Who is the most famous person you’ve met?  

Dinorah Flores is a huge professional wrestling fan so when she wanted to inject some conversation in her department’s Yammer community while everyone was working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, she shared photos of herself and some of the famous wrestlers she has met. 

It kicked off a “brush with fame” campaign on Yammer, asking colleagues to share their encounter with someone famous. 

A colleague shared a photo of herself with Duran Duran singer Simon Le Bon, which got lots of conversation going about the legendary English pop band. Then a manager surprised them all by revealing she had performed on America’s Got Talent with her choir. 

“I had no idea she was a singer, no idea she had been on the show,” said Dinorah, an internal communications specialist and Yammer community manager at a major US health insurer. 

It’s this sort of conversation that kept the department connected and engaged during the work from home period, as well as allowing everyone to get to know their colleagues a little better. 

“It got so many conversations started as people started asking about the posts, chatting to each other saying; ‘Did you see so and so met…’,” Dinorah said. 

“It tells you a little bit about that person at the same time. They met this famous person because of…or it gives you an insight into what they do. Maybe they were on a trip and they happened to bump into…” 

So engaged and responsive is this Yammer community, it was ranked the No.4 Top Performing Yammer Community in SWOOP Analytics’ 2021 Yammer Benchmarking analysis of more than 4,300+ Yammer communities worldwide. 

Using Yammer for praise 

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dinorah’s internal communication department’s Yammer community was rarely used. That changed when departmental meetings were moved online and a strict 60-minute time limit was set. Traditionally, the end of the meeting was a time for managers to praise their staff. 

“One of the things that had to be cut was the praise moment because we had time constraints,” Dinorah said. 

“So they asked; ‘Where can we put this?’ I said; ‘Hello, Yammer! Let’s put it in Yammer’.” 

That reinvigorated the entire internal communications Yammer community, which is now ranked No.4 in the world.  

“Folks got involved, taking those praises and putting them in Yammer,” Dinorah said. 

“Everyone wants to be supportive and everyone wants that high five, so it was another way of getting folks in there to participate. That really made that reciprocity go up because as we were all being super supportive, we were all coming in and saying; ‘Good job’. 

“Folks were just taking to it, not just the managers – employees would go in on their own and just say; ‘Hey, great job to this person for helping me out’ and it just grew from there.” 

An interesting point Dinorah found by posting praise on Yammer was it seemed more authentic and considered than rushing praise out at the end of a physical meeting when everyone was trying to wrap it up and move on with their day.  

“It’s just helpful to get in there and start talking with one another without being burdensome or thinking; ‘Hurry up and get through your praise, we have another meeting to get to’,” Dinorah said. 

It also resulted in a lot more conversation and recognition in the replies to the original praise posts. 

Following on from the success of the praise posts on Yammer, an engagement committee was formed to brainstorm ideas to further connect the teams on Yammer. That’s when Dinorah came up with the idea of a brush with fame campaign. 

Most likely, had it not been for the pandemic and the forced work from home environment, this Yammer community would not be the rich place of connection and conversation it currently is.  

In total, there are 53 employees in the internal communications Yammer community. Data from SWOOP Analytics shows high levels of participation/involvement, people-to-people engagement and responsiveness. 

Dinorah said as a result of getting employees onto Yammer through the praise and engagement campaigns, it’s now become a place where work-related topics are commonly posted and discussed. 

Dinorah runs a monthly benchmark report using data from SWOOP Analytics to track topics like the Most Influential Leader, Most Influential Employee, Most Engaging Conversation, Most Active Communities. All of a sudden, once the praise and engagement campaigns were taking off in the internal communications Yammer community, she saw the internal communications community rising to the top of the engagement measures. 

Dinorah’s plan now is to share these metrics across the organisation to boost engagement across the health insurer’s entire Yammer network of more than 30,000 employees.  

The power of social connections 

While this US insurance company’s Yammer network is primarily focused on using the digital platform for work, Dinorah said the importance of the “more personal content” in Yammer cannot be underestimated. 

“It’s the special interest that sometime brings some of these folks here,” she said. 

“We’ve had focus groups where people have told us; ‘Yammer gets me through the day sometimes because I’ll open up the Meow and Woof group and it has cute pictures of dogs’.”