How To Use Yammer More Effectively In Your Organization

Introduction

Yammer is another app in your Office 365 suite. I find it’s like an enterprise version of Facebook by Microsoft 😊. You can call it an Enterprise Social Network too. It is used to openly connect and engage across your organization. There is a buzz about which platform to use between Microsoft Teams and Yammer. Of course, both have a long list of differences.

To keep it short I would say treat MS Teams as the replacement to your Skype for business where you can chat, make a call, video call, screen sharing, remote access of your screen, etc. Whereas on Yammer you can’t do anything like that; but you can share updates with everyone, start a poll, start a quiz, ask questions to which anyone in the organization can respond. Most of the time all the conversations happen openly, that means everyone can see it (of course there is an option to keep it private as well).

Details

Yammer is more helpful when someone wants to communicate across departments, across teams, and across different global locations.

Everyone from the organization can participate in the discussions.

Let’s see how you can find Yammer in your office 365 suite. Login here.

You should see the Yammer app listed as shown below >> click on it and it should automatically log in with your Office 365 account. If not, then enter your credentials.

How To Use Yammer More Effectively In Your Organization

Let’s see what things we can post using Yammer.

Ask a Question

We can post questions on Yammer. Anyone from the organization can answer to it. People can like, reply, and share the post as well. Specific answers can be marked as the best answer. Check the below screen from where you can post the question.

That’s how the answer is shown as Best Answer when marked as best. You can unmark it back if you want.

Start a Poll

Polls can be started from Yammer easily. This will help to get responses from everyone in your team/department or even everyone from your organization. No need to use Outlook emails now.

Once you click on the Poll tab, you will see the below screen >> start typing the questions and answers,

You can add as many answers you want, it’s just that it’s a plain text single selection answer. You need to choose who all should be notified about this poll. I have chosen the All Company Yammer as default group. Everyone from my organization will see this poll and can respond to it.

That’s how the poll looks like when posted.

Praise a colleague

Anyone can praise or appreciate a teammate for his/her achievements through Yammer. You can click on Praise tab >> choose the fancy icons relevant to why you are praising someone >> mention whom you are praising >> and you can specify why you are praising them (short details) and post it.

That’s how it looks on the board once posted, people can like, share, reply on this post.

Yammer Groups

You can create internal or external, public or private groups in Yammer >> add required users in it as members. If any other user joins the group, if it's a public group then anyone in the organization can view the conversations and post in that group. If it's private only, the members of a group can view the conversations and posts.

That’s how you can do the branding of your group, set image, background theme color, add info about the group. On the left side navigation, you see a list of all the groups where you are a member.

How can we integrate Yammer conversations, posts, polls, quizzes on SharePoint modern page?

Go to your SharePoint modern page >> edit the page >> click on + icon to add web part >> look for Yammer web parts and add it.

To show the conversations select the group >> you can specify what conversations to be shown. You can even specify only particular conversations, like polls, by entering the URL.

Save the changes and check out how the conversations appear on the modern page.

Summary

Prepare a plan to train the users on what and how to use Yammer. Roll it out team or department wise. Add Yammer posts on an intranet portal so that everyone can contribute to it easily. Yammer will help the organization's employees to engage with everyone effectively.

Hope this helps, thanks for reading.