Yammer for True Communities of Practice #CoP #Yammer
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Hi all,
Quick question: are you using Yammer for your communities of practice? If so, how do you accomplish:
Kim Kim Glover Director, Knowledge Management & Social Learning | People and Culture P +1 281 405 7069 | M +1 832 472 2983 |
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Hi Kim,
We use Yammer for our Communities of Practice.
Navigation and identity - we try to give them a distinctive brand. For example:
Using specific icons or swooshes helps them stand out.
Sharing across communities - We use topics as the glue (we also use topics to join people to Yammer communities). We make data available that allows community leaders to use data to discover and reconnect disconnected conversations. Community leaders also trace
through conversations, keeping the momentum going etc. Search is also a powerful ally as it uses the icons. Having a snappy strapline helps as it is in the search results.
Customisation of the community home - We let communities manage their visual identity and they know it is limited to what Yammer allow. We certainly do not build custom pages and then add Yammer feeds to them.
We have built light touch integration. It uses our taxonomy to connect likeminded people to Yammer communities, provides associated SharePoint Hub sites, and knowledge sharing capabilities in SharePoint that augment business processes. We also use Microsoft
Viva to enhance the knowledge management experience.
We are not a big company - only 17,000 people and we do not have dedicated KM functions.
Regards,
Simon
From: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Kim Glover via groups.io <kim.glover@...>
Sent: 18 November 2022 17:13 To: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> Subject: [SIKM] Yammer for True Communities of Practice #CoP #Yammer Hi all,
Quick question: are you using Yammer for your communities of practice? If so, how do you accomplish:
Kim Kim Glover Director, Knowledge Management & Social Learning | People and Culture P +1 281 405 7069 | M +1 832 472 2983 |
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Thanks Simon for sharing. Which part of the Viva Suite do you use?
Best,
JC
From:
main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Simon Denton via groups.io <Simon.denton@...> Hi Kim,
We use Yammer for our Communities of Practice.
Navigation and identity - we try to give them a distinctive brand. For example:
Using specific icons or swooshes helps them stand out.
Sharing across communities - We use topics as the glue (we also use topics to join people to Yammer communities). We make data available that allows community leaders to use data to discover and reconnect disconnected conversations. Community leaders also trace through conversations, keeping the momentum going etc. Search is also a powerful ally as it uses the icons. Having a snappy strapline helps as it is in the search results.
Customisation of the community home - We let communities manage their visual identity and they know it is limited to what Yammer allow. We certainly do not build custom pages and then add Yammer feeds to them.
We have built light touch integration. It uses our taxonomy to connect likeminded people to Yammer communities, provides associated SharePoint Hub sites, and knowledge sharing capabilities in SharePoint that augment business processes. We also use Microsoft Viva to enhance the knowledge management experience.
We are not a big company - only 17,000 people and we do not have dedicated KM functions.
Regards,
Simon
From: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Kim Glover via groups.io <kim.glover@...>
Sent: 18 November 2022 17:13 To: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> Subject: [SIKM] Yammer for True Communities of Practice #CoP #Yammer
Hi all,
Thanks in advance for your responses - and have a great weekend! Kim Glover Director, Knowledge Management & Social Learning | People and Culture P +1 281 405 7069 | M +1 832 472 2983 |
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The items that come free with our E5 license plus Topics. We have run some experiments with the Premium features and may invest in those soon. From: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Jean-Claude F. Monney via groups.io <Jean-Claude@...>
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2022 6:09:36 PM To: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> Subject: Re: [SIKM] Yammer for True Communities of Practice #CoP #Yammer Thanks Simon for sharing. Which part of the Viva Suite do you use?
Best,
JC
From:
main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Simon Denton via groups.io <Simon.denton@...> Hi Kim,
We use Yammer for our Communities of Practice.
Navigation and identity - we try to give them a distinctive brand. For example:
Using specific icons or swooshes helps them stand out.
Sharing across communities - We use topics as the glue (we also use topics to join people to Yammer communities). We make data available that allows community leaders to use data to discover and reconnect disconnected conversations. Community leaders also trace through conversations, keeping the momentum going etc. Search is also a powerful ally as it uses the icons. Having a snappy strapline helps as it is in the search results.
Customisation of the community home - We let communities manage their visual identity and they know it is limited to what Yammer allow. We certainly do not build custom pages and then add Yammer feeds to them.
We have built light touch integration. It uses our taxonomy to connect likeminded people to Yammer communities, provides associated SharePoint Hub sites, and knowledge sharing capabilities in SharePoint that augment business processes. We also use Microsoft Viva to enhance the knowledge management experience.
We are not a big company - only 17,000 people and we do not have dedicated KM functions.
Regards,
Simon
From: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Kim Glover via groups.io <kim.glover@...>
Hi all,
Thanks in advance for your responses - and have a great weekend! Kim Glover Director, Knowledge Management & Social Learning | People and Culture P +1 281 405 7069 | M +1 832 472 2983 |
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Alexandre Zivkovic
Hi Kim,
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In my previous company, as KM responsible, the previous KM manager and I have implemented the Yammer in the CoP environment. If in 2015/2018, this tool was for me very exciting (co-edition and very simple), it was not a huge success. People were stuck to Outlook !!! They considered Yammer as a Social media and not a professional tools Today, TEAMS has taken over Yammer !!! Conclusion: very good tool but low success and now nearly obsolete. Kind regards Alexandre Zivkovic Le 18 nov. 2022 à 19:13, Simon Denton via groups.io <Simon.denton@...> a écrit :
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Kim Horstmanshof
Hi Kim, I have experienced the same problem as Alexandre; we have Yammer but only around 10-20% of our staff body regularly engage with it. Most, including our Community of Practice, use Teams; however, our Teams are currently private for invited members only, so it is much harder to collaborate across the organisation and get interested staff into the right Teams area. We are hoping to change this soon, but in the meantime I have been asked on occasion for a company-wide version of Teams by members of staff who refuse to use Yammer! The recent update to Yammer has made it much harder to engage across channels serendipitously, with the Home page not pulling in new content from channels particularly well. As mentioned before, we hope to open up our Teams for easier collaboration as well as potentially introducing Viva Topics down the line... Best, Kim -- On Fri, 18 Nov 2022 at 18:56, Alexandre Zivkovic <alexandre.zivkovic@...> wrote:
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I'd disagree with the obsolete comment. It's become the cornerstone of Viva with Teams providing the single pane of glass. Investment continues. Benchmarking studies like SWOOPs show many organisations are taking advantage of it. If anything, it may have a
future whereby it is not overtly evident that you are using Yammer but you will be. Microsoft are clearly on a assimilation path and we will see products being relegated to becoming features with Teams as the window into the Microsoft world.
For information around 40% of our staff actively use Yammer which we feel is pretty good and compares well with others.
From: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Alexandre Zivkovic via groups.io <alexandre.zivkovic@...>
Sent: Friday, 18 November 2022, 18:56 To: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> Subject: Re: [SIKM] Yammer for True Communities of Practice #CoP #Yammer
Hi Kim,
In my previous company, as KM responsible, the previous KM manager and I have implemented the Yammer in the CoP environment.
If in 2015/2018, this tool was for me very exciting (co-edition and very simple), it was not a huge success. People were stuck to Outlook !!! They considered Yammer as a Social media and not a professional tools
Today, TEAMS has taken over Yammer !!!
Conclusion: very good tool but low success and now nearly obsolete.
Kind regards
Alexandre Zivkovic
Le 18 nov. 2022 à 19:13, Simon Denton via groups.io <Simon.denton@...> a écrit :
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I agree with Simon also because Yammer and Teams were built and are meant for different collaboration purposes.
Yammer serves enterprise wide collaboration. To my knowledge, there are companies with up to 100 of thousands users while team is for group/project collaboration and meant to be your “personalized work hub” where you can access the apps that you need to perform your role.
Microsoft’s Viva Engage that is Yammer communities embedded into teams.
JC From:
main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Simon Denton via groups.io <Simon.denton@...> I'd disagree with the obsolete comment. It's become the cornerstone of Viva with Teams providing the single pane of glass. Investment continues. Benchmarking studies like SWOOPs show many organisations are taking advantage of it. If anything, it may have a future whereby it is not overtly evident that you are using Yammer but you will be. Microsoft are clearly on a assimilation path and we will see products being relegated to becoming features with Teams as the window into the Microsoft world.
For information around 40% of our staff actively use Yammer which we feel is pretty good and compares well with others. From: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> on behalf of Alexandre Zivkovic via groups.io <alexandre.zivkovic@...>
Sent: Friday, 18 November 2022, 18:56 To: main@SIKM.groups.io <main@SIKM.groups.io> Subject: Re: [SIKM] Yammer for True Communities of Practice #CoP #Yammer
Hi Kim,
In my previous company, as KM responsible, the previous KM manager and I have implemented the Yammer in the CoP environment.
If in 2015/2018, this tool was for me very exciting (co-edition and very simple), it was not a huge success. People were stuck to Outlook !!! They considered Yammer as a Social media and not a professional tools
Today, TEAMS has taken over Yammer !!!
Conclusion: very good tool but low success and now nearly obsolete.
Kind regards
Alexandre Zivkovic
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Hi Kim,
In our organization we have active use of both Teams and Yammer. Teams typically gets most of the focus of smaller groups and project-related teams, and Yammer gets the lion's share of larger, cross-organization communities (both social and interest). Some Yammer CoPs are wildly successful, others not so much ... the primary difference being the community moderator(s) and how well they have framed the purpose, goals, sponsorship and have a game plan for delivering value. To your questions:
Hope this is helpful. Best regards, David |
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Michelle Pike
Hi Kim - We also use Yammer, Teams and SharePoint to drive our Communities of Practice strategy forward. We developed a governance around when to use Yammer and when not - as well as how to cross collaborate. Microsoft has some great visuals on how to promote the use of Yammer and really spark engagement which comes in many different forms. On Fri, Nov 18, 2022 at 12:13 PM Kim Glover via groups.io <kim.glover=technipfmc.com@groups.io> wrote: Hi all, |
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Barbara Fillip
Hi everyone, We have used Yammer extensively for communities of practice that are focused on our technical practice areas but also for communities of interests, including ERGs (enterprise resource groups). For several years after launch, Yammer was underutilized because it was competing with another internal collaboration tool tied to our learning platform. Then in 2019, Yammer was relaunched with proper governance and strategic intent, and top leadership support. This included governance for community management, the different types of communities, and support for community managers. The KM team is responsible for overall management, support to community managers. There is a governance group (the Yammer product manager from IT, the KM lead (that's me), and the internal communications lead). We have a newsletter for community managers and a quarterly meeting. There was some confusion between Teams and Yammer at some point but it's been cleared up (mostly) now. The latest issue has been Viva Engage and how to explain the difference between accessing Yammer in the Yammer app (web, desktop, phone) vs. accessing the Yammer communities in Teams. We already had Yammer in Teams. It was called "Communities", so the transition to a different name and interface is baffling unless you understand what Microsoft is doing with the Viva Suite. Customization of community pages: Provide guidance/support to the community managers. There are a few elements useful for customization: 1) the main image; 2) the thumbnail image -- this one has become more important with Viva Engage because the thumbnail is what shows up in the navigation menu; 3) info blurb; 4) pinned documents or links (we pin the community charter, common guidance for new Yammer users, and whatever the community wants to make available to the community). How to differentiate different types of communities: The automated list of communities doesn't allow you to do that easily, whether you are looking at the list in Viva Engage or in Yammer. Part of our governance involves creating a one-page charter for each community when they are created. It's based on a template and the first section of that charter specifically states what type of community it is (technical community of practice, community of interest, cross-cutting, etc...). There are only four types to pick from. This has evolved a little over the past 3 years as remote work and now hybrid work have pushed everyone to Teams and Yammer, including leadership communications. Sharing across communities: I am a big fan of the Topics function. I believe it will be critical to the integration with Viva Topics and therefore other aspects of the Viva Suite. However, I have had challenges getting people to tag conversations with topics. I do 90% of the topics tagging. I've tried to get the community managers to do it consistently at least within their communities. People tend to use hashtags, which isn't the same as Topics in Yammer. In my mind, hashtags are the folksonomy (not useful for curation purposes) and topics are a more controlled taxonomy that will be accessible throughout the Office 365 environment and can be used to pull conversations based on topic tags anywhere in the SharePoint environment. I use that extensively in our document library, with Yammer web parts, pulling metadata (including topics) to link conversations and high value content (documents). The "share conversation" function isn't very good. Yes, you can share conversations across communities, but the look is pretty bad. It looks like a truncated message. In my experience, no matter how many times I recommend people use that function, they prefer to copy and paste their message into another community, thereby duplicating the conversations. However, the share conversation function is what allows access to all related posts from a single conversation in one space. It's not perfect but you can find all related posts and a single point for the combined analytics in the conversation insights for the shared conversation. Integration with other tools: Most of our communities are linked to pre-existing SharePoint sites outside of Yammer. We do not use wikis. The ability to store files within the community's automatically generated SP sites (in our configuration) is actually problematic. We have strongly recommended that community managers NOT use those sites and continue curating materials in their pre-existing SP sites. The SP sites can then display a Yammer web part for that specific community, pulling people into the conversations. We also have a Yammer web part on our main intranet landing page. That one displays conversations from the All Company community. For navigation purposes, Yammer is also featured in our SharePoint global navigation. I have experimented with Yammer in Outlook on the web as well. The Viva Engage in Teams is great for people who don't like to use too many different tools. The main issue now is the complexity of the notification settings. Yammer desktop and web have their own notification settings, which refer to email notifications and Yammer feeds, while Teams notifications are more limited. I had a conversation recently with Microsoft about this and I now understand why. So, for the time being, explaining notifications to 5000 people is challenging. I read the SWOOP reports even though we don't use SWOOP for our Yammer engagement analytics, and I can say that our Yammer/Viva Engage network is going through the same challenges/changes as the networks analyzed by SWOOP. However, things are changing fast. Right now (November), we are experiencing a significant spike in engagement (broad engagement from people who typically only read and don't post/react) that is directly tied to corporate / leadership efforts. I am pushing for a broader understanding of "engagement" so that we don't isolate engagement in Yammer from broader employee engagement, aiming for an optimal balance of engagement in Teams and in Yammer as opposed to presenting it as a competition between the two. It's not a matter of "we have too many tools, Yammer isn't working as well as Teams, therefore let's stick to Teams". It's becoming easier to argue that both are needed now that Yammer is in Teams with a solid interface as Viva Engage. Sorry, that was a long answer. Best, Barbara Fillip On Fri, Nov 18, 2022 at 2:08 PM Simon Denton via groups.io <Simon.denton=mottmac.com@groups.io> wrote:
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Laurence Lock Lee
HI all,
Sorry that I'm a little late to this conversation, despite being a long term KMer .... I'm a co-founder and Chief Scientist at SWOOP Analytics and a co-author of our benchmarking reports. I do the quantitative stuff and write the opinion bits and futures. My colleague Sharon Dawson does the case studies. I like what you Barbara,Simon Denton and others have written about the use of Yammer for CoPs. My history of CoPs goes back to the 1990s, when I designed our own CoP system (pre-Yammer) for my employer of the time BHP. We grew to 120+ CoPs very quickly, until the world changed through a series of M&A and divestments, where the big loser was the KM program :( In writing this year's report I attached the tag line "going backward to go forward" (with a bigger cohort). Privately I was hoping that this really will be the case and that the Yammer/Viva Engage owners would not settle into a "social media is good enough" status. I'm therefore encouraged by your post Barbara, that your organisation is indeed turning that way. I have a soft spot for CoPs and have used this years report to try and emphasise that there is for more to Yammer/Viva Engage than a social media tool; and that people like your good selves are actually demonstrating the case. As a KM community we need to be sure that this is not lost. My personal simplified definition for KM to the uneducated is that it's about "connections and collections". Sadly much of the KM technology space has focussed on the collections only. I was encouraged to see some comments about Viva Topics as its the technology I see as finally bringing connections and collections together in some sort of unified way. To be fair IBM were probably there decades ago .... but they lost the office technology war.... On the topic of Yammer vs Teams (we benchmark both by the way) it worries me that organisations would try to use Teams to do what Yammer does, simply because it's one less tool. I think Microsoft's own advice around inner loop (your day to day team) and outer loop (your broader network) is a good characterisation and separation of the two. It does concern me that some of the Microsoft research identifying a loss of broader network connections during the pandemic did not even factor in Yammer as a data source for their research (though I do agree in general with the findings). I believe that trying to do both inner loop and outer loop work in Teams Channels/chat/meeting will only lead to more confusion. I have devoted a section in this year's Yammer report (and also in some previous reports) as to how we see how Yammer and Teams Channels can co-exist effectively. As a former CoP champion I'm excited by where Yammer/Viva Engage is going. It's now up to practitioners like yourselves to keep sharing our best practices. Speaking for SWOOP Analytics, we intend to keep doing so and hopefully be able to share some of your good experiences on the way. Rgds Laurence Lock Lee |
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Laurence Lock Lee
Oh... I forgot to let those on the list interested ion Yammer/Viva Engage we have the Yammer festival running again this year in December https://www.swoopanalytics.com/events/yammer-community-festival-2022 ...is virtual in global time zones....
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Hamish Tacey
Hi all Is Viva Engage up and running 100% as a means of CoPs and knowledge sharing? I heard otherwise. Thank you. Hamish On Mon, 21 Nov 2022 at 09:48, Laurence Lock Lee <llocklee@...> wrote: Oh... I forgot to let those on the list interested ion Yammer/Viva Engage we have the Yammer festival running again this year in December https://www.swoopanalytics.com/events/yammer-community-festival-2022 ...is virtual in global time zones.... |
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Yes, Viva Engage, which is basically how you experience Yammer in Teams, is generally available. There will be new premium features released early next year, but the name and look and feel change from the Communities app in Teams to Viva Engage happened in
August. Just like most of the apps in Microsoft 365, it will evolve over time and new features, both included, like Storyline, or premium, like the upcoming Social Campaign, Leadership Corner, and Answers Hub, are available only with add-on licenses or the
Viva Suite license.
Here is a link to learn more: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/getting-started-with-microsoft-viva-engage-729f9fce-3aa6-4478-888c-a1543918c284#:~:text=Viva%20Engage%20delivers%20high-value%20employee%20experiences%20including%20community,and%20introduces%20new%20features%20including%20storyline%20and%20stories.
Sue Susan Hanley
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Barbara Fillip
It requires some work and I can't say it's working perfectly. The challenge has very little to do with the tool and more to do with having a common understanding of what it takes to develop and sustain thriving communities of practice within an organization. It's the same challenge you would have with any tool. If we didn't use Yammer/ Viva Engage, we would be using Teams for our communities of practice and that would have some limitations as well. Storylines and Stories, however, will take Viva Engage in a different direction, presenting more opportunities for individual self-expression. I am concerned that this will divert engagement from communities, but I don't really know what will happen if and when we launch Storylines. In the end, it's a matter of not allowing the tools to control what we do and doing our best to use the tools to serve our purpose. Barbara On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 11:03 PM Hamish Tacey <hamish.tacey@...> wrote:
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Laurence Lock Lee
I share your concerns. We can only try and keep educating the Yammer/Viva Engage new users….
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