“Does a conversation on Microsoft Teams have a longer or shorter life span than a conversation in Yammer?”  

This is a question recently posed to me and it prompted me ask our Chief Scientist Dr Laurence Lock Lee to analyse our benchmarking data for Yammer and Microsoft Teams to find the answer. But first, what do we mean by life-span? We’ve defined it as the time from the initial post to the most recent reply. I also need to note that for Microsoft Teams we looked at conversations in channels, as chat messages are not structured as a set of post/replies, but an ongoing stream of messages. Therefore, the start/end date for a chat doesn’t tell us when a particular topic being discussed started and ended. 

Here’s what we found: 

A conversation on Yammer has a life span which is about three times longer than one on Teams. 

I wasn’t surprised that it was longer, but it’s nice to know just how much longer it is. What about the actual duration? How long (minutes, hours, days, weeks) do conversations last? In other words, how patient you should be before you start chasing replies? 

The actual life span of a conversation varies from organisation to organisation. In one organisation the lifespan was 4.6 hours for Teams and 13 hours for Yammer. In another it was 5.6 hours for Teams and 21 hours for Yammer. Overall, we arrived at an average of 5 hours for Teams and 17 hours for Yammer. 

These averages obviously hide a typical bell-curve distribution, but I think it still tells an important story.  

Key Take-Aways 

I guess there are at least a couple of take-aways from this: 

• Teams conversations are more rapid than on Yammer. Not a surprise as Teams is more about day-to-day work activities. But I also think this is because Teams is more about ‘in the moment’ conversations and replies that come the next day have often lost their relevance. Maybe Teams conversations are also more tactical in nature, ie more about practical coordination of tasks. 

• Yammer conversations are less frequent but have a longer life. I’d suggest this means they are less ‘transactional’, and arguably also less time sensitive (i.e. less about day-to-day work). Could that mean they are more strategic in nature? Or is the ‘lag’ just due to messages being less time sensitive? 

Conclusion 

In SWOOP’s 2020 Teams Benchmarking Report we included a chapter on the difference between Yammer and Teams, and the use of them is substantially different. We found: 

• Teams are typically set up as private. Yammer communities are typically public. 

• Teams typically have only a small number of members. Yammer communities are far bigger.  

• Discussions happening within Teams typically don’t cross organisational boundaries, but they do more so on Yammer. 

Now we can conclude that the life span of discussions are short on Teams and long on Yammer. I think a pretty compelling picture has formed that these are indeed very different platforms. Anyone claiming Teams and Yammer are the same clearly haven’t looked at the data.