more complex processes, but here are three simple ways in which you can get your team started!
1. Share your work early and ask for feedback
Workplace is a great place to ask colleagues for feedback and increase the quality of your deliverables, and the best moment to receive meaningful and significant input is right at the start of your thinking process.
To that end, make sure you share what you are working on at the earliest stage possible. At the same time this also avoids two people working on the same thing without being aware of each other's efforts.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when posting:
Provide enough context to make it easier for your peers to understand the kind of contributions you are seeking (i.e. is the formatting, the content, more examples?)
If you have questions for specific team members, remember to tag them on the post
Explain the goal, urgency and deadline. This will help your peers figure out when would be best to help you.
2. Co-creation sessions
Along with asking for feedback, you can use the group to organise co-creation sessions.
Similar to how #tweetchats work, these sessions are pre-planned and time boxed online conversations, focused on bringing together a group of people to collect many contributions in a short period of time.
To organise these co-creation sessions, you should follow these steps:
Select a topic with a clearly defined deliverable (i.e. returned items policy)
Craft a series of key questions around that topic
Create a group event and invite your team members (i.e. Wednesday at 11am, for 1hr)
Share the initial question and ask everyone to share their contributions as comments
After a few minutes, launch the second question as a comment, with everyone contributing on the same thread.
Keep posting the remaining key questions on the same thread until the end of the session
As the one leading this session, stay away from providing answers; Your focus is on triggering contributions through the use of smart questions and conversations
3. Structure your information in threads
As you start sharing information constantly on your group feed, it can become difficult to keep track of all the different conversations within the group.
To better organise the information, you can create individual posts for each of the key topics of your business case (i.e. team meetings, project alpha, risk assessment, etc) and ask everyone to place relevant updates as comments under the relevant posts.
By clustering all the updates and information under the same thread, you have a much better overview of each of the topics and how they evolve over time.