Building Communities the Yammer Way
Do you have a particular culture at work or do you belong to a community in your company that you identify with?
How are those communities dealing with working remotely without face to face contact? Is the culture or spirit of a group of people slowly fading?
Do you want a way to enthuse people, bring them together and encourage people to help each other, to work together to solve problems across teams and silos?
Yammer is Microsoft’s product to build communities for large groups of people. Think of a Facebook for work if you will. You can read all about it on Microsoft’s pages here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/yammer/yammer-overview
While helping our clients deploy Yammer we’ve noticed how often different people who didn’t have contact previously can start working closely together, innovating, solving problems making it an excellent way to help in these times.
This together with the benefits it brings in bringing people together with stories of Easter Egg painting, WFH setups, or stories about how colleagues are helping others are worth it on their own.
Also, it’s one of the easiest products in Microsoft 365 to deploy. Essentially grant people access, create some fundamental structure, with appropriate recommended ways of working and market it as a secure information sharing platform, and you can start the process.
Microsoft gives you loads of help as normal through their excellent support pages: https://support.office.com/en-us/yammer and https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/yammer/
Then routinely follow up with tips and tricks, insight and information as to innovation or good stories that have come out of using it, and you can quickly gain momentum and keep it.
Be sure to address the ‘Which tool when?’ question, so it doesn’t become yet another messaging platform to review periodically, and doesn’t replace existing formal communications or support processes and you’ve eliminated one of the major potential problem areas.
Here are our Top 10 Yammer Tips:
Amend your notifications, so you’re alerted when you want to be.
Add #’s to each post, so you build up a group of topics to search on
Use @ when mentioning people as it draws people into a conversation.
On average it leads to 73% more replies.
Like posts you like, and reply with appropriate gifs
Get the Yammer mobile App
Get the Desktop client if you’re a heavy Yammer user or group admin.
Make sure your profile is up to date with a profile photo
Use the poll functionality for quick polling
Praise someone publicly. People LOVE it.
Ask a question.
It’s a great way to start a conversation and leads to 150% more replies.
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