What is Yammer?
Microsoft Yammer, more commonly referred to as Yammer is a social network used for private communication within organizations. It is a freemium enterprise social networking service used for private communication within organizations. An excellent way to engage your employees. Access to a Yammer network is determined by a user’s network domain. Individuals with an approved email, can join the Yammer network.
Organizations commonly choose Yammer as a solution if they are part of Microsoft’s suite or looking for a Corporate online solution to engage their employees.
How to Create a Yammer Group
When you create your Yammer group title it by function, if your organization is large enough. Or you can have one group depending on the size of your organization. For example, if you’re in marketing you can call your Yammer group, company name marketing. You can then upload emails into your Yammer group to invite members or members who can manually join the group. You also have the option to make your group public or private.
How to Engage Your Employees With Yammer
Yammer is a great way to engage your employees. Some ideas of what to post can include the following.
Company News: Company in the news, an employee in the news, recent product launch, recent status update, company events etc.
Industry News: Interesting or relevant news that impacts your organization or news in the industry.
Yammer Tagging
Let’s say you shared industry news in your Yammer group and wanted to notify a few relevant people within your company. Instead of email, leverage your Yammer group and engage your employees by tagging relevant people within the group.
Yammer Hashtags
Using hashtags on your Yammer posts is an easy way to align your post to a specific topic. It is also an easy way to find relevant information or themes by clicking on that hashtag. Once the tag is selected, other posts that contain that tag will be displayed.
Yammer Praise
Acknowledging employees and your colleagues is a great way to utilize Yammer. You can do so by selecting the Praise option displayed at the top of the group page. Enter your message and you can then add the person you’re praising. I recommend to also add their supervisor in the message so there is visibility.
Yammer Polls
At the top of the Yammer page click on Poll. From here, you can enter your question and answers. You can choose to send the poll to specific users, groups, or the entire company. This is a great way to engage your employees and have your employees feel included on decision making.
Yammer Question & Answer
You can start a Q&A within Yammer to find answers to your questions. You can also filter for unanswered questions.
As you can see above, Yammer is a great way to engage your employees and celebrate your successes. Don’t confuse Yammer as a replacement for internal chat service like Microsoft Teams or Slack, you can think of Yammer as more of a professional social network — a fantastic way to engage your employees.
