A few months back in a meeting at Meridian Energy, someone made a comment about the Dad Jokes that get bantered around the staff café and wouldn’t it be great to have a place to share them. Internal communications manager Kat Jensen, thick in the midst of rolling out Viva Engage & Yammer across the organisation, knew she had the perfect place for them to be posted. 

The jokes are awful, as you’d expect, but the Bad Jokes Viva Engage & Yammer Yammer community is now the most engaged community at New Zealand renewable electricity generator Meridian Energy, according to data from SWOOP Analytics.  

What makes the community so important is that it’s been an easy and entertaining way to introduce Viva Engage & Yammer to hundreds of employees who had otherwise never engaged on an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). These employees may be connecting over terrible jokes, but more importantly, they are connecting with colleagues they otherwise may never encounter, they’re learning how to use Viva Engage & Yammer and they’re starting to explore other Yammer communities while they’re there. 

It was a conscious effort by Meridian Energy’s internal communications team of Jack Zorab, Internal Communications Advisor, and Kat to focus on social groups when they softly launched Yammer in September 2021. 

“The Bad Jokes community seems really trivial but there was a marked increase in usage of Yammer after we launched it,” Jack said. 

“Suddenly we had this whole group of users who had never really engaged with enterprise-wide channels before. Especially for shift workers, it gave them a way to connect socially by sharing these terrible jokes. 

“It is the most active community in terms of users who engage and are active because everyone has some bad jokes to share, or if they don’t have one themselves, they give it a laugh or a love. The jokes are just terrible, they really make you roll your eyes or groan out loud, but people keep coming back for more.” 

The Bad Jokes Yammer community has already begun to show business value across Meridian Energy. 

“Suddenly you then see these people popping up in other places around the network,” Jack said. 

“We’ve given them something that draws them in socially and suddenly they realise this isn’t so bad - people are engaged with me, so I’ll engage with them.” 

You could imagine sometimes the jokes are not in good taste but Kat says there’s been no need to moderate the community so far, nor any other community on Meridian Energy’s Yammer network. 

“It’s a really well-behaved, self-moderated network of people,” Kat said. 

“Our grass-roots approach to Yammer has meant our people know it’s their network, not something that’s ‘controlled’ by the company, and everyone seems to get how to behave – have fun but be kind and be respectful. We’ve never once had to step in and delete a comment. That democratisation of it, everyone who uses it feels it’s our network.” 

From missing forks in the kitchen to collaboration champion 

Kat and Jack said their 870 or so colleagues on Viva Engage & Yammer have really taken ownership of the network. These employees are scattered right across the country and for many, Viva Engage & Yammer is their way of connecting with colleagues outside of their usual team. It’s perhaps for this reason Meridian Energy was ranked the No.1 Collaboration Champion in the APAC region for small-sized organisations (between 200 and 1,500 active staff) in SWOOP Analytics’ 2022/23 Yammer & Viva Engage Benchmarking analysis. This takes into account all of Meridian Energy’s Yammer communities and compares them with other organisational networks of a similar size. 

It’s an impressive accolade for a Viva Engage & Yammer network that was just a year old when the analysis was carried out by SWOOP.  

Meridian Energy knew it was time for an ESN when inboxes were being overrun by email blasts, often for things like; “There are no forks left in the kitchen, please return your forks”. 

“It was just driving people mad,” Jack said. 

“Then the ‘reply all’ emails would start. Someone would ‘reply all’ on their phone, someone would joke about the email. You’d end up with 6,000 emails going out for one issue. It became a real problem and so we looked for something better. 

“We came across Yammer and explored it more. It ticked a lot of the boxes around that informal communication and allowing people to connect with each other, allowing that open and honest two-way communication which was something that had popped up a few times during our employee engagement surveys. 

“We wanted a solution that wasn’t just about solving a comms problem, but would enable staff to build connections and increase engagement across the company.” 

Power to the people 

Jack and Kat had done their research, which included reading previous SWOOP Analytics benchmarking reports and case studies to learn what has worked for other successful Viva Engage & Yammer networks. They knew the value in social groups and encouraging employees to take ownership of Viva Engage & Yammer communities. They also knew the power of having a leader engaged on Yammer and so recruited the General Manager of Retail to “sponsor” Yammer for her business unit. 

In the first few months of Yammer, it was the Rainbow community and the Pets of Meridian community that really flourished. At the same time, the number of emails began to slow for things like missing forks. 

“We wanted to give that power to the people,” Jack said. 

“We told them; ‘These are your communities, not our communities’.” 

Kat and Jack both believe the success of Viva Engage & Yammer at Meridian Energy was making it completely optional initially for anyone to use. There has never been a directive to start using Viva Engage & Yammer. However, now adoption levels are high, some All Company announcements are made on Viva Engage & Yammer, with notifications to the announcement sent via Microsoft Teams and email. 

“Yammer has been a ‘nice to have’ tool, not a ‘must have’ tool,” Kat said. 

“That made it more appealing for people to get onboard. It made it very clear that it was different to other corporate comms.” 

Isn’t it just social media? 

Like most internal comms professionals, Kat and Jack faced some criticism from colleagues that Viva Engage & Yammer was just another distraction from work. That became another reason to never force Viva Engage & Yammer on anyone, but instead pique their interest about what might be happening on Viva Engage & Yammer.  

Leaders have also questioned whether Viva Engage & Yammer is just social media. That’s where data from SWOOP Analytics has made a huge impact. Kat and Jack are able to immediately show leaders the impact of their posts on Viva Engage & Yammer. 

“Having SWOOP Analytics, when I’ve been asked; ‘Why are we doing it like that?’ I grab some figures and stats and show them,” Jack said. 

“I can show them that when it was on the intranet it had 100 views. After 15 minutes on Yammer and it’s already had 800 views, 78 people have engaged with it, and so it’s been a lot easier to prove the value.” 

Kat said it’s been validation for executives that messages have not only been read by employees, but that they’re also reacting and engaging with their messages. 

“It really provides much richer engagement for our executive team,” she said. 

Kat said one of the biggest complaints about the intranet is low readership, or it might take a week for someone to go and read a story on the intranet. 

“Yammer is really appealing because it gives you an opportunity to get that push notification out, whether it was via Teams or a super important announcement, ticking that email box as well,” she said, referring to the email notification if an All Company announcement is made on Viva Engage & Yammer. 

Another upshot of All Company announcements on Yammer is a reduction in email. Kat said it had been months since an all company email had been sent. 

“We don’t use email anymore,” Kat said. 

As Meridian Energy’s Viva Engage & Yammer network continues to mature, Kat and Jack plan to encourage senior leaders to engage even more and continue to present them with data to show their impact. 

“We can show them that what they are doing is working,” Jack said. 

“It’s not an instant thing, you’ve got to keep working at it, but we can show them with SWOOP the impact they’re having.”