Celent Model Bank Award: Royal Bank of Scotland: Workplace by Facebook

Winner of Celent Model Bank 2017 Award for Employee Productivity. RBS’ use of Workplace is a compelling example of the strategic use of technology to support cultural change within a large organization as well as a mechanism to accelerate the pace of innovation.

Workplace, a business version of Facebook, is helping RBS transform the way it works. RBS has made it available to the 90,000 colleagues across the bank to encourage collaboration and allow employees to communicate faster and more efficiently.

This initiative is distinctive for its scale. RBS is the first bank in the world to deploy Workplace, and one of the largest companies to have done so.

Extracting value out of any new application rests with employee usage. Typically, this requires extensive training, burdensome support, and incentives to use the new application. A key benefit of Workplace is its built-in familiarity. This contributed to broad usage and required a minimum of support.

Many organizations appear to be over-reliant on email, despite its many drawbacks. In part this may be a function of its ubiquity or a historic lack of viable options. RBS is wise to migrate its staff off email to a more collaborative and flexible platform — one much more fit for purpose.