Microsoft

What Is Yammer? How Can Businesses Leverage It?

Jithu Daniel | Last Updated on : May 24, 2024

What is Yammer

What Is Yammer In Office365?

Yammer is an enterprise social networking service made use of for communication within an organization. Yammer was introduced to the world by Geni to help its employees connect and collaborate across their enterprise.

The efficiency of Yammer led to its launch in September 2008 and was later acquired by Microsoft in 2012. Yammer was rolled into Microsoft’s Office Suite 365 in 2014.

When Should Businesses Opt For Yammer?

The constant evolution of the workforce and business workflows tend to be a key reason for the increasing adoption of Microsoft Yammer. Let us walk through the major factors that resonate to the adoption of Yammer for organizations:

  • Increased Speeds – Yammer can be used by businesses that require speedy communications.
  • Larger Audience – Yammer is best-suited for organization-wide communication as well as cross-departmental collaboration.
  • Easy Information Share – Information that is once shared and uploaded can be easily accessed and shared.
  • Simple Knowledge Transfer – If your business requires frequent tagging topics across departments, and newly added users should be able to find what they require easily, Yammer is the best solution.

Why Should Businesses Give Yammer A Try?

Sharing information securely and openly encourages employees to get access to the source at a rapid pace, cutting down on email, etc is undoubtedly a major advantage that businesses can leverage out of Yammer. In a nutshell, Yammer enables effective collaboration within the work space.

Yammer enables communication with external sources such as customers, vendors, partners, as well as other non-employees to to communicate with your company by allowing businesses to create external networks.

The major reasons why enterprises should give Yammer a try are as follows:

Organic Knowledge Repository

Enterprises will require teamwork and teams require a medium to share ideas. It is difficult if these groups have to physically get together every single time a day for discussions, especially for large multiple groups within an organization.

For instance, consider an HR Benefits group. Such a cross-functional cloud group can effectively be a medium for people or members to discuss on various requirements and concerns. Unlike within an email inbox, the messages are unlikely to be deleted or lost, which is yet another advantage.

External Collaboration

In addition to having internal interactions within groups, Yammer allows employees to open up a dialogue window to communicate with external sources as well. Yammer has been successful in extending the organic knowledge management feature with external clients, vendors, and even contractors, for that matter.

Seamless Workflow

The global mobile workforce that grew by 38.8% in 2016 is forecasted to grow to 1.87 billion people by 2022. The reason for this growth has been the increasing trend of employees moving to portable tablets, and other devices such as wearables, ultrabooks, and other primary work devices.

Yammer’s mobile application allows employees to stay up-to-date and to derive critical insights in real-time.

Use Cases Of Yammer

The ease with which Yammer can be set up and its features that add value to the organization make it a need for businesses. Let us walk through the major ways by which Yammer adds value to businesses:

Collaborate Remotely Across Geographies

Organizations that have multiple offices at various locations find it easy to collaborate with Yammer across multiple geographies. Department heads can now answer to queries spontaneously without any delay. Businesses that require teams to work remotely on a common task especially when the multiple offices are not situated in physical proximity, Yammer creates a common workspace to collaborate effectively.

Employees can now stay connected, bonded, and updated as well. Yammer is perfect for targeted collaboration where announcements can be shared, accomplishments are notified, and connecting with coworkers is made easier. Yammer is highly effective even for enterprises with a large number of participants.

Enhanced Employee Informal Training

Businesses leverage the advantage of acquiring niche industry knowledge as they continuously read updates via Yammer. Even if employees might be on autopilot, Yammer encourages them to learn and stay updated.

Additionally, groups of individuals who are engaged in similar activities such as analytics, project management, training, customer service, leadership activities, etc, but not involved in a common organizational unit, can still share and learn on a common topic across geographies and organizational structures.

Platform To Showcase Internal Achievement And Encourage Improvement

Sales acceleration, product improvement, service efficiency, are all internal achievements that require appreciation. Departmental innovations as well as achievements, when posted as appreciation boosts employee confidence and improves their efficiency in turn.

Yammer can also be used by businesses as a tool to collect employee thoughts transparently and openly. With the evolution of Yammer, businesses no longer need to purchase a one-off product or service for updating innovations and achievements. A dedicated group on Yammer can do the job better.

An Enterprise-Wide Communication That Fosters Transparency

Yammer perfectly suits the purpose of enterprise-wide communication. Business leaders can now post updates, feedback, announcements, etc more transparently. Yammer provides businesses with an easy-to-use interface with which employees can respond to feedback either by text or via files such as photos and other documents.

The Microsoft Yammer open chat tool fosters honesty, openness, as well as transparency in an organization. Businesses can suggest department heads to make use of Yammer to create protocols for posting achievements and updates. It also ensures the management can oversee the activities of the workforce and can suggest improvements, correct workflows, etc and can thus improve productivity.

Omnidirectional Collaborations Of Any Type

Yammer works for any type of communication. With Yammer, businesses have increasingly shifted from traditional top-down communications to omnidirectional communicational and let all participants have a say.

A Social Introductory Space For Collaborative Work

Businesses that have been used to traditional workflows may find it difficult to shift spontaneously from traditional modes of working to advanced, workstream collaboration. Microsoft Yammer provides businesses that are a little behind the workforce adoption curve with an easy entry. The social collaboration offered by Yammer lets businesses adopt it easily without any hassle.

With Microsoft Yammer, more and more businesses have realized that changing their processes and workflows from traditional to Microsoft Teams is far better than working in silos.

Effective Communication For Large Departments

Employees within the same organizational structure must collaborate effectively. This will create a platform that enables different types of departments to have their own space.  Individual employee level contributors can also share information of a specific nature related to the organization’s objectives with their leaders easily. Yammer, thus maintains the departmental culture and also fosters unity and is not affected by departmental size.

Effective Channel For Crowd-sourcing Feedback And Obtaining Responses

Microsoft Yammer encourages employee groups to disseminate important information. Creating specific groups around channels that align with topics involved in enterprises such as leadership groups, announcements, promotions, etc can sustain corporate initiatives for positive outcomes.

Future Of The Digital World: How Yammer Will Transform The Workforce

It is forecasted that by the year 2025, 70% of the workforce will be millennial. The ability to access their smart devices instantly drives their affinity towards applications such as Yammer. Be it their personal or work life, the growing number of employees are adopting Yammer and this trend drives workforce digital transformation increasingly within businesses as well.

If you want to learn how Yammer can transform your workforce with its collaboration tools to improve communication and productivity, drop us a call and talk to our experts!

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Jithu DanielJithu is a Technical Team Leader at ClaySys Technologies and deals with Microsoft technologies mostly.
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