No more emails - collaborate on Yammer

On Amy Asin’s first day at work as a vice president at the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) back in 2015, she met her entire team online.

During the meeting, Amy explained her vision for what was ahead and ended the meeting by promising to set up an email group for everyone to work in and connect.

Two years earlier, Larry Glickman, Director, Reform Movement Marketplace at URJ, had launched a Yammer network across the organisation. He was still in the process of getting staff onboarded and engaged with Yammer on Amy’s first day on the job.

“When she said she was setting up an email group at the end of that meeting, I couldn’t help myself, the words just came out of my mouth,” Larry said.

“I said; ‘Wait a minute, how about we set up a Yammer group instead of email?’ and she said; ‘Oh, of course Larry, you’re right, we’ll do it that way’.

“Never to this day, has she set up an email group. It’s always done in our Yammer network. She led the way, she’s there. People see that she’s there.”

Five years later, this Yammer Community is among the top 15 most collaborative Yammer Communities in the world in SWOOP Analytics’ 2020 global Yammer benchmarking report, which analysed almost 9,000 Communities.

It is primarily an online work community but Larry said it’s about so much more than work – it’s about bringing fun to work and bringing your whole self to work.

“People feel free to come here and talk about work and share fun stuff as well,” he said.

“We have fun here and people ask questions here. They share interesting things here. They feel free to express themselves.”

Give Yammer time to work and lead by example

Feeling like Yammer was a place where people could work collaboratively and express themselves was not something that happened overnight. It’s taken years to get to this point.

Larry says you must be determined to make the space work, and give it time, as well as leading by example.

“We just didn’t give up. We are finding more and more teams throughout our staff organisation use Yammer as the place where they share information, where they connect with one another each week,” he said.

In 2020, the URJ’s internal staff Yammer network is ranked among the top three in the world for small-sized organisations in SWOOP’s 2020 Yammer benchmarking.

URJ also runs an external Yammer network called The Tent, with almost 16,000 active users, which connects the URJ’s 850 congregations.

The Tent’s external Yammer network was ranked among the top 30 in SWOOP’s benchmarking of 116 organisations around the globe. URJ leads the largest Jewish movement in North America, connecting 850 congregations.

URJ was also among the top performing Yammer networks in the world in SWOOP’s 2018 Global Yammer Benchmarking, with both its internal and external networks ranking highly.

The value of Yammer during tragedy and crisis

No one would ever have predicted the need, and the value, of having such established collaboration platforms during two never-to-be-forgotten events.

When a man wielding semi-automatic guns walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2018 and opened fire on the congregation, he affected the lives of Jewish people around the world.

It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States, with 11 worshippers killed that tragic day.

It’s impossible to imagine the grief, fear, sadness, emotion, anger, questions that swelled throughout the Jewish community upon hearing the devastating news of the shooting.

In a time of crisis, people want to connect and seek answers. Thankfully, URJ had an established network where all 850 congregations could connect immediately. URJ’s internal and external Yammer networks became a go-to place to share information and plans and, more importantly, to share stories and support for each other.

Larry said he first learned of the shooting when he saw an alert on his phone, then a colleague shared a news article in the Emergency Response group in the staff Yammer network.

“On this Shabbat, a day of rest when our staff generally tries to stay away from email and other forms of work-related digital communication, our Emergency Response group was busy with posts about the events unfolding in Pittsburgh,” he said.

“We quickly connected with dozens of people throughout our organisation. We quickly recognised the need to be of a unified voice as we prepared to respond to the shooting that had just happened a few hours earlier. We realised that although it was Shabbat, we had to talk. Quickly.”

URJ used the Emergency Response Yammer group to share information and resources and connect with the 850 member congregations on The Tent Yammer network.

They created a public Yammer Community in The Tent called Prayers for Pittsburgh.

“We envisioned this as a space where our organisation could share information with members. How we were responding to the tragedy, but more importantly, we wanted this to be a place where our members could share their questions, feelings and prayers with one another,” Larry said.

“People were eager to talk, people needed to connect.”

In the first week, more than 150 messages had been posted in Prayers for Pittsburgh and had been read almost 6,000 times.

Members were also concerned about how to keep their own synagogues safe. SWOOP data showed the Safety and Security Yammer group had increased by more than 500 per cent in a week.

“Because of our community network space, people were able to find the information and resources they needed to keep their synagogues safe,” Larry said.

“They found a conversation taking place. They found an active community. They found a tangible reminder that they are not alone in their experience, expertise or concern.

“Our organisation found connection too. Through the conversation happening in The Tent, we gained valuable insight as to what was on the minds of our members in real time.”

As a result of these questions and conversations, URJ was able to offer webinars, curated content and expertise directly connected to the questions asked in The Tent.

“Yammer connected our members to each other. Yammer connected our organisation to our members. Yammer connected our members to us,” Larry said.

“Yammer was able to help us guide our members through tragedy to a greater sense community, more meaningful conversation and a resources and expertise.”

Measuring Yammer with SWOOP

Larry said key to URJ’s Yammer success has been understanding how URJ’s communities use the platform.

“Through a robust data set we collect from SWOOP on a monthly basis, we know when our users are most active, and what type of information is most useful,” he said.

“We understand what types of posts elicit the most response, and we can see how engaged our users are. Perhaps most importantly, SWOOP shows us where we can do better, and where we must work harder to connect with our users.”

Adapting during the global pandemic

When most of the world effectively shut down in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so too did synagogues and churches around the world – moving services and community online.

For years, the URJ offered a Zoom discount code in Yammer for its member congregations, and it had been used a handful of times. However, once the pandemic began and congregations found themselves moving all of their services and community activity online, the need for Zoom increased exponentially - as did use of the discount code. Yammer provided an easy way for congregations to access that key piece of information that made it possible to sustain their work in a new reality.

Again, Yammer became a place to share ideas and experiences of how to adapt to the COVID-world as employees moved to working from home and whole congregations had to socially distance.

Keep it fun

Larry said there has been an emphasis on fun in Yammer during this COVID-19 period, with Communities like Pandemic Potluck and book club communities established.

And while these Yammer Communities are not necessarily all about work, they become the conversations that would have been held around the water cooler in the office.

“Important things happen at the water cooler as well,” Larry said.

“Just because you’re not in front of the whiteboard doesn’t mean that important information isn’t making its way through the organisation.”

• Learn more about URJ’s journey with Yammer and SWOOP in our case study and in this interview with Larry Glickman.