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6 minute read
Summary
In this episode of Catching Up with, Collab Collective's Craig Durr chats with Joe Darrer, Lead Product Manager at Workvivo by Zoom, during Zoom Perspectives at the Zoom Experience Center in San Jose, CA. Joe walks Craig through a live demo of the Workvivo platform, highlighting how it’s transforming internal communication, operational workflows, and frontline engagement in today’s hybrid work environments.
Their discussion covers:
- Activity Feed & Spotlight: A familiar social-style experience and a structured content hub for internal communication
- Spaces & Community Building: Tailored content areas for onboarding, interests, and company culture
- Chat + Operations: A versatile communication tool that supports collaboration and work execution
- Recognition & Values: Built-in tools to amplify company values and celebrate employee contributions
- Admin & Analytics: Insights, signage, and surveys—all manageable through a centralized admin experience
- Future-Focused Development: Operational tools for Shifts and Tasks targeting the needs of frontline workers
- Mobile-First Experience: A robust interface designed for deskless employees without needing company email
Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. I am here in San Jose, California, at the headquarters of Zoom. And more importantly, this space right here is the Zoom Experience Center. This is part of a tour that we had during Zoom Perspectives–an analyst event in which the executive team walked us through some of their strategies, some of their insights, and asked us feedback on what they're looking to do.
Now, one of the cool things about this event is actually I had a chance to meet some more of the executives within the product portfolio. And there's a group that actually came over from Cork, Ireland with part of the Workvivo team, and I want to introduce you to them because I've always been interested in this product, and we'll have a chance to walk through the demo. So to walk us through a demo, I want to introduce you to Joe–Joe Darrer.
Joe Darrer: Hey, Craig
Craig Durr: He is the Head of Product for Workvivo.
How's it going?
Joe Darrer: Really good
Craig Durr: I'm glad you came and took a special trip all the way from Ireland just to come talk to me.
Joe Darrer: Delighted to be here
Craig Durr: Hey, can we walk through a demo?
Joe Darrer: Let's do it
Craig Durr: Okay, great!
Joe, this is my first overview of Workvivo by Zoom. Why don't you go ahead and walk me through what we are seeing here? What's the experience?
Joe Darrer: Great. So what you can see here on the main feed, this is called our Activity Feed. So Workvivo is an internet package solution for workforces, and the activity feed is our main social feed for content that goes out onto the platform. And this is really our two way communication, so content can come down into the platform, and then employees are able to react, respond, and engage with the content that it's delivered.
Craig Durr: So this works just like a social media feed in an Internet environment, right? But is this where I might land, or are there some others I might do some more things?
Joe Darrer: This is the main landing page. We do have another product or space within Workvivo; we call it Spotlight. This is your more typical internet landing page for more static content, so you've got news, articles, events, which are all surfaced up on this feed.
Craig Durr: Okay, so this might be where I go to find some specific resources existing a link off to HR or something like that. But the thing about this is it's not only keeping people informed but also engaged. This is where some of these other tools come in, right?
Joe Darrer: Absolutely. So if we think about engagement, we have two main areas to deliver this. One is through what we call Spaces. Spaces is an audience if you think about that within workflow. So if I jump into a space here called New Hires, this now delivers content related to that topic. And so when we think about engagement, this is for new hires getting up to speed into the organization and to find all the right content.
Craig Durr: And this almost looks again, like it has an internet type of feature richness, which allows not only for feed but pages. I might even have some documents specific to that as well, like an HR onboarding guide. So this is like a shared space. Is it private? Is it public? Can it be both?
Joe Darrer: It can be both. So that's up to the organization. This one is a public space, but you can enroll it into a private space if you want to keep it more central.
Craig Durr: But the fun thing is, you can also use this for some great building of community.
Joe Darrer: Communities, yeah, so we have, like a San Francisco running club here, which is appropriate.
Craig Durr: Is there a football club where people can argue about the shape of a proper football? Is it round or is it oblong?
Joe Darrer: There’s always space for that.
Craig Durr: And then, of course, it looks like you got Chat as well, right?
Joe Darrer: Chat is a big new feature we launched last year. So Chat is twofold–one is obviously for employee communication and engagement, but it also serves a really key purpose for an operation. So we are seeing more and more organizations using Chat to get work done, and that's part of Workvivo's key strategy.
Craig Durr: Interesting! Now, one of the things I saw before that I liked, I don't know if they have it on this activity feed. If not, we're gonna take it out here. Is there an opportunity to do some things like, not only engage and comment and share and post, but you talked about sharing information under certain values or things like that, right?
Joe Darrer: Absolutely. So that's the key part. I'll just bring us back up to the posting dialog. So when you post content on the platform, you have the opportunity to tag it to a value, and values really bring organizations and employees back to the core purposes, right? So we got growth or giving back to the community. So when you put content onto the platform, you close that loop back to their company values.
Craig Durr: So this kind of helps with that reward and recognition point of view, right? We have four values as a company. One of them is growth. And I can say, “Here's a great example where Joe gave a great demo to Craig. It was a great growth opportunity for us.”
Joe Darrer: Absolutely, yeah. And you can also go one step further, so you can do things like kudos or shout outs in this environment. So shout out is, I could call out Anthony, who's our creative director, who designed this nice, lovely environment. So I can type away there and say, “Well done, Anthony,” and he'll get a shout out onto the feed.
Craig Durr: And he gets kudos. That's fantastic. I love that. So this here is all the end user environment as well. Now, there's some other things up top that they can have access to. And then there's an area for administration, too. What can you tell me about the administration part?
Joe Darrer: So I'll touch on admin. So admin is for our main persona on the platforms; for internal comms or operations. Here, they can manage their Workvivo. They can get to analytics. We have a digital signage solution. They can deploy surveys. We have a new solution we call Employee Insights, which is our EMPS type solution to get like sentiment on the organization that could all be managed and delivered to our Workvivo app.
Craig Durr: That's a lot of functions. Love the update. Good stuff. Now, you guys actually shared with us some of your growth trajectory and where the areas you're focusing on here in the next year or so. Why don't you talk to me about that? I think there were two in particular that you're really excited about.
Joe Darrer: Yeah, absolutely. For us, the solution we've delivered to market has always been about engagement and communication. Operations is the big play for us, and specifically helping organizations get work done through the internet package solution. And a big play for us here is operational capabilities like Shift and Task, and we're gonna bring those capabilities into Workvivo, which is gonna be amazing.
Craig Durr: And so once you start doing Shifts and Tasks, that’ll allow you to kind of really double down on a core audience that you want to do with end users.
Joe Darrer: And that would be frontline for us. Frontline is a big player for Workvivo, and we see that as one of the most underserved, I guess, employees in the industry.
Craig Durr: Right, and this works as a wonderful solution because frontline workers are deskless. They have their mobile phones, so there's a great mobile experience. They may not even have a company email, right? But they can still log on and still have their persona and understand what's going on through company messaging, Spaces, Spotlights, things like that, right?
Joe Darrer: That's it. Yeah.
Craig Durr: I love it. That's good. All right, so I'll see you next in September at Zoomtopia. We'll have some more updates hopefully?
Joe Darrer: Absolutely, I’m really excited for it.
Craig Durr: Or maybe I can come visit you in Ireland, I don't know. All right. Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and founder of the Collab Collective, with this wonderful Workvivo demonstration here from Zoom Perspectives. Take care.
