“Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
― Samuel Johnson
If you don’t know about Yammer yet, you should. Simply, it’s an “enterprise social network” for businesses. Microsoft purchased it in 2012 for $1.2B in cash. The goal of Yammer (and similar tools like Salesforce’s Work.com) is to help employees collaborate, stay connected, and improve company-wide communication.
Yammer’s approach is to leverage the same type of social media experience that employees are using in their personal lives — like Facebook and Twitter — to be more productive in their jobs. According to Yammer, companies who use the service reduce email use by 40%.
I think this trend of “enterprise socialization” is here to stay. As with a lot of trends, though, there’s the hype and then there’s the reality. I’ve had the chance to sit in on a few companies’ Yammer channels over the past year and here’s what I discovered:
- The ratio of noise to signal seems (unscientifically) worse than the classic 80/20 rule. That is, for every really useful piece of actionable information, there’s a hell of a lot more useless noise/fluff/chatter filling up the airwaves. Some might argue that that’s the real benefit of these tools — they sort of capture an organization’s collective stream of consciousness. I would argue that it’s more indicative of people not being focused on or caring about what’s most important.
- Employees seem to really like and use the tools. There’s value in that for sure. The risk is that, just as email killed the face-to-face meeting and enterprise socialization is killing email, you end up with a lot of data but little cohesiveness and actionable insight. Often, the fastest route to creating a breakthrough is to communicate less frequently but have a regular (weekly or bi-weekly) process where team leaders can meet face to face to really dive into and solve the issues at hand.
- These tools don’t cut down on information fatigue. It can take just as long to get through a Yammer channel as it does to wade through your email inbox. So my sense is that the medium may have shifted but the feeling of information overload for most employees probably hasn’t. I overheard a woman in Accounts Receivable say, “I’ve got to start participating in Yammer or people will think I’m not working.” As Homer Simpson would say, “D’OH!”
There’s a simple practice you can implement immediately in your company that harnesses the best of what social enterprise has to offer and helps mitigate the bad. Here’s how it works:
At the start of each day, no later than, say, 9 a.m., have everyone log on to a set Yammer channel and state what their #1 priority is for the day, as well as any obstacles they need help in overcoming.
“Sam – My #1 priority is fixing the XYZ bug. Need help in getting the client to call me back.”
“Jane – My #1 priority is getting ABC Co. to sign the contract. No blockers. Let’s rumble.”
“Luke – My #1 priority is to make 3 outbound sales calls and follow up on the Rodriguez contract. If anyone has a sales lead, please send it my way.”
The benefit of this approach is that it begins to focus the organizational culture on achieving the most important things each day. It can have the additional advantage of improving visibility, teamwork, and accountability.
As a leader, you can scan the channel and get a sense of whether your staff is focused on the right things and better understand the pattern of obstacles presenting themselves, as well as who may be sandbagging, playing hero, or needing some coaching.
It’s a very simple process that takes little overhead to manage for the staff or for management. If done correctly, it begins to focus the conversations towards accomplishing short-term, daily wins. Those daily wins build up over time and pretty soon the train is roaring down the tracks.
Of course, this presupposes that your organization already has a strong and healthy foundation on which it can deploy a social enterprise tool. One with an aligned culture, structure, processes, strategy, and team. If not, then using Yammer, or any other social enterprise tool, is like trying to cover up body odor with cheap perfume. No matter how much you use, you’re still going to stink.
Please share this: