Goodbye To Workplace by Meta, Hello To Workvivo by Zoom

Today Meta announced that it is shutting down its employee communications tool Workplace by Meta (which I found to be very successful) and turning over the business to Workvivo by Zoom.

This is actually a very significant move for HR and IT teams: there are more than 7 million corporate users (it was originally called Facebook@Work) and the product was particularly successful with remote and deskless workers. One of the clients, Farmer’s Insurance, told me Workplace had revolutionized its employee experience because it was the only corporate tool that employees could immediately learn how to use. (It’s patterned after Facebook.)

That said, Meta has other priorities now so their “corporate applications” business (including Portal, their wiz-bang video conferencing tool) is over, essentially ceding the market to Zoom, Microsoft, Slack, and others.

I just talked with Gidi Pridor, the founder of Workvivo, and they are thrilled. All of a sudden Workvivo (owned by Zoom) becomes the #2 employee experience platform by volume (this will bring them to 9 million or more users) and it gives Zoom a massive boost to winning corporate business.

The “Employee Experience Platform” business is massive, attracting Microsoft (Viva), ServiceNow, Firstup, Simpplr, Worktango, and many other vendors to the space. As more and more companies focus on hybrid work, integrated collaboration, employee listening, and pinpoint communications, I see nothing but growth here. So Zoom, a $4.5 Billion company competing with elephants, now has a big leg up.

We’ve looked closely at Workvivo and we do see it as a best-of-breed in this space. Not only does it provide employee communications and feedback systems, it lets companies deploy onboarding, training, and actually replace Sharepoint for entire employee portals. So this move creates a strong competitor to Microsoft and ServiceNow, especially for mid-sized companies and organizations in retail, hospitality, transportation, and healthcare where PCs are hard to find.

We’ll keep you informed as this developed, but I sense this is just the beginning of many new tectonic shifts we’ll see in the EX market.

Additional Information

The Definitive Guide To Employee Experience

Employee Activation and the Four Day Week

Employee Experience 4.0: From Signal to Action

The Massive Market Impact of Microsoft Viva