Included as part of Microsoft Office 365, Yammer is a communication platform that helps team members connect and reference past discussions for better collaboration.
When looking to use Yammer in your business, there are two ways to look at it: the general level and the best use case level.
At the general level, Yammer is a social platform that can help build a community around common goals and interests. It’s a platform that connects users with different skill sets, enabling them to share advice and resources with one another.
For the use case level, Yammer has a “groups” feature that allows users to form a community around specific topics. There is no limit to the number of people who can join a Yammer group, and this opens up the possibility of an entire company having conversations on topics like human resources or safety. In an HR group, for example, HR personnel could open up conversations around onboarding or open enrollment.
Yammer groups can also act as incubators for new solutions. Group members can share observations and suggestions, some of which may turn into innovative, actionable ideas. Potential solutions forged in the crucible of a Yammer group can go on to wider acceptance across the platform.
Because it reaches up and down an organization as well as across it, Yammer is extremely useful for cultivating engagement. It can make frontline employees feel more connected to executive leadership and break down silos. It increases transparency and facilitates the kind of dialogue that is critical to supporting employee engagement.
What are some best use cases?
When looking to use Yammer in your business, it’s important to consider some best use cases.
The term ‘use case’ describes how a tool or platform is employed to achieve a specific objective. Many companies find Yammer helps them achieve specific goals within different departments, typically through department-specific Yammer groups.
An HR department might use Yammer to facilitate the onboarding of new employees. Using a Yammer group specifically created for onboarding, HR personnel could answer questions from new hires and review onboarding paperwork. An onboarding Yammer group could also serve as a reference for new hires seeking information about the company and important HR documents.
A Yammer group for marketing could help marketing employees stay connected to customer sentiment while enabling those on the front lines of customer service. Using Yammer as a two-way communications tool, a marketing department could use Yammer to help customer-facing employees address specific customer concerns, then use feedback to inform marketing decisions.
A Yammer group for marketing and product development teams could facilitate an ongoing conversation about a company’s products and services, and how they stack up to the competition. This group could help product development professionals access the latest feedback and engage with their marketing colleagues and how to better develop products and services.
Yammer is also a great place for frontline workers to provide feedback about processes and customer complaints. Leadership can gauge sentiment by posting polls and asking questions. Acting on feedback from workers is important for so many reasons. It can help make workers more productive and more satisfied. Through all of this dialogue, Yammer helps to flatten an organization, empowering people at every level by giving them visibility and a voice.
Additional Best Use Cases:
- Company-wide conversations
- Upcoming company events
- Industry news discussion
- Employees seeking help
- On-boarding
Identifying specific use cases
Yammer use cases will be different for each company, and internal communications professionals should constantly be on the lookout to identify more use cases.
When looking to develop Yammer use cases, internal communications professionals should keep a few principles in mind.
First of all, the best use cases for Yammer should relate to workflows that are general in nature. Because Yammer is such an open platform, it is best suited to general topics. Since Yammer is often used for interdepartmental collaboration, it isn’t the best place for drilling down into highly-specialized processes.
Second, Yammer is best used in situations where transparency and open conversation is valuable. If two or three individuals need to have a focused conversation, Yammer is likely not the best medium.
Third, the best use cases for Yammer involve it being a natural part of a workflow. When a process involves collaborative work and decision making, working together over Yammer tends to feel quite natural.
Finally, Yammer use cases should involve engagement from the top of the organization down to the bottom. If executives and managers are not contributing in any way to a Yammer discussion, it may not be a best use case scenario.
Keeping these principles in mind, an internal communications team should work with people throughout the organization to develop specific Yammer use cases. Identifying best use cases can come from brainstorming discussions, or they could develop organically at the grassroots level. Regardless of where Yammer use cases are conceived, it is critical to recognize them to get the most out of an investment in Yammer.
How Tryane can help
In addition to being a tool that can directly benefit an organization, Yammer can also be a wealth of data on employee engagement and sentiment for an employer. Our analytics and AI solutions for Yammer can provide many insights on how employees are doing and how they are engaging with the platform. Contact us today to find out how we can optimize how to use Yammer in your business.
Is Yammer Useful in the Workplace?
