We launched Workplace in October 2016 with a clear mission. To give the world a place to work together. Since then, over 30,000 organizations from across the globe (including Antarctica!) have joined us to discover new and better ways of working.

It means we’ve now heard thousands of stories. How our customers and partners need new ways to connect teams. Why they want to give people more effective spaces to get the work done.

Like Starbucks, who were looking for ways to connect every store manager in the world to their HQ for the first time. Or Save the Children, who needed to share real time advice about hand washing practices across borders and beyond language barriers.

And it’s these real examples that inspire us. Our partners and customers have given us hundreds of ideas about how we can transform the world of work with Workplace. So, when we hear a great idea we move quickly to share it with our Product and Engineering teams.

We build, we test, and then we do it all over again. Because we believe the Workplace journey is only 1% finished and we can always make it better.

So thanks to everyone who has given us feedback. Your suggestions will together help us to build the future of work.

And here are some of the top updates to Workplace since our launch.

Work Fast…

Bots that speed up your process

You can build bots in Workplace to speed up simple workflows. Like some of the more routine tasks such as sharing feedback or booking office resources. It’s also possible to build powerful bots in Work Chat and Workplace groups that can talk to your people and share content. Or bots that respond to questions and complete actions on your behalf.

Our customers and Workplace partners have already built and deployed some great bots. The “Mood-O-Meter”, for example, allows your HR team to use Work Chat to survey the mood of your employees. A simple and smart interaction across teams and geographies.

Reactions and comments

You can now use reactions and comments in Workplace to react to a Work Chat message with a familiar range of expressions. React with love, smiles or a ‘wow’. Empathize with sad or angry. And get things done with the yes or no emoji.

Use them to quickly express how you feel about a message or get agreement on an idea.

Mentions that get things done

To get someone’s attention, you can now mention them in a comment or message. Workplace will notify them that a conversation needs their attention so you can keep the work moving.

GIFs in Work Chat and Comments

Sometimes words just aren’t enough. When that happens, find and preview the perfect GIF using the button in Work Chat and Workplace composer. A GIF can be worth a thousand words!

Connect Everyone…

Live video that connects

Streaming team meetings, Q&A sessions, and organization-wide conferences are just some of the ways Live video connects everyone. That’s why we made Workplace Live video available on your desk and phone back in late 2016.

And now we’ve added Live API. This means you can now go live using a professional-grade video kit. With the help of our production partners, Workplace customers have become flawless broadcasters.

To find out more about the Live video just head here.

Find people with org chart

Finding the right people in your organization can sometimes be a challenge. That’s why we’ve launched Org Chart, which visualizes your organization and helps you quickly find people and teams.

Your Org Chart is an interactive view of everyone in your organization and how they fit together. By clicking on people, you can navigate through departments and find out more about them.

You can also use a smart search to look for your coworkers. Org Chart will search a combination of entries like job title, department, location or name. So a partial search of “Kelly sales London” will point you in the right direction. And, once you’ve found them in Org Chart, you’ll see all their contact information so you can say hello:

• Send a Work Chat message
• Follow them on Workplace
• Send an email

Do more...

Seamless Workplace integrations

Easily share files from OneDrive, Google Drive, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox and Quip with coworkers in a Workplace group. Your documents will show as a preview when you post, and you can use the file tab to organize your documents and see who’s working on what. Find out more about the range of document management integrations right here.

Workplace also connects to cloud identity providers. This means Workplace admins can manage your Workplace community from one place. It makes adding and managing people easy by automatically importing key user details like name and profile picture.

And it means Workplace will update if an employee joins or leaves your organization or cloud identity provider information changes. To find out more about people management integrations click here.

Multi-company groups for collaboration

Many tasks at work involve working with people from other organizations. With multi-company groups, you can create secure groups to share posts, photos, videos and documents with anyone – even if they don’t already have a Workplace account. Our customers use multi-company groups to get the work done with vendors, agencies and contract staff.

Create Docs in groups

Now you can create Workplace documents inside a group to share only with group members. Allow others to edit the doc for easy collaboration. Write drafts, add rich text formatting, photos and even embed videos.

… And now use Workplace Standard. For free

Finally, back in March, we launched Workplace Standard. We heard how small companies and teams like the collaboration features of Workplace but don’t need all the administrative controls.

Workplace Standard gives you that. The communication and productivity tools that your teams love – and all completely free to use. Find out more about Workplace Standard here.

Thank You