User-friendly and easy to personalize, Yammer is a great social enterprise tool for capturing threaded discussions in the digital workplace.
Even better, it’s relatively easy for your organization to get started. With so many personal social media platforms already based on the threaded-discussion micro-blogging format — including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter — Yammer’s basic functionality is familiar to users, making it easy to understand and adopt.
Some might think of social media as a time-waster, and worry that adding Yammer could mean another sort of overflowing “inbox.” In fact, social enterprise platforms are designed to offer real business value by reducing the need for in-person meetings while increasing transparency and employee engagement.
When people send each other email, for instance, the information in these one-to-one communications tends to become buried in data silos. Yammer offers a very different model: a social enterprise newsfeed in which organization user groups hold threaded discussions on different topics. These conversations then roll up into a centralized newsfeed that allows you to review and digest the information in an efficient, convenient manner.
Unlike email, when a conversation takes place in a social enterprise newsfeed, that one-to-one communication is opened up to others who might be following that discussion group or thread. This allows for more real-time information exchanges, reducing the need for meetings across the organization.
If your company already has some digital workplace elements in place, you’ve probably started to see social enterprise technology cropping up in other platforms. SharePoint 2010 offered a rudimentary newsfeed, and that tool became more pervasive with SharePoint 2013, which offers a community template with an associated newsfeed as an add-on for the basic site template.
Since acquiring Yammer in mid-2012, Microsoft has begun integrating the social enterprise tool in a holistic fashion across the Office 365 productivity suite. While Yammer will still exist as a standalone, over the next six months we should see the Yammer newsfeed appearing in a right-hand pane within Office applications.
Let’s say you and a coworker are collaborating on a PowerPoint presentation that’s stored in a SharePoint site. The Yammer newsfeed on the right allows you to comment and communicate without leaving the application, so that the conversation takes place in the context of the work you’re doing. Instead of having to mark up a document completely with comments, you have the option to use the newsfeed while working on the document or reviewing changes.
If you’re already using SharePoint newsfeeds, however, you might wonder what happens with those newsfeeds if you switch to Yammer. At this point, there’s no easy way to transfer your SharePoint newsfeeds into Yammer, and you would probably lose the data. If you’ve accumulated a lot of valuable information in SharePoint newsfeeds, you might want to think twice before switching over to Yammer. But if the data is relatively small so far, you would probably benefit from the greater ease of use that Yammer offers.
On the other hand, if you currently aren’t using another social enterprise network, it makes sense to begin implementing Yammer in your digital workplace.
A good way to start is by creating Yammer groups that correspond to your SharePoint team sites. This way, your documents have a home in SharePoint, and the corresponding threaded conversations live in Yammer. User-generated hashtags and locations then keep the two items together.
This connection means you’re less dependent on structured metadata and taxonomy design to organize and find your documents. While your documents in SharePoint could follow a rigid organizational structure, the conversations follow a looser plan and still tie into one another and drive interactions between the two. Yammer is very flat, dynamic and responsive to the ebb and flow of business.
In the end, it’s relatively easy to get started with Yammer and begin deriving business value from this social enterprise platform. To engage your entire workforce, the key is to keep social enterprise tools closely tied to business goals, so that checking up on Yammer newsfeeds supports a vested interest in each person’s daily work.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by contacting Portal Solutions.
