Reaching beyond Teams — getting started with your Yammer platform

I joined my current company, FSP, in the summer of 2020. By this point, the UK had just got through the first national lockdown and the general population were widely fixated on the daily case rates — with a grim expectation that things were likely going to get more challenging in the run up to Christmas. I’d seen stories about how interns at one of my previous companies were preparing to work from home and I was getting ready to do the same at FSP. I couldn’t quite fathom how I was going to make this work, especially going through a career change at the same time and having very little ability to meet new colleagues.

As my onboarding took place and a new lockdown seemed to feel closer and closer, I became one of many new WFH employees who quickly grew used to life on Microsoft Teams. You don’t need me to tell you that Teams adoption absolutely spiked at the start of the pandemic, and I was grateful for the opportunities to speak with colleagues regularly and to be able to start conversations quickly (although some co-workers still flinch when they get the billionth Teams call notification coming in from me!).

What Teams doesn’t do, however, is easily cater for bringing together groups of people or individuals who may have one common interest. Teams just isn’t designed for ‘broadcasting’ to wider groups, and you may naturally start to see challenges as large Teams chats are created in an attempt to home significant numbers of people at once. I can admit to being one of the disruptors, who sees an important message pop up and is likely to immediately start having a wider conversation beneath it. If you’re a colleague who doesn’t happen to see the important message immediately as it’s posted, you’re not going to want to trawl through all of the messages as they take up all of the screen space — especially once they’ve started to transform into a cascade of memes and funny GIFs (again, I’ll apologise for my part in this!).

Enter Yammer. Case in point — I enjoyed playing the likes of COD Warzone and Among Us during lockdown and it occurred to me one day that there were likely to be a few others in the company who fancied playing along some nights. Teams wasn’t going to cater for this — but Yammer could. Yammer, for those unaware, is an M365 social media tool that helps users to broadcast messages or useful information to communities within the company (either pre-assigned by the company or created yourself). Each post is designed to place emphasis on the original message whilst still giving attention to any responses underneath. Within a few weeks of joining the company, I was able to use Yammer to broadcast my interest in creating a gaming group — and a number of individuals quickly reached out.

These individuals were in teams very different to my own and I was unlikely to have met them in real life, let alone lockdown. Despite this, within weeks, we’d made new connections as we virtually murdered each other on Among Us in the evenings (red is sus FYI). In a nutshell, Yammer is very nicely positioned as an all-company networking tool — and if you feel that you aren’t quite using it properly yet, I can possibly help you to get started.

Encouraging contributors

In order to start getting new contributors into the open and presenting their thoughts, you’ll need to address impostor syndrome — where your colleagues may feel that their opinions don’t carry weight or that they aren’t helpful to others. Posting content on an internal social media platform needs to be very low stakes (if not negligible) and you can help establish this by supporting new content creators. This can take the form of liking, commenting on or amplifying their content by sharing it with your team. If done properly and authentically — building a true collaborative culture — you are likely to start creating a snowball effect, where new creators post new content and other colleagues follow their lead. This does, of course, say nothing of the fact that you are likely to actually benefit a great deal from their content — you shouldn’t be interacting with the posts just for the sake of it. By facilitating a culture where people readily provide their thoughts and give honest suggestions, you will benefit from the diversity of thought that an enterprise social network can bring.

When trying to bring new contributors into your new Yammer community, you can also help to drive conversations by @mentioning users in the comments. If you know that a particular user is likely to have a helpful perspective on a conversation — ask them for it! There are many users who tend to interact with Yammer by taking a quick look during quiet periods, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll always see relevant content — so it’s worth helping the author by encouraging others along to their content. If you are using Teams as part of your M365 experience (I’d be shocked if you weren’t), you’ll also find that the Yammer notifications will go straight to the Teams activity stream, too.

Work out loud

You can help build your Yammer community by bringing internal (relevant) conversations out into the open. We’ve all seen the same email threads where all of your colleagues thrash out details — with a number of separate smaller email threads springing up to clarify the smaller aspects. This might just about work until you have to address a similar issue a year later and it dawns upon you that you’re going to need to spend a lot of time sifting through Outlook. If the conversation can go on Yammer and would benefit from the input of others, why shouldn’t it? By modelling ‘Working Out Loud’ and discussing your plans in the open, you can help bring in perspectives you may not otherwise have considered — and you can also improve knowledge retrieval later if newer colleagues want to remember how people came to a certain decision previously.

You’ll need to start to model the behaviours above and encourage colleagues to do the same. But by doing this authentically and having the benefits in mind, you stand to get significant value from Yammer — a tool that naturally caters for large audiences and can stop your content disappearing amongst the noise. And if you manage to start putting the above in place, keep an eye out for my next article, where I’ll be letting you know how you might turn your initial Yammer community into an even better one.