Meta’s Workplace Just Got 1.9 Million New Users – Thanks to Big Mac!

Meta (or Facebook as we knew it) made a big win for its Workspace collaborative software when it signed a deal with global food chain McDonald’s that could potentially add 1.9 million of the latter’s employees to its increasing list of users. 

The company announced the deal for its employee engagement platform on Thursday whereby all of McDonald’s workforce would be given Workplace to collaborate with each other. Meta’s Workplace has more than seven million paid subscribers at last count, though the company hasn’t really bothered to update these numbers in a while. 

Though Facebook had first beta-launched its suite of collaborative workplace tools back in 2015 and called it “Facebook at Work”, it took the company several years to get enough users on board in order to make the service chargeable. In the early years, the company had trouble convincing users that Workplace had nothing to do with Facebook accounts and was set up and run separately, albeit using most of the same technology that powers the social network. 

The data is stored separately on 12 Meta-owned and operated data centers while its services support online group work with features like messaging, news sharing and video conferencing thrown in. Workplace uses Meta’s AI-ML capabilities extensively when it comes to selecting its news feeds and recommending or downgrading information to such groups. 

What’s McDonald’s signed up for? 

For starters, Workplace is already being used by Big Mac’s franchise workers in 11 markets that include Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Spain and Poland, besides some company-owned restaurants in the US. Over the next two years, McDonald will expand Workspace use in other markets including India, the UK and Saudi Arabia. 

The company believes that employees using Workplace would get timely business updates and useful information around local marketing or promotional material. In addition, the tools would be used to disseminate training courses and associated content. Employees and franchise workers would also be able to share tips and best practices with each other in a geography.

The company claimed Workplace tools fostered quicker employee recognition and meaningful engagement and support. Its Chief People Officer Heidi Capozzi said in a statement that the company saw Workplace as a resource for those at the heart of our restaurant, to help them grow and succeed at their jobs. 

Collaborative work tools are here to stay

The deal assumes added significance due to the fact that it is deployed at a workplace and has been done so to enhance the overall experience. And not as an effort to support hybrid work models that appear to be the norm following the world’s tryst with lockdowns, which may have provoked this out-of-the-box thinking, but definitely wasn’t the reason for this innovation. 

Right from Microsoft and Google to Workday and Meta, companies have been creating solutions for collaborative work for quite some time now. The use of Microsoft’s suite of office tools clubbed with its Teams conferencing or Google’s work suite suggests that solutions existed but the pandemic just nudged enterprises to use it more in recent times.