Bringing fun to work, prioritising physical and mental health and wellness, ensuring leaders over-communicate with their employees and measuring activity interactions with analytics are among the keys to a successful Yammer Community.

As part of SWOOP Analytics’ 2020 global Yammer Benchmarking report, we spoke with the managers and facilitators overseeing the world’s best Yammer networks and these tips were the common themes for a successful network, regardless of the industry or geographic location.

Bring some fun to work

Mixing work with fun was undoubtedly the most common emerging theme among the dozens of Yammer community managers we spoke with when writing SWOOP’s 2020 Yammer Benchmarking report.

As employees moved to working from home in March, Yammer became the virtual lunch room or water cooler – the place where employees could go to keep connected with their colleagues and leaders and share some laughs or tips on how to survive the new working from home world. At Westpac New Zealand, one of the most popular Yammer Communities was literally a “Dad Jokes” group.

A glance at the top-ranked Yammer Communities in SWOOP’s Benchmarking showed fun or social posts mixed in with purely work-related posts. Sometimes it was as simple as a “Happy Birthday” post, other times it’s a Yammer exercise class or tips on how to keep your kids entertained while you work from home.

One community in the top 1% of SWOOP’s analysis of 8,916 Yammer Communities was called “Convince Me Otherwise” where employees made a statement, often controversial, and colleagues had to convince them otherwise. An example was the statement: “Bacon is the duct tape of food. Seems almost everything is somehow wrapped in bacon, which makes for a delicious addition, but is it necessary?”

Global publishing company Wiley’s Director of Communication, Ron Perazza, said Wiley actively promotes fun on Yammer, it’s what brings people to the platform, and then they’ll stay for the work.

“Engagement and diversity are connected. You have leave room for informal conversation and fun. It can’t just be like a black and white newsletter,” Ron said.

How to measure with SWOOP: Check out your “Most Engaging Posts”. Can you see a sprinkling of fun posts? Change your time frame to pre-COVID-19. Is a change evident?

2. Make health and wellbeing a priority

Prioritising health and wellbeing during 2020, especially as most employees were working from home, was another common theme and one that ties into mixing work with fun - focusing on employees’ mental health by bringing some fun into their day. Time and again we were told about Yammer Communities engaging staff with exercise classes, tips on how to keep motivated while working from home, healthy eating during the pandemic, a “Pandemic Potluck” group, book clubs and even “Wear Your Camp T-shirt Day”.

One of member organisation’s RACQ’s top performing Yammer Communities was MyMarathon2020, to encourage staff to join The Heart Foundation’s fitness and fundraising challenge. Participants run, jog or walk 42.2 kilometres at their own pace during the month of October, helping to raise vital funds for lifesaving heart disease research.

Last year, RACQ employees joined MyMarathon and raised about $2,500. The goal was set this year to raise $5,000. When MyMarathon closed on 30 October, RACQ employees had raised $14,800 .

RACQ General Manager Corporate Communications, Renee Smith, credited much of the success of the internal communications campaign to the fact RACQ’s leaders encouraged their people to join the MyMarathon challenge to keep fit. She said RACQ leaders had been encouraging staff to take breaks to focus on their wellbeing as they work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They’ll take an hour off and they’ll go on a 5km walk during the course of the day,” she said.

“MyMarathon has had this multiple result of helping raise funds, but it’s also reminding people that if you’re working at home, you don’t have to stay seated all day. Do something to break up your day.

“We have a responsibility as an organisation to make sure people are looking after themselves.”

How to measure with SWOOP: Any new health and wellbeing Communities formed this year? Have you seen an increase in activity on existing health and wellbeing communities? Can you see any executives leading in “Most Engaging Posts”. Check your Keyword Cloud. Are health and wellbeing keywords evident?

3. Ensure leaders over-communicate during a time of crisis

When employees began working from home, they desperately wanted information, especially as government and health advice was changing, at times, on an hourly basis. Are their shop fronts remaining open? Are customer-facing teams still operating? How are we planning on working virtually and still delivering to customers? How do I use these new WFH tools?

The most successful Yammer networks during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic were those whose leaders communicated regularly with their employees, usually on a daily basis.

Yammer went “berserk” during the initial transition to working from home at multi-national bank ANZ. ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott did a daily webcast to answer the multitude of questions flooding in from staff on three newly-established Yammer Communities set up to guide staff through the period. The webcast link was shared back into the Yammer Q&A Community.

“The engagement was huge. We saw a huge uptake in mobile logins. I think on our top day we had 14,000 people log in,” said ANZ’s Yammer Community Manager, Richard Cartmell.

The CEO and Deputy CEO Alexis George were in Yammer every day replying to employees directly, giving them information and reassuring them.

Yammer posts from ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott and Deputy CEO Alexis George.

Telstra CEO Andrew Penn joined other executives to do the first COVID-19 live stream on Yammer to the entire organisation. Thousands of employees tuned in to be updated. So successful were these live streams, they became a daily occurrence for a month.

Australia’s largest health insurer Medibank’s executive leadership team hosted a live Yammer chat, where every employee could ask questions and receive answers. Data from SWOOP Analytics showed this was the most highly engaged post on Yammer for the year, and had the most views on any day.

Almost all our benchmarked leaders had similar stories to share about their CEO and leaders communicating and connecting with employees on Yammer during the pandemic, giving them a glimpse into their home lives and breaking down hierarchies.

How to measure with SWOOP: Hopefully you have hash tagged leader discussions so the impacts can be measured using SWOOP’s Topics tab. If not, and you have the SWOOP Keywords option, just select the keywords associated with leadership communications and track them as if they were hash tagged.

4. Host some competitions on Yammer

Most of our benchmarked leaders used competitions to engage staff on Yammer. Many of the competitions were focused on health and wellbeing and were tracked with SWOOP Analytics, using keywords, hashtags and sentiment analysis. Medibank launched a Feel Good Grants campaign on Yammer where employees could apply for a grant to bring their “Feel Good” idea on health and well-being to life. It kicked it off with a Friday Feel Good Dance Off. They had three dance-off battles online with other business units.

Telstra employees were asked; “If Telstra was a movie, what would that movie be called?”

Creative ideas came flooding in, with some people using movie posters and replacing images with Telstra staff and the Telstra logo.

Ross Healy, who works in Telstra’s Internal Communications team, said it brings the fun to Yammer and data from SWOOP shows the high levels of engagement across the network.

How to measure with SWOOP: Hash tag your competitions to track the effect under Topics.

5. Measure success with analytics

Especially during a time of upheaval or crisis, it’s important to measure the impact and reach of communications campaigns, as well as overall employee engagement. Data from SWOOP ensures you know exactly how Yammer is tracking.

So important is it at professional real estate services firm RealFoundations to ensure all employees can see and improve their Yammer behaviours, twice a year they use SWOOP Analytics to benchmark every employee’s SWOOP Persona. It’s an opportunity to see how each staff member is contributing, collaborating and sharing their knowledge with the rest of the organisation on Yammer and Microsoft Teams. If, for example, a senior leader is identified as an “Observer” by SWOOP, based on their online behaviours on Teams and Yammer, they can be helped to improve their collaboration.

“People see where they stand, they see their SWOOP persona,” said RealFoundations’ CEO Chris Shaida.

SWOOP’s benchmarking of almost 9,000 Yammer Communities has also helped uncover some otherwise little-known Yammer success stories.

Royal Dutch Airline KLM’s Yammer Community Managers hadn’t heard of the community called Ping ID, which was the airline’s top community in SWOOP’s benchmarking. Turns out the Ping ID Yammer Community is a place where all cabin crew can ask questions about setting up a new single sign-on system to log into KLM’s network. Now they’ve learned about the success of the Ping ID Yammer Community, KLM’s Yammer Community managers plan to tap into this knowledge when the new single sign-on system is rolled out to the rest of the company.

How to measure with SWOOP: For those with administrator rights, benchmarking reports for different Communities can be generated. SWOOP’s new rating algorithms will soon be in place and you will be able to generate ranking reports for Communities.

Learn more about how each of these organisations, and more, are using Yammer and SWOOP in our 2020 Yammer benchmarking report, free to download at: https://www.swoopanalytics.com/yammer-benchmarking

How to run a successful Yammer network during the COVID-19 pandemic