With more than 356 million people accessing its network every year, Telefonica understands the power of connectivity. It's even enshrined in the company mission: to make lives more human by connecting people.

It's a mission that we understand. At Workplace, we believe that business is better when people are connected. So that's what we do – connect everyone in an organisation so that they can share knowledge, work together and build community.

Telefonica and Workplace

We're delighted to announce that following a successful UK pilot at O2, Telefonica is taking that shared belief in connectivity even further – by opening up Workplace to over 120,000 employees worldwide.

Sharing and telling stories

A key driver in the decision to deploy Workplace globally was the impact on frontline workers in the UK and around the world. For the first time, managers could see real stories of employees delivering outstanding customer service because those stories were shared back to Workplace in pictures and videos.

Workplace gave Telefónica a single place to showcase meaningful work, recognise individual and team efforts, and build a shared sense of pride in the impact that its people were creating.

Connectivity

But it's not just the frontline. Global leaders are already using live video to broadcast key company updates and engage in two-way conversations with employees. One example is the Global Meeting of Executives of Telefónica that took place in Madrid last December. Telefónica presented there his new company programme, and it was live-streamed to the whole organisation via Workplace.

While auto-translate is helping Telefonica build a more connected community with colleagues who speak different languages. People are using it extensively to share ideas and work with colleagues in 16 countries, allowing project teams to collaborate more effectively across borders. And it's enabling leaders to be more visible, accessible and responsive.

"At Telefonica, we are committed to creating an open people-centric environment. Workplace was the perfect fit and is now part of our set of internal tools that let our employees do their jobs more efficiently. Our colleagues are already enjoying the platform and we feel more connected than ever before", said Aitor Goyenechea, Global Head of Internal Comms, Telefonica.

Julien Lesaicherre, director of Workplace by Facebook for Europe Middle East and Africa said, "Helping turn companies into communities is at the heart of what we do and we're honoured to partner with a company such as Telefonica. We're proud that Workplace will play a part in helping Telefonica create connected, empowered and purposeful communities so that it can continue to better serve its customers."

Innovation and integrations

Looking to the future, Telefonica has taken advantage of Workplace integrations that make it the single tool that people use to get work done. The team has already integrated Workplace with Office 365 with single sign-on (SSO). This makes it easier for employees to sign in to Workplace using the same SSO credentials that they use with other systems.

As the deployment continues, Telefonica plans to develop new bots and automated processes to make simple tasks easier – and help accelerate existing efforts to bring artificial intelligence to customers.

For Telefonica, that, ultimately, is the twin promise of Workplace. Not just to connect employees with each other in a single global community, but to bring them closer to customers as well. To make work better for everyone. And lives a little more human.