Tapping into unrealised resources

When KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ Yammer Community Managers found out what their top performing Yammer Community was, according to SWOOP Analytics’ 2020 benchmarking measures, they were surprised, to say the least.

It turned out to be a Yammer Community called Ping ID, a community none of the managers realised was thriving so well. To their surprise, the top performing Yammer Community wasn’t the highly engaged Inflight Services used by all cabin crew, nor the Flight Operations group used by pilots to share information. Instead, it was a new sign-on support community for inflight cabin crew.

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. In the past, when a new sign-on system was initiated, crew would have gone to a help desk and an IT specialist would have manually installed the new software and signed them in.

That’s not possible during the COVID-19 world, and the changing culture at KLM is focused on empowering staff to become more self-sufficient, with the full support of the company. Therefore, a Yammer Community was set up to allow cabin crew to ask questions, find answers and get support from their colleagues for any issue they may encounter.

This Yammer Community was among the top two per cent in SWOOP’s benchmarking of almost 9,000 Communities, with particularly strong scores for member-to-member engagement and overall responsiveness.

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.

Maud van de Vosse is a KLM pilot who also manages the company’s Yammer Community for Flight Operations (pilots). She plans to refer her Yammer Community, which has 2,400 active members, to the already established Ping ID Community when the new sign-in is rolled out to pilots.

“We can use that group when they roll it (single sign-on) out within our division,” Maud said.

“That way we can be learning from each other and increase cross-silo knowledge sharing.”

Jaap Lalkens, a cabin attendant and one of KLM’s Community Managers for Inflight Services, said establishing the Ping ID Yammer Community was also a shift in culture at the airline to encourage crew to be more self-sufficient and less dependent on the help desk, while at the same time making support readily available to all who need it.

“That’s why this group is very thriving. Crew can go online at any time, from any location, and help each other to activate and use this new software in their daily work,” he said.

Patricia Mars, working at Corporate Communications, focussing on increasing engagement and online collaboration within company-wide communication, plans to build on the success of the Ping ID Yammer Community when the same single sign-on is rolled out to other departments at KLM.

“So much information is already there and these colleagues are able to help other colleagues,” she said.

Save on thousands of emails by creating a new Yammer Community

KLM’s second highest performing Yammer Community in SWOOP’s 2020 benchmarking is a newly-established community for cabin crew taking the voluntary retirement scheme offered during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when airlines have been among the hardest hit industries.

Jaap wanted to create this Yammer Community as a subset of the large Inflight Services Community, which has almost 9,000 active members.

At the time, KLM’s HR department was hesitant to open this Voluntary Resignation Scheme Yammer Community, instead preferring questions to be emailed to them.

It took Jaap weeks to persuade the HR department within his division Inflight Services otherwise. Initially, the HR department thought it would create extra work, having to post details and procedures in Yammer as well as in emails.

“It was very difficult to persuade HR to open up this group,” Jaap said.

“It took me days to demonstrate to find best practices to see it’s really necessary because probably you will get thousands of questions on your email and probably from all those questions, 2,000 will be the same.

“So, if one question is shared on Yammer, those 9,000 members can see it on Yammer, you don’t need to answer your email. Lots of questions are generic, and suitable for the common cause. With this showcased in a broader light, HR could be more focused on the specialised situations.”

With the help of his manager, Jaap convinced HR to open the Yammer Community for questions about the voluntary resignation scheme. HR set up a team of three HR experts to handle the community. Since then many questions have been shared, Jaap and his team have orchestrated Q&As on Yammer and asked people to look at the commonly asked questions before posting a new question to see if their query has already been answered.

“HR has deemed the Yammer Community a success, due to the short communications lines and teamwork between the community managers and the HR experts. It saved HR work and gave them good insights into what crew are talking about on the work-floor,” Jaap said.

He used data from SWOOP Analytics to report to HR on the success of the Yammer Community showing engagement levels, most engaging posts, hot topics and more.

“I sent it to everyone in our HR department and I got back they were very happy with it,” he said.

“Despite the big impact of COVID-19 on our company, it’s nice to see that the communities are getting a boost and Yammer is really on KLM’s roadmap.”