Enhancing your Yammer community

Microsoft Teams is a brilliant way of connecting your internal teams and helping create those inter-team connections — however, once we start going beyond teams and into the wider company, Yammer presents itself as a more suitable alternative. In my last article — ‘Reaching beyond Teams — getting started with your Yammer platform’ — I wanted to provide some guidance to those individuals who may not have a Yammer presence yet and would like to explore the tool further. In this article, I’d like to expand on my previous suggestions and offer guidance on how your Yammer community can be improved to an even greater extent.

As a reminder of my previous article, I’d given two key messages — the importance of encouraging contributors, and encouraging users to ‘work out loud’. It’s crucial that organisations using Yammer consider the culture they have when creating content and that all users are shown that their contributions have value — we can ‘encourage contributors’ by @mentioning users in comments, supporting new posters by interacting with their content and letting users known that their input on Yammer is valued (although I’m sure this is already explicit!). We can also boost our initial Yammer efforts by encouraging ‘working out loud’ — where relevant conversations are brought into the open if this is appropriate.

Once these recommendations are potentially put into practice (and reinforced through regular action), it might be time to consider enhancing the Yammer community further. Here’s two ways that I believe can give you a chance of doing that…

Get leadership involved

When creating your sharing culture or encouraging people to contribute, your leaders should ideally be playing a part in this — either sharing content themselves or encouraging their team to get involved in this behaviour. However, if you haven’t explicitly brought your leaders into the fold yet, this may be your opportunity to get this started.

To create a vibrant Yammer community, leaders need to play their part — and show people that everyone can contribute. By taking the time to write posts or to leave comments on the work of others, leaders can both offer an insight into their own work, and give colleagues a significant boost too. By seeing the work of the wider community, they stand a chance of learning more about recent developments or understanding how these developments might link in with their own function.

Again — how does this work in practice? Ask leaders to talk about initiatives they have completed recently or get them to reflect on something significant that has taken place in their work. If they may be unable to think of an example — what is something they have seen a positive example of recently and would like to recognise? I’m sure every leader can think of a success they have observed within their direct reports and I’m confident that they would be willing to promote this on Yammer, even if it’s something they don’t do regularly. Calling out excellent work regularly attracts positive attention on Yammer, and it can slip our mind to do this given the realities of daily work — by encouraging this, we can potentially set a standard for other leaders to follow suit.

**Sketch out a ‘Which Tool When’

**At the very start of this article I spent some time spelling out ‘Which Tool When’ — the idea that Teams is likely very helpful for inter-team communication, whilst Yammer is great for when the conversation extends multiple teams collaborate with each other. This is just my quick analysis on two key Microsoft tools — and yet we haven’t even delved in to the likes of SharePoint intranets and Outlook emails yet. Whilst each of these tools have their use cases, these aren’t always obvious to our users, who can find it challenging to understand exactly which tool should be used when.

It’s well worth creating a ‘Which Tool When’ guide or infographic that can be sent out to the wider organisation — this should be done in tandem with your communications team. You should identify what each tool should be used for and an example of a scenario for each — it’s recommended that you also consult your UX designers, who can help make the guide easily digestible and transparent for your users. This will help clarify the situation for your users, who are more likely to start using tools like Yammer as they know the specific circumstances in which it’s recommended. Conversely, it’s likely to gently ease away users from using inappropriate tools for certain tasks — such as using Teams for a piece of all company information, where the number of notifications arising are likely to dilute the impact of the announcement and make it seem like more of a hindrance than a help.

By investing some time into both gaining leadership support and communicating with your users regarding Which Tool When, you can hopefully begin to improve Yammer uptake whilst also increasing understanding of your other Microsoft communication tools. This will help to provide your users with a thriving internal communications platform that will allow them to move beyond Teams for conversations and announcements that the whole company will benefit from, as opposed to smaller groups. I am excited to see how your Yammer practice develops with these tools in mind — please do let me know of any successes you have and any other reflections that you find interesting!