Yammer is an enterprise social network that allows employees,managers, executives, teams and different office branches to engage,collaborate and innovate over one interactive virtual network.
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atlassian Confluence | 4.1 | 10.6% | 90% | 105 interviewsAdd to research |
| Microsoft Teams | 4.1 | 12.8% | 95% | 166 interviewsAdd to research |
Yammer creates a social workplace that drives innovationthrough the sharing of ideas and business intelligence, boosts productivity inteams and projects, and encourages communication and connectivity betweenemployees, no matter where they are located.
Verizon, Rakuten,Nationwide, DHL, Westfield, Telefonica, 7-Eleven, Red Robin, Intuit, eBay,Darden, Suncorp, Tyco, Xerox, and ModCloth.
I’m very keen on the idea of the enterprise social network Yammer and what it could mean for internal business communication.
I visualise a time when our interstate frontline staff are discussing the pros and cons of a new business initiative with our senior managers at Head Office. When the CEO spots a game-changing idea from a new employee during his daily check of the site. When our sales teams are reporting back from the field, creating excitement about wins as they happen.
But enterprise social tools like Yammer are not like our traditional internal communication tools:
- We don’t control the message.
- We can’t force people to get involved - and success relies on interaction.
- We can’t guarantee success.
It’s actually pretty scary. I know of plenty of organisations that have experimented with Yammer and it failed. People didn’t see the value, they didn’t find the time and it fizzled out.
At this moment in time, the success of Yammer within my own organisation is at make or break point. Over one-sixth of our workforce signed up within the first few weeks of my soft launch, simply via word of mouth. I invited those people I could rely on to join first. That worked well. A key group of about half a dozen people from across the business were very keen and began posting updates, asking questions, replying to threads and creating groups.
Next, with a good proportion of staff onboard I sent an email to our Senior Management Team, outlining the benefits and asking for their commitment to the network – just five minutes a day, twice a week to begin with.
I also spoke face-to-face with a number of staff: if they were working on an interesting project I suggested a Yammer post. If I was writing an intranet news story on behalf of a business unit, I suggested that they could also promote their work in a status update.
I’ve nudged conversations along, introduced talking points, asked questions and tried to encourage the lurkers.
Now, we’re six weeks in. The initial excitement has died off. There are other business priorities. Less people are joining. Those who signed-up haven’t revisited the site. The goodwill of our Senior Managers is there, but they just haven’t found the time.
So, I’m asking myself some key questions and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts:
- do we just ‘experiment’ with enterprise social tools such as Yammer, or do we strategise the roll-out as we do with all other internal comms channels?
- by creating a strategy for success, can we ever guarantee a social tool like Yammer is a success?
- what does success look like on these tools anyway?
- finally, what can we learn about our employee engagement if there is low interaction through Yammer. How can we use this to influence the rest of our internal communications strategy?
These are the questions I’ll be working through over the coming months…..I’ll keep you updated.
Hi Anna Lowman,
Hope your journey should be almost two years old now as it is 2015. Eager to know your observations and did a true social transformation take place in your organization? As suggested by Samuel Coe, were you able to measure the metrics? Any progress? Can you pl keep your observations posted...?
Thanks,
Allthough the article is a couple of years old, some statements keep nagging as I keep hearing them. They can be summarized by the following quote:
"But enterprise social tools like Yammer are not like our traditional internal communication tools:
- We don’t control the message.
- We can’t force people to get involved - and success relies on interaction.
- We can’t guarantee success."
Starting with the third item: Can you name any tool that actually does guarantee success?
And the first: when your goal is to control the message, don't use a collaboration tool. Use a send to all mechanism, preferably with a 'do-not-reply' from address. ;-) You then automatically arrive at your second point: if you want involvement, let go of the control issues....