Once upon a time, sitting at your desk liking and swiping was a good way to annoy your boss. Most companies saw social media use as a distraction or a risk to be managed, and many banned Facebook and Twitter from their networks. Yet today, some of the world’s biggest employers are doing the opposite: coaxing and cajoling workers to sign up to a new form of social media designed for workplace.

Among the first was Yammer, a Facebook clone for companies and teams launched in 2008 and bought by Microsoft in 2012. Then there was Slack, the quirky office chat app which spread like wildfire through the tech industry, roughly doubling its revenue each year.

Microsoft responded by launching Teams, a collaboration and chat tool tied in to Microsoft Office which now has 200,000 firms on board. Even Google Plus, which is being shut down for consumers after exposing the personal data of 500,000 people, will persist as an enterprise product. After a long stagnation, “enterprise social networking” seems to be gaining pace.

Yet perhaps the most interesting player is Facebook itself. Its app, called Workplace, began in 2011 as an internal tool, but became public two years ago. On the surface it is almost identical to Facebook: users can chat, create groups, react to posts and broadcast live video. But it is funded by subscriptions rather than advertising, and the data it generates is only accessible to the companies that use it.