Yammer: love it or hate it, how to make it work for you.
If you’re familiar with Yammer, you’ll know it’s a bit like Marmite, people either love it or hate it. Launched back in 2008, it’s often described as the ‘Facebook for business’ – a private social network where friends are colleagues, ads are replaced with corporate reminders, and updates are about events, questions, and problems other employees are trying to fix. And it’s claimed 85% of Fortune 500 companies use it, so you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a huge success story. But just because a company buys into a particular communications channel doesn’t mean its employees do – and when it comes to Yammer that seems all too common. To give you an idea of how divisive this app is, when we asked people on LinkedIn recently what they thought about Yammer this was the result:
56% said they loved it
44% said they hated it
Now, there are good examples out there of businesses who’ve benefited from Yammer. We saw one recently from Phillips, the health technology company, which improved its internal IT support through the creation of an 'IT Help' community on Yammer. Employees were able to put a human face to their tech support and they sped up their problem-solving by working collaboratively. But if our polling and the feedback we’ve had from clients is correct, too many people simply don’t see Yammer’s value. Take a look at some of the comments we got during a recent internal comms audit. We’ll start with the positive:
‘It’s great for general news on what’s happening around the business.’
But then there was also this, decidedly more lukewarm response:
‘I tried to get my head around Yammer and understand it, but for me it was one of those platforms where you could get really absorbed in it but that takes away from the day job.’
And then there was the negative:
‘Yammer always fails. I’ve seen it successively reharnessed, reinvigorated – and it always dies – so don’t keep it.’
But perhaps even more damning than the comments were the figures behind them. When we surveyed this company’s employees, we found a third (33%) didn’t even see Yammer, and of those that did only 22% found it helpful. With figures like that you can see why some businesses might think there are better ways to spend their money.
Despite all of that, we don’t believe Yammer, in itself, is flawed. The problem, as we’ve heard time and time again, is that people don’t know how to use it; the how and why of Yammer has never been explained to them. This comment, for example, was fairly typical:
‘Yammer has been around long enough for us to know what it is, but people don’t use it because they don’t know how. They’re not confident on how to use it or how to reply to anything.’
Depending on where you are with your love or hate affair with Yammer, this may all sound terribly familiar. You may even be considering ditching it yourself right now. However, if you are still invested enough that you want to give it one more try, or, if you’re new to it and want to make sure you get it right, we have a few tips we hope might help:
Align Yammer with your business goals. Identify what you want to achieve and how Yammer can help. Think less about the functionality and more about the behaviour it can facilitate. For example, if improving your customer service is a business goal, you could use Yammer to gather ideas on how to do that from frontline staff, incentivising them to share ideas on the platform.
Clearly define your aims and intentions for Yammer. If you work for a large company with multiple sites you might, for example, decide you want to use it to increase collaboration between staff who don’t know each other personally. You could therefore encourage the social use of Yammer, enabling people to connect, become familiar with each other and, ultimately, engage better.
Get senior management buy in. Coach leaders so they know how to use Yammer and get them to show their human side – we’ve mentioned before the story of a CEO who reinvigorated Yammer usage simply by recommending the coffee shop where they bought their morning coffee. More widely though, if management engage with staff on Yammer they’ll feel more connected to what’s going on. At the other end of the scale, imagine you’re a junior employee and you see the CEO has just liked your post. Not only is it a great confidence boost, others see it, they want their posts to be shared and liked and it creates a domino effect.
Develop a ‘how to’ Yammer guide. This one is crucial and needs to cover what Yammer is for, how to use it, general etiquette and technical How To points, such as turning notifications on and off. Remember to also address the ‘why’ with your employees and show them, with examples, how it can help them in their roles.
Run a Yammer competition to get people signed up. Perhaps you have a problem your company needs to fix, you can use Yammer to help you do that. For example, if you want to become greener, you could get your employees to submit suggestions and have the best ones implemented.
Find your Yammer champions. Just as outside work there are people who love social media, it’s the same in the office. Find the people who naturally see the benefit and use them to spark conversations and encourage others to participate.
Create a community feel. Even if your main aim for Yammer isn’t to increase sociability among your staff, there’s no harm in encouraging it as it will help break down barriers between teams and departments. You could create communities about baking or pets, for example. Have fun and others will start to enjoy it too.
Done well, Yammer has the potential to cut through silos, increasing collaboration and promoting efficiency, but it does need to be set up with your individual company’s needs in mind. Most importantly of all, it needs to be rolled out well, with a plan put in place to help momentum build. Only then will its potential be realised.
