What’s your favourite part of the workday? What’s your favourite board game? How do you have your coffee? What’s the last thing you do at night? 

These are some of the random questions asked in consulting company Engage Squared’s “Social” Yammer community. It’s not another colleague who asks the arbitrary questions - it’s a bot, named Flow Bot. The bot randomly @mentions an employee and asks them a question.

The idea is Flow Bot gets people engaged on Yammer by asking them a personal question. It gets employees logging onto the enterprise social network so they may look around to see what else is being posted in other communities, it allows colleagues to learn a little more about each other, it gives everyone a break from the regular work day - hopefully bringing some fun to work - and it allows employees to “practice” using Yammer in a safe environment, making them feel comfortable to use the digital platform. 

Can a social community be innovative? 

Engage Squared’s “Social” Yammer community was ranked No.3 in the world for Most Innovative Communities in SWOOP Analytics’ 2021 Microsoft Yammer Benchmarking analysis of more than 4,300 communities, the world’s most comprehensive analysis of Yammer networks. 

The community ranked highly due its performance in three SWOOP measures aligned with innovation in communities: Diversity of experience in the membership (members are active in multiple other communities), Curiosity (a high proportion of posts and replies framed as questions) and %Catalysts (a high proportion of members that are able to provoke reactions and discussion). 

While the Yammer community identified by SWOOP’s data is a social community, Engage Squared CEO Stephen Monk believes it is still a place of innovation. 

“This community is an innovative space,” he said. 

“It has a great mix of different contributors. People share everything from ideas about how to survive lockdown, to their personal achievements outside of work like launching their new art exhibition.  

“And we have our social bot asking a randomly selected employee a fun question about their life each week to better connect the organisation.” 

The Flow Bot doesn’t dominate the community. It asks one question for about every four or five organic posts. Often the questions from Flow Bot lead to much longer discussion as more and more people join in the conversation. 

Stephen said the conversations initiated by Flow Bot lighten the mood and put “people in a better head space”.  

“Our team may not be solving work problems directly within this community, but they have better relationships and a better understanding of what their colleagues are up to, and therefore have a better ability to be creative in their work and solve problems together,” he said. 

“It may not be immediately obvious in this community, but it is a key part of that.” 

Creating healthy and sustainable work practices 

Stephen said using Flow Bot in Yammer was one way to try and create healthy and sustainable work practices, especially as employees across Australia and New Zealand had been so hard hit by COVID-19 enforced lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. He said while people don’t seem to mind too much working from home, they do worry about the uncertainty of extended lockdowns, and often you can find yourself still at your computer at 4pm without taking a break because you’re no longer moving around to chat in the office or see clients, or commuting to the office. 

“We’re trying to create a mindful culture where you’re adopting work practices across the organisation that are healthy and sustainable,” Stephen said. 

“This is just one of the things that we’re doing that makes it clear that we care about working in a way that is sustainable, so you don’t burn out staff, so they don’t experience periods of low energy and so they are mindful about taking breaks. 

“A lot of the stuff we’re doing here, whilst we’re trying to present it in a friendly way, we’re engineering moments throughout the week where people in the organisation are forced to stop working and step out of that grind and really connect with each other and form that human relationship.  

“The really nice thing about Yammer is it’s spontaneous and you can consume it when you want that moment.” 

Taking a digital break from Microsoft Teams 

Day-to-day work at Engage Squared is done in Microsoft Teams so the Flow Bot is a prompt to pull people into the Yammer community to have a non-work-related conversation, said Matt Dodd, Digital Workplace Consultant at Engage Squared. 

“We live a lot of our life in Teams because we’re focusing on work, so for a good chunk of people Yammer is not the first place they will head. It’s just a way to help pull people in and ask a question,” he said of the bot. 

“To get business value, you have to give personal value. I need to be commenting, liking, posting - it’s those kinds of learned behaviours and role modelling which encourages social capital.” 

Stephen agreed about the need to move from Teams to Yammer as a break from the day-to-day, while also being cautious not to multiply work on different platforms. Be deliberate in making Yammer a catalyst for a more healthy and connected workplace. 

“We tell our customers to be careful and conscious about the way they roll out Yammer; to clearly communicate to your staff the problem that Yammer will solve. If you don’t, it will just end up being the same thing as the forums you had before,” he said. 

Mark Woodrow, Microsoft 365 Evangelist at Engage Squared, spoke of the diversity created in the “Social” Yammer community, and how knowing more about someone’s life outside of work breaks down barriers at work, especially as everyone is working from home, without the spontaneous office conversations. 

“There can be some random questions asked by Flow Bot but it’s diversifying the conversation,” he said. 

“The bot helps us build relationships in the social group - which makes it easier to collaborate on work as colleagues." 

Matt said most posts in the social Yammer community are seen by about 60-80 per cent of staff, according to data from SWOOP Analytics, which reinforces it as a channel where people go to collaborate.  

For Matt personally, he has only ever worked remotely at Engage Squared, yet he feels a greater sense of trust with his colleagues, most of whom he has never met face to face, than he did in former jobs. 

“Underlying all this is that sense of trust and psychological safety that it gives you,” Matt said. 

“It doesn’t matter that it’s a social group. The fact people are asking questions, building those connections, you can then take that and you can build onto that. It gives that underlying trust in your colleagues. You’ve got a much better sense of the people you are working with. 

“You see that human side coming through on all our digital channels. It’s that digital landscape that builds that sense of trust.”