So your organization is embracing Microsoft’s new and improved Yammer. Congratulations. Especially if your teams are still working remotely, Yammer’s social but still business-related interaction can help you build community, leverage knowledge and engage leaders and employees alike at scale.
But, what should you be doing for Yammer engagement? First, it’s important to understand that Yammer, though keeping the business in mind, is much more of a social town hall. There’s a vast gulf between merely acquiring a tool and gaining a degree of benefit versus mastering a tool and maximizing benefit. If you’re going to Yammer, take the time and effort to do it well. Here are seven ideas for Yammer posts.
1. Focus on the Messaging
A key point of Yammer is to provide digital spaces for people to get to know other people’s roles so they’ll become more engaged and better able to collaborate more effectively. Department milestones and other happenings, as well as interesting bits about what different parts of the organization are up to, can be productive.
But for Yammer to achieve its full potential, it needs to, where appropriate, lean in to promoting and enabling business. So be sure to also post messages that address or reinforce your company’s purpose. This means you’ll also be talking about your business’s challenges and success stories. Keep a log of messaging that does well so you have future Yammer examples to emulate.
2. Give Praise Where Earned
Praise is a powerful means of driving engagement. Everyone using Yammer should be sure to point out examples where team members or entire teams found an innovative solution or went above and beyond the call of duty. Select “Praise,” choose the person, pick out one of the praise-oriented images and write your story. Now think about who should be notified — the target’s supervisor could be one — then hit “post.”
3. Be Inquisitive
Yammer also allows you to be playful using polls and surveys, a capability that can be useful in many ways. For one, polls are engaging. But in addition, they can also be useful for improving the workplace culture, processes, strategies and other elements of the business. When creating polls, try asking open-ended questions that give people the ability to feel heard, like:
- What’s the greatest challenge you’re facing at work today?
- What issues would people like to see covered in next week’s team meeting?
- What would make the workplace a more enjoyable place to be?
4. Be Active
You’ve committed to posting, polling and praising — good. Now you need to develop consistency. People will be commenting on your posts, so be sure to acknowledge them. You’ll be seeing the posts of others where you agree and respect their perspectives, and want to commend or chuckle. Do so.
You will probably soon note that the inclusion of images greatly increases the degree of engagement, so get visual! Meanwhile, recognize that once you begin using your voice on Yammer, its absence will also be noticed. You don’t need to turn this into a chore, but you do need to be consistently seen.
5. Engage with the Most Meaningful Groups
Join or even help create groups that support and highlight a commitment to and achievement of organizational objectives. Whatever initiatives are underway — they need a group. Not only does this foster collegiality and collaboration, but it also makes it easier for people to share ideas and suggestions with their workgroups or other teams.
Do what you can to stimulate interactions that demonstrate, complement and drive the meaning behind your company’s products and services, as well as its commitment to customers and the community. You don’t have to be engaged with every group, but be sure that those that are doing important work see that you’re watching and cheering from the sidelines, as that will give them a sense of recognition.
6. Listen Closely to What’s Being Said
Look for meaningful keywords and take notice of how often they’re being used and in what context. A business social media platform like Yammer gives you and others throughout your company the abilities of a seer, able to identify challenges and opportunities long before they become apparent to others.
Basic metrics provided within Yammer can get you started, helping you to detect where valuable insights are brewing. But to truly distill the most potent ideas and actions you’ll need to invest in a more sophisticated set of analytics and dashboards.
7. Identify Power influencers and Connectors
As you begin to explore deeper metrics using advanced analytics, you will begin to see patterns indicating which persons are the most active and influential across your organization and within specific areas of activity. You may also notice who people are turning to for answers and to which sorts of issues. You will discover that there are many in your organization who command more confidence and respect in certain areas, often transcending traditional organizational charts.
Armed with this insight, you can begin to collaborate and communicate with those team members who are most closely associated with whatever ideas you wish to share or missions you hope to launch. That will help you amplify your messaging, ensuring that the people whose ears they have will respect the messaging as filtered through those influencing voices.
Advanced analytics, including machine learning, can help you stay on top of the topics that are trending across your organization. You will also be able to measure how well your announcements, polls and other posts are performing, plus gauge your effectiveness in leading relatively inactive users to participate. Finally, anything else that you learn can be shared with group leaders and other executives across the enterprise. Yammer, invariably, becomes an engine of insight, innovation and engagement.
How Can Tryane Help?
The seven ideas above barely scratch the surface of all your organization can gain by embracing Yammer and even more importantly, using advanced metrics like those offered by Tryane to capture deep insight that can help drive your business. Ultimately Yammer is a hyper-efficient, compelling and even enjoyable means for dozens, hundreds or even many thousands of your stakeholders to share meaningful interaction.
As its usage explodes across your business, the value of Yammer engagement will grow exponentially with the help of in-depth analytics giving you clues about what’s working or not working, and how people are engaging with your messaging on the platform. Get in touch today to learn how Tryane can help you make the most out of Yammer.