ANZ - Top Yammer network
Authentic leaders listening to their people
The key to ANZ’s Yammer success is using it as a listening tool for the bank’s executives and leaders, rather than a broadcasting tool, and providing leaders with the data to show them the impact of their connection.
Yammer allows the bank’s leaders to build trust and relationships with employees by connecting in genuine two-way conversation and taking the time to understand what’s important to them.
The data from SWOOP Analytics has been a catalyst for getting ANZ’s executives and leaders connecting on Yammer because it clearly shows the impact of leaders’ actions.
Ryan Crocker, ANZ’s Social Business Development Manager, explains.
“What really worked is helping people, and leaders in particular, understand that Yammer really is a conversation tool, it’s not a broadcast tool - that’s what email is for,” he said.
“Yammer is a way to build genuine relationships with people, to ask questions and find out what’s on people’s minds. That’s what leadership is all about - having conversation with people, building trust and building relationships.”
Traditional leadership events like webcasts or town hall meetings are really important, but they take a lot of work and are often mostly one-way, or not scalable across an organisation of 45,000 employees.
“What Yammer provides is that scalable connection,” he said.
Ryan Crocker, Social Business Development Manager, ANZ.
“It just adds so much value. Once you can convince people of that and give them the confidence to get started, and then they start to see the data and the impact that they’re having, that really, really has a big impact.”
ANZ’s Yammer Community Manager, Richy Cartmell, says by showing leaders the impact of their comments and posts from SWOOP data, it leads to increased executive engagement.
Richy Cartmell, Yammer Community Manager, ANZ.
“You can talk and talk and talk but sometimes you need to show people data and show them exactly the impact they’ve had, or the spread of their voice across the network, it’s what people want,” he said.
Ryan said it is also important to coach or mentor leaders in using and connecting on Yammer themselves, rather than driving it for them. He said sometimes leaders are concerned they’re not receiving the level of engagement they would like.
“We go back through the SWOOP data and look at the sort of conversations you had that have been really engaging, and what are the conversations you had recently that have been not so engaging,” he said.
“Nine times out of 10, stuff that’s not engaging is usually when they’ve been prompted by somebody to post because maybe there’s an initiative or a campaign or something that we’re trying to push down on to people.
“But the stuff that’s engaging is when it’s something that’s relevant right now. Whether it’s something happening externally in our broader environment that may impact us at ANZ, or something happening within our organisation that impacts us, but it’s relevant for people and it has some kind of personal story or interesting insight that comes directly from that leader.”
Ryan said as a communications professional, you can’t come up with those sorts of posts for leaders – it has to come from the leader and it has to be authentic.
Launching Yammer at ANZ
ANZ is one of Australia’s big four banks, operating in 33 markets across the globe, with 45,000 employees.
In 2017, the bank realised it had outgrown its first enterprise social network (ESN) tool, which was being used by only 19 per cent of staff, often as a broadcasting channel rather than a collaboration tool.
Before deciding on its next ESN platform, ANZ conducted in-depth research to what appealed most to employees and decided upon Yammer. Employees wanted a place that was authentic and safe, provided functionality and features they needed such as being mobile friendly, ease of use, and integrated into other workplace applications.
Leaders played a critical role in promoting engagement from the get-go, Ryan said. People are active on Yammer if their leaders are active – the data shows a direct correlation.
This is the second consecutive year ANZ has been in the top three in SWOOP’s global benchmarking of Yammer networks for large-size organisations.
Yammer went “berserk” during COVID-19
With an already well-established Yammer network across the ANZ business, Yammer Communities went “berserk” during the COVID-19 pandemic when most employees suddenly found themselves working from home.
“It was the busiest we’ve ever seen it,” Richy said.
People were hungry for information, especially as everything was changing so rapidly – working from home, using new tools, and all the while day-to-day restrictions and boundaries were rapidly changing.
ANZ’s Yammer team created three new Yammer Communities to address all matters COVID-related.
1. Tips and Tricks
2. Things you need to know
3. Q&A Community
A screenshot of ANZ’s Community Dashboard from SWOOP Analytics.
Each day, employees were encouraged to post their questions in Yammer. The team facilitating Yammer then reviewed the questions and focused on the most important and popular.
ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott hosted a daily webcast to help answer some of the questions too. The webcast link was shared back into the Yammer Q&A Community, by announcement.
A Yammer post from ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott.
“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,” Richy said.
Ryan said the internal communications team didn’t need to prompt Mr Elliott nor Deputy CEO Alexis George to read and reply to posts in the Q&A Community.
“A number of times they posted proactively to show that solidarity, that emotional support, for people, which I think was really important,” Ryan said.
“They responded really well to questions as well. We didn’t want to set the expectation that they were going to go in and reply to everything. So we, in the Yammer team, played a role of making sure that people were having their questions answered as much as possible.
“But actually Shayne and Alexis were in there really often replying to people and giving them information, reassuring them, and it was really amazing. It was like a direct two-way connection with the CEO and the Deputy CEO during a really crazy and scary time for people.
“I think it was just such a powerful way for them to stay connected to our people.”
It was a connection felt both ways – employees connecting with leaders and leaders feeling connected with employees.
“The fact that there were so many questions and so much engagement in that community speaks to the fact that people found it valuable because they were having that genuine engagement with leaders,” Ryan said.
“It just felt like it was really embedded and integrated as part of the way that we were working and communicating with one another.”
Polling is one method of engagement the team has been using to discover the wants and needs from employees when it comes to how they work.
The first example was early on in the bank’s COVID-19 response. Alexis George posted a poll on Yammer asking how ANZ employees felt about returning to the office. Though the poll received more than 3,500 votes, it was in the 120+ replies that people explained they were more concerned about safely getting to and from work, than the risk of transmission in the office.
A more recent example was a poll run during a global YamJam, called the “Big Conversation”. The Jam gave ANZ employees across the globe the opportunity to share their thoughts and help answer the question: “How will we work in the future once we are able to start returning to the office?”
The team were keen to understand how often people would like to continue working from home, and over 1,700 people gave their feedback.
“People really wanted to give their feedback and I think that’s really going a long way in showing other leaders that this is a place that people want to give their feedback, they want to be heard,” Richy said.
Getting executives engaged on Yammer
Many Yammer community managers would be envious of ANZ’s leaders’ commitment to Yammer. Take heart, Richy said it’s taken a lot of work to get to this point and every step along the way has been backed by data, something bank executives love.
“We’ve really worked towards it and certainly SWOOP has helped with that,” he said.
Tips like SWOOP’s 1,2,3 rule have helped enormously to get leaders started on Yammer.
Richy said on ANZ’s previous ESN some leaders would have posts written on their behalf because they weren’t comfortable sharing their opinion.
“Actually coaching leaders and encouraging them to have an opinion, share what they’re thinking and don’t be afraid to just jump in and engage was really important,” he said.
Richy said it was then important to show leaders the impact they’ve had by using the data from SWOOP.
“It kind snowballs from there, he said. “Once they see the impact that it’s had they don’t necessarily have to think about a 1, 2, 3 rule – it just becomes natural.”
Making SWOOP available for all
SWOOP is available for all ANZ employees to access, along with internal SWOOP training sessions. Richy said when people see their own online behaviours via SWOOP it acts as a “wake-up call” to encourage the right behaviours on Yammer.
By showing each employee their SWOOP Persona, it leads to conversations on how to improve collaboration. Perhaps they should add a photo or video to a post, or make a post shorter and more relevant.
“Absolutely SWOOP data really helps people,” Richy said.
“We encourage everybody to use SWOOP.”
Ryan explained that when someone comes to them asking how to better drive their message on Yammer, they can use data from SWOOP to best address the intended audience and outcome.
“With SWOOP we can actually look at their audience, see what their behaviour is on Yammer in terms of which Communities they engage in, who’s influential, what do they talk about, what engages them versus what doesn’t engage them, and you can build a whole Yammer plan or Yammer strategy being informed by that data,” Ryan said.
“We’ve had feedback from stakeholders coming back to us and saying; ‘This has totally changed the way we thought Yammer worked’.”
Learn more about ANZ’s authentic leadership in this case study.
Hear from Ryan and Richy in this SWOOP Chat interview.
