Google Chat, formerly Hangouts Chat, is a collaboration tool competing with Slack, designed to make it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate, and with dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat helps users track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members.
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Workplace from Meta
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Facebook at Work allows users to interact with co-workers through the Facebook interface.
For me, I'd rather use Google Hangouts Chat than Microsoft Teams. Based on my experience Google Hangouts is way less complicated than Microsoft Teams. I don't like complicated and Microsoft Teams for me is complicated. Let's say for a first-time user for both platforms I'd say …
Workplace [from Meta] far outstrips the others as it allows you to create an information hub, as well as just enabling conversations. The Newsfeed, Groups and the Knowledge Library all make it really simple for the end-user to find information, and the familiarity of having …
Google Chat is well-suited for businesses. Where it fits in my organization is to maintain communication between teams. Collaboration between teams to solve issues our customers cannot resolve without using Google Chat. Our Organization depends on it. When someone needs assistance from another team in the organization, we use Google Chat to solve this issue.
I think Workplace by Facebook is a great communication vehicle for any mid-sized to large company. (Since it's more groups-oriented than "regular" Facebook, it might not work well for smaller companies.) I also don't have any idea what the cost is for having it, but that also be a reason that it wouldn't be worth the expense for smaller companies. For larger companies, I think it's a terrific way for folks to communicate with one another and for "the powers that be" to communicate with employees. Facebook Live is only suitable when you have a limited number of people who need to be on screen and it wouldn't really be suitable as a vehicle for instructor-led online training -- it's really most suitable for presentations (although, via the comments area, does allow for questions to be asked in writing)
It is so easy to introduce to employees because it has the same look and feel as Facebook, which the majority of our employees are already familiar with.
It's a communications, collaboration, and file/document sharing tool all rolled up into one. It eliminates the need for other software.
Our HR team uses it constantly to keep employees up to date on company news and for polling to get feedback on new initiatives.
Limited project management options - no good way to track tasks or projects, so other tools are needed.
Easy to dismiss for people who don't see the value - the Facebook-like nature of the tool can be a liability when it comes to wanting management to take it seriously.
Chat interface has downsides - the standalone chat applications can be a bit buggy, and the chat interface within the web view is not ideal.
No intuitive way to message a group - chat options like Slack are better at easily messaging a group or department, where in Workplace you have to be a member of a group to start a conversation.
The updates, support, general reviews on Google Chat are great everywhere. The development of the features is ongoing and this adds a great value to Google as a big company in the market. Other applications are limiting communication while Google Chat is allowing communication to grow. It is very easy to use it and teach others how to use Google Chat.
As stated from the starting we found this application is well suited for a small audience and a group of people across the organization can be communicated easily with no additional hectic of doing any setup. When you have a Gmail account ready then you can easily access google chat and continue the communication. This tool is simple,secure and robust helping the global leading partner for their internal precise communication and handling the tasks in a great way
Having to download multiple apps just to use the tool is very cumbersome. Facebook would have make this better by wrapping it in as a main feature within their app, but having to use multiple apps to see discussions and walls is so frustrating.
I have not needed to contact the support folks for Google Hangouts Chat, so I can't speak to this with any accuracy. The online instructions are fairly clearly written, so it is fairly intuitive to start with. I did not feel the need to use the support people anyway.
Workplace by Facebook is an excellent fit in respect of support and documentation. It has excellent tutorials and documentation, as well. The UI and UX are already great as it is developed and maintained by Facebook, so most of the times, there is no need for any support or documentation.
It doesn't need to much to get started if you have a personal Google account. If you have a business account setup by your organization, you need permissions to use it, however this is something good to have this customizable part from Google Chat. We can create groups, attach files, and have online conversations from the gmail page, in a new window or using the mobile.
We can compare Workplace in general from email communication (we use Bananatag tool for this). Our email communication and Workplace communication are sometimes competitors. RIght now, we have much higher analytics of email read rate/open rate than on Workplace activity. It may be connected with the fact that there is a lot of communication going on on Workplace. And with the emails we have a dedicated unit to monitor and balance the daily/weekly official email load on the associate. Workplace is a live network. Of course, we as admins balance the posts in official groups. But there are lots of other groups where people post whatever they want (like local communities or communities by interest). Why we keep focus on increasing Workplace engagement instead of email communication is definitely because of this instant feedback that we can get with posting. Email communication cannot create this feeling - it's always a one-way communication in our case.
Through seamless communication across remote workers, Google Chat has significantly reduced the time spent on back and forth emails.
Undoubtedly Google Chat is great for communication but because of a lack of task management tools, we have to rely on other platforms for organizing and tracking tasks.
200MB file size limit in Google Chat often forces us to use other services like Google Drive for sending large files.
Workplace offers a free version and a more enhanced, and really enhanced, paid version. The free version is a nice place to test the waters out and see if you can get it working at your company. We have only had a positive return on investment, measured in time.
The on-boarding is where you will see the greatest positive gain. You will quickly be up and running and so will the staff. This will decrease the training and implementation period and for many that means a substantial cost savings.
The only negative return that might be realized is if too much time is spent monitoring and policing the content. If trust is there, then employees can share and enhance the use of this tool to be a positive force. As with any communication tool, set guidelines and let the community police itself to some extent.
