Following on from our retail industry sector roundtable, we recently facilitated a roundtable with our US customers and prospects from the healthcare industry. Healthcare is another industry well represented as SWOOP customers. Healthcare was arguably one of the most under-pressure industry sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recently published our white paper on Workforce analytics for the Healthcare industry in the hybrid working era; where we reported on the changes we were seeing on healthcare workforces, in their use of digital collaboration platforms. We also shared several case study examples from our SWOOP clients.

We purposefully chose not to record these sessions, so participants could be totally open and transparent while ensuring energised and transparent discussions on the challenges they were facing. In this blog post, we are sharing the topics offered and discussed, along with some considered responses drawn from our benchmarking and case studies. 

Challenges discussed 

The issues raised:  

1. Moving internal communications staff off email  

At SWOOP we have always associated the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) being Microsoft Yammer or Workplace by Meta with an organisation’s internal communications function. It was therefore surprising to hear, especially from some of the larger organisations, that not all communications staff are supporters of an ESN. The comment was made that many communications staff are still “stuck in email”. 

We can understand why communications departments with a strong focus on external communications would by necessity be focussed on email. Email is still the dominant channel for external communications. But as the anticipated champions for the ESN for internal communication, it is important the communications function is well schooled on “what tool to use when”. Our SWOOP for M365 product has been designed specifically to support this requirement. Our early benchmarking of M365 sites has reinforced the degree to which organisations are “stuck in email”. We have found that for many of the larger organisations, staff can spend up to 70% of their “interaction time” in email.

It has long been known that email is no longer the most efficient means for sharing knowledge and information. The internal sharing options like Microsoft Teams channels and Yammer/Workplace are a substantially more effective and efficient means for knowledge sharing internally. We have calculated that simply substituting your internal email with a Microsoft Teams channel and/or Yammer/Workplace message can result in millions of dollars in time savings alone. Our SWOOP for M365 product reports on digital habits using the M365 suite. The “Email Liberation” habit is calculated as the ratio of messages sent by email to those sent through the more effective Teams channels or Yammer modes. Our benchmarking shows that the most liberated emailers have been able to reduce their ratio to less than five emails for every Teams channel or Yammer message sent.  

2. A disruptive “general” channel on Yammer 

One of the big movements we saw in Yammer usage reported in our 2021 Yammer Benchmarking Report was the degree to which discussions on general societal issues, regularly found on the popular social media sites, were finding their way onto Yammer. For some of the roundtable participants, this was surfacing on the Yammer “general” channel, causing disruption and senior executive angst. Other participants reported on the organic growth of some very active communities for discussing issues like climate change, COVID-19 vaccinations, LGBTIQ issues, etc. In our benchmarking study, we reported on many positive cases where these communities facilitated cross-organisational connections and relationships that would not normally have been formed. Instances where such connections led to innovative and tangible business outcomes were also reported. 

In this case, however, several participants reported the negative aspects where extreme and unwelcome posts were being made. As a result, ESN managers were being forced to remove staff from the network, something that was a rarity pre-pandemic. As a result, the discussion moved to governance and social media policies. Not all organisations experienced these negative effects; therefore leading to a discussion on how social media policies had been developed and executed for best effect.  

3. Social media and community governance policies and their relative effectiveness 

All our participants had social media policies in place, but reported that staff were largely unaware the policies applied internally, as well as externally. One participant addressed pollution of the general channel by restricting who could post in the general channel (reactions such as likes and emojis are allowed though).  

The issue of whether community formation should be governed i.e. new communities needing to pass through an approval process; or be allowed to form and grow organically, has been a regular live issue for Yammer and Workplace. There are good arguments for both approaches. It does appear that emerging issues from Yammer/Workplace now hosting a broader range of discussion topics, stronger governance measures may be warranted. This was evidenced in the differing experiences of toxic posting on Yammer/Workplace for the participants.  

Time did not permit a more detailed examination of the participants’ social media and governance policies. However, the participants felt the issue was important enough to agree to share their policies with each other.  

4. Hybrid working experience 

 At this time our participants were anticipating hybrid working, but were still largely working remotely. The discussion about battling loneliness and/or a loss of workplace connection opportunities reinforces much of the research conducted by ourselves in the most recent Yammer Benchmarking study and Microsoft’s own research on working remotely. 

The participants agreed that Yammer/Workplace plays a key role in battling the negative aspects of remote working. However, information sharing alone does not resolve the loss of people-to-people connections. Connections are formed and enrichened inside the communities. This led to a discussion on how healthy communities can be formed and run at scale. Community managers are clearly central to this discussion; hence the final discussion point of educating and nurturing community leaders.  

5. Educating community admins  

There is an abundance of educational material on online community management. It appears though that for those adopting a more organic approach to community growth, many community administrators have fallen through the gaps when it comes to training and education. Those participants with more formal governance processes in place appeared better prepared, by including education into the community formation processes.   

Community management is largely voluntary, with participants reporting thousands of communities being formed. It’s not surprising that a majority of community administrators remain untrained. This is a lost opportunity. Even with a modest level of training, communities can be a welcoming place for connecting and learning. Additionally, SWOOP licensing covers all staff. Community administrators have access to the tools and analytics for effective community facilitation. A broad-based community manager education program appears to be a real requirement now.  

The discussion ended on a very pragmatic point: how do you even find out who all the communities and community administrators are? Thankfully we were able to help out here,  with some SWOOP administration functions for Yammer and Workplace.  

Keep an eye out for a SWOOP Chat roundtable near you.