When it comes to employee engagement, it’s important to meet people where they are. In a world where roughly seven out of 10 adults use social media to connect with friends and family members, it makes perfect sense for organizations to jump on the social media bandwagon to reach and engage individuals at every level. Enter Yammer, Microsoft’s enterprise social media solution for companies or all kinds and sizes.
Yammer 101
Yammer is a social media platform designed specifically for businesses. Companies that use Yammer essentially have their own, self-contained social media bubble, where employees can communicate effortlessly with one another and where internal communications professionals can deliver easy-to-read, engaging messaging.
Since it feels more like a social network than an enterprise communication tool, adoption is pretty straightforward and far-reaching. Yammer’s features include
- A user-specific home feed
- Communities, such as for specific projects or departments
- Search functionality for locating people, files and conversations
- The ability to react to, respond to and share posts
- People tagging
- The ability to attach files to posts
- Live virtual event hosting and recording
- Poll creation and dissemination
Yammer has an easy-to-use, streamlined interface. That means that often, Yammer serves as a virtual gathering space for companies — a watercooler of sorts — helping them feel more connected to others across the organization and to company executives. Yammer also presents a great opportunity to create a wraparound employee engagement strategy. Following are some key ways to do that.
Employee Feedback
You can bet that your employees have a lot to say, and some of that could lead to significant improvements and better ways to meet business objectives. Yammer employee engagement can help you solicit that kind of feedback, by starting a conversation around specific business challenges, key performance indicators and even company culture.
Company executives are often removed from the employees who are responsible for the organization’s success, so this is a great way to bridge that gap between executives’ perceptions and employees’ professional experiences and ideas.
Innovation Incubator
Sometimes, employees’ ideas go unheard, yet who knows if one of those ideas is just the thing that could catapult a company to the next level? Soliciting such ideas can not only drive positive change but also lead to new and profitable collaborations across different business units and employee groups that might not otherwise interact with each other. Even if not a single usable idea emerges, employees will appreciate the opportunity to be heard.
Employee Recognition
Exemplary work should not go unnoticed. Yammer is an excellent platform for recognizing top-notch employees for everything they do and highlighting their great work. This helps them see that they are valued and empowered to continue doing great work. Plus, it might just motivate others to shine as well, by tapping into a spirit of friendly competition and empowering employees to take their job performance into their own hands.
Event Hosting
For many organizations, gone are the days when they could call an all-staff meeting and expect everyone to show up to a large conference room in person. Yet sometimes it’s important to ensure that employees at every level get certain information straight from the leadership team. Yammer makes that possible with live events hosting.
Not only can employees watch in real time as company leaders make big announcements, but they can also raise their hands to ask questions and have them answered on the spot. If executives don’t feel comfortable answering questions in the moment, they can set Yammer to accept feedback and questions post-event.
Yammer’s event hosting capabilities allow for everything from timely live announcements with little notice to carefully produced webinars offering transcription and translation into many languages.
Goodwill Ambassadorship
At some point, employees may be asked about the company for which they work. You can influence whether they speak positively or negatively about the company by making them feel connected and valued, and also by modeling the language and facts they could be using.
If your organization is doing notable work to lift its surrounding community, share it as part of your Yammer strategy. Is it making the world a better place somehow? If so, make sure that’s part of your regular messaging, while also giving kudos to all the employees who make the company’s positive impact possible.
Analytics
For company leaders who understand the value of connecting with and engaging employees on a regular basis, a Yammer engagement strategy is a powerful solution for doing just that. However, it’s not enough to simply use the platform for employee engagement. You need metrics to understand what’s working well and what’s not to get the most out of this tool.
Tryane gives you the ability to see that data, plus learn how employees are using the tool outside of reacting to messaging from your office. Tryane can also help you determine which employee groups use Yammer most, which mediums — text, video or something else — are most effective for generating engagement, and what different groups across the organization say and feel about the company. If Yammer is the blank canvas for your employee engagement efforts, Tryane is the easel, helping you carry out engagement-focused communications with ease.
Contact Tryane today to learn how we can help you make the best use of Yammer.