Harvesting knowledge at RealFoundations

Email is where knowledge goes to die.

Take a moment to think of the knowledge, expertise, information, guidance and content that has been shared with you in emails over the years. Other than rifling through the history of those who were included in the email chain, where was this knowledge shared? How do others in the organisation access it? What about those new to the organisation? How do they get themselves up to speed on the knowledge in those emails that remains hidden in someone else’s inbox?

This was the concern for RealFoundations CEO Chris Shaida a decade ago.

RealFoundations is the world’s foremost provider of management consulting and managed services, solely focused on helping real estate companies around the globe run better. Headquartered in the United States, RealFoundations has partnered with more than 450 real estate developers, owners, operators and investors to solve some of real estate’s most complex challenges.

“I knew that when most of our discussion was going on in email, knowledge was dying, every day,” Chris said.
“Email is where knowledge goes to die.

“We had these knowledge-rich conversations that were happening all throughout our firm and that knowledge was only harvested later if one of those people happen to remember, and happened to forward all the replies.
“We had tonnes and tonnes of knowledge and I had nightmares of all this knowledge spilling off and disappearing.”

So began Chris’ search for a collaboration tool to share knowledge, where people could work together and accumulate knowledge that others could access.

After trying some very early collaboration tools, RealFoundations settled on Yammer back in 2011.

Chris said Yammer was RealFoundations’ first successful foray into a platform where people were working together and accumulating knowledge in a way others could learn. They refer to it as the RF(X) Factor - the ability to deliver a better outcome for clients by tapping into the firm’s collective knowledge and capabilities.

RealFoundations’ focus on the capture and dissemination of knowledge enables people to easily and quickly tap into the always-improving knowledge and capabilities of every single person who is working at the company, or has previously worked there, to deliver a better outcome for clients. We take a closer look at how Yammer and SWOOP Analytics contribute to the RF(X) Factor in this case study.

Which place when?

In 2016, RealFoundations became one of the world’s earliest adopters of Microsoft Teams. With a culture of sharing on Yammer, it took a little direction early on to differentiate when to work in Yammer and when to work in Teams.

Chris said it soon became a simple formula.

“Yammer was like our digital water cooler, the digital bulletin board,” he said.

Yammer is the place to go to share ideas about enduring topics.

“Teams was like our project team room,” Chris said.

“As consultants, we’re used to having physical team rooms that were assigned by clients. We get a conference room and we fill it up with flip charts and stickies, and there’s a bunch of people in there. Sometimes you’re formally meeting, sometimes you’re overhearing other people, sometimes you’re watching somebody working in a document and say; ‘Hey I can fix that’.”

Teams is the place for day-to-day work and Yammer is the place to share knowledge and learn from others’ ideas.

“They have very complementary but distinct uses for us,” Chris said.

“Yammer is the place where any practitioner can go to learn things, share things about knowledge of topics of enduring interest to us as a firm.

“Teams is where we go to do shared work, or share goals, with defined teammates and we go back and forth all the time.”

People may be in and out of Yammer throughout the work day, whereas they’ll spend most of their day working in Teams. As for email, that may take up a minute or two a day.

Chris says five years ago he had about 500 messages in his email inbox every day, excluding junk. Nowadays he will have maybe 10 to 15 emails.

“The other 490 (messages) are in Teams or Yammer because that’s where we are not only getting the message out and getting a response but where I also know that I am contributing knowledge that can be harvested for days, months, weeks, years to come,” he said.

“90% of our intra-RF messages, which honestly are the most knowledge-rich messages, happen inside Teams. So our world today is very Teams-centric.

“We spend most of our day in Teams in the way that 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago we spent most of our day with Outlook sitting on our screen.”

Measuring collaboration with SWOOP

With Yammer and Teams as the catchall for knowledge and collaboration at RealFoundations, how can they ensure the right people are contributing the right knowledge, and no pieces of the puzzle are being left out?

That’s where SWOOP comes into RealFoundations’ story.

Right from the start, Chris wanted to measure engagement on Yammer and Teams. As a result, RealFoundations was one of SWOOP’s early customers for SWOOP for Yammer and SWOOP for Teams.

Twice a year, RealFoundations uses SWOOP to benchmark its now 300+ employees. It’s an opportunity to see how each staff member is contributing, collaborating and sharing their knowledge with the rest of the organisation on Microsoft Teams and Yammer.

If, for example, a senior leader is identified as an “Observer” by SWOOP, based on their online behaviours on Teams and Yammer, they can be helped to improve their collaboration.

“We bake that into the performance review process,” Chris said.

“People see where they stand, they see their persona. It is not a negative thing. The measurement is important and we’ve been tracking the expansion of that measurement beyond Yammer into Teams and through the other parts of Microsoft 365.”

Learn more about how RealFoundations does its internal benchmarks with SWOOP in our case study.

Leading by example

Given RealFoundations’ leadership from Chris to collaborate, it’s no surprise RealFoundations was among the top three performers for small-sized organisations in SWOOP’s 2020 global Yammer benchmarking. RealFoundations also boasted two Yammer Communities in the top 1% from the 8,916 Communities analysed by SWOOP in this year’s report.

One of these communities was ranked in the top three, based on high levels of engagement, responsiveness, innovation and participation levels.

Chris said while RealFoundations was getting day-to-day usage from features and functions in Teams, Yammer and the Microsoft 365 suite of tools, they were also building a richer knowledge base, which includes not just traditional files but other resources.

“It’s not all in documents, it’s not all in tabular files. A whole bunch of it (knowledge) is in discussions and videos and transcripts and chats and we’ll be able to mine that for days and years to come,” he said.

Learn more from Chris Shaida in this webinar with SWOOP and Microsoft.

RealFoundations - Email is where knowledge goes to die