There's no doubting 2020 has been a tough year, which makes it perhaps even more surprising that research from SWOOP Analytics has found staff sentiment at work was far more positive than negative during the first six months of the global COVID-19 pandemic. 

In fact, in the early days of working from home, sentiment was at its highest positive levels. 

Over time, as employees settled into new ways of working, sentiment did tend to moderate – moving from strongly positive toward somewhat positive. That said, SWOOP data showed no real movement in negative sentiment across a sample of 22 organisations selected as part of SWOOP’s 2020 Yammer Benchmarking report.  

The graph below shows the SWOOP sentiment analysis, conducted at the enterprise level, during the six months from March to September 2020 from our sample of 22 organisations’ Yammer networks. 

Overall, it’s a good news story. Organisations seem to be adapting to the new working arrangements. It’s an important overview to monitor overall mood and well-being during the global pandemic. 

Another sign to confirm employees are adapting to the new working arrangements is an analysis of keywords used in Yammer Communities.  

SWOOP recently introduced a keyword analysis function that can give organisations a sense of what staff are talking about, in the form of a word cloud. 

While we do not have data across the full six-month benchmarking period, we analysed the word clouds of the many organisations who opted in to the research. We analysed the three months to the end of October 2020. 

In another surprise, the term “COVID” or “Coronavirus”, or variations of the two terms, did not feature heavily in any of organisations’ Yammer networks analysed. The following is a stylised version of a fusion of the word clouds analysed: 

The No.1 word used for all of the word clouds analysed across networks was “Thanks”. Other prominent terms included “Team”, “People”, “Information”, “Time”, “Week”, “Customer”. In many ways work looks like it has gone back to normal conversation, despite the pandemic. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic initially took hold in March and April and sent employees to work from home, SWOOP data showed a large jump in both Yammer and Teams usage. 

After reaching peak Yammer activity levels for transition to working from home in March/April, the majority of the 116 organisations benchmarked by SWOOP experienced a small drop in Yammer activity after the initial move to working from home. However, Microsoft has confirmed the overall usage and number of users on Yammer has grown since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Despite the fall in overall Yammer activity from our benchmarked partners after April, levels of responsiveness and engagement between staff actually increased, suggesting stronger relationships were formed during a time of crisis. 

We take a deeper look into the data in SWOOP Analytics' 2020 Yammer Benchmarking report, available here for free download. We are also conducting a deep analysis into Microsoft Teams networks, with SWOOP’s second Microsoft Teams Benchmarking report to be released in April 2021.