Moving on from Meta: What do businesses need to look for?

15 Nov 2024, posted in Blogs

Meta’s move to discontinue its business communication platform Workplace in August 2025 leaves over seven million users without a way to connect with and engage their people. Considering engaged teams are 21% more profitable and 17% more productive, the sudden closure of the engagement platform poses major issues to businesses globally. 

But this change didn’t come out of the blue. Meta’s decision was a strategic one, to focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that will fundamentally reshape the way we work. 

A change of this magnitude allows businesses to find a platform that is better suited to their communication and engagement needs. Businesses now need a modern employee experience platform for communication and collaboration, tailored to their needs and designed to keep their people connected and engaged, no matter where they are.  

Here are some of the capabilities you should be looking for in your business’s new colleague platform.

Consumer-grade technology 

It seems Meta let go of Workplace because it hasn’t quite kept up with other engagement platforms. While Meta has been busy exploring exciting projects like extended reality, Workplace missed out on updates, especially with newer tech like AI.  

Your ideal colleague platform should embrace consumer-grade technology that provides the best user experience. After all, we use state-of-the-art technology every day in our personal lives—from phones to laptops—so why wouldn’t you use the best technology possible in your business, too?  

Too many businesses rely on old-fashioned intranets that aren’t optimised to their needs, and this can be detrimental to colleague productivity and engagement. If your colleague platform is easier to use, people are more likely to use it. It’s common sense. 

Incorporating a consumer-grade employee platform can allow you to explore and include new technological developments. By making your platform available as an app, your people can access everything they need, from anywhere in the world. Colleague platforms can use features like AI to provide personalised content feeds for all your people, meaning they can stay in the loop and receive the updates most relevant to them. Customising the colleague experience in this way means that your people receive the information that they need most, and that they are most likely to engage with.  

Custom branding 

Customisation is a great way to stimulate engagement. A significant feature of Workplace was its design emulating Facebook, another Meta platform. While this design made Workplace’s user interface seem familiar to users, it limited the extent to which companies could tailor the platform to their unique communication and collaboration needs, meaning they couldn’t really make it their own.  

The ideal colleague platform should allow you to truly make your mark by offering advanced flexibility and customisation capabilities. You can tailor your app or website to your business with personalised dashboards for all your people, as well as creating workflows that correspond with how your team works best. You can also help your team feel more connected to your business by customising your platform to include your brand’s colours, icons, and images. 

Secure social networking 

To build real engagement, it’s not enough for your people to interact with corporate updates—they need to connect and engage with each other. 

The ideal platform empowers colleagues to create profiles, join group discussions, participate in topic-based chats, and connect through private messaging. Customisation should be at the core, allowing you to boost morale with peer-to-peer recognition and celebrate achievements unique to your company. These features enable businesses to foster vibrant, engaged communities—all within a secure, trusted space. 

Easy integration 

Colleagues can connect in various ways, often across multiple apps. However, when essential documents and conversations are scattered across different platforms, the risk of important information getting lost or misplaced increases significantly. 

The best colleague platforms allow you to seamlessly integrate the apps and websites your people use most—this is another example of the advanced capabilities in platform customisation and flexibility that you should be searching for. By integrating all your people’s key tools, your platform becomes a powerful, centralised resource and communication hub that is unique to your business. 

This integration streamlines workflows, making work more efficient and boosting team productivity by reducing time spent hunting down important files. With less time wasted, your people can focus more on engaging with your business and with each other. 

Engage: The engagement specialists 

Engage brings all these features together and more. Beyond just design, it’s built with a focus on personalisation, combining practical insights into creating thriving colleague communities with consumer-grade technology to give your people a great experience. 

Ready to move on from Meta? Speak to the Engage team now: https://www.engagesolutionsgroup.com/employee/book-a-demo/