Microsoft’s social networking service Viva Engage (Yammer) is used for private communication within organizations. While SharePoint provides information and content, Viva Engage (Yammer) provides a place for discussion and interaction between users. It allows employees at all levels to know what’s happening day to day, communicate and collaborate quickly with colleagues, and use one another’s learnings to accelerate workplace productivity.
Benefits of Viva Engage (Yammer)
Viva Engage (Yammer) can enhance your company in many ways. Here are some of the main benefits:
- Speedy Communication – Interactions on Viva Engage (Yammer) are quick and informal. By sending out information to everyone at once, rather than in a top-down manner, it helps flattens large organizations and accelerates communication. It also increases communication by allowing employees to find one another’s profiles in a company directory, view what colleagues are working on, and build a sense of community among users.
- Open Collaboration – In addition to improving internal communication, Viva Engage (Yammer) connects employees with customers, partners, and suppliers by forming channels based on interests or relevancy. This component helps organizations crowdsource from larger groups of people to gain instant feedback and insight. The transparent and direct collaboration between employees as well as company community members presents the opportunity to learn from one another as well as share knowledge and resources.
- Easy-to-Find Content – Viva Engage (Yammer) organizes the posts, links, documents, photos, and videos shared on the platform by using tags and hashtags. They automatically create a cataloged directory of updates and resources that make it easy for others to find the information.
Main Features
These are a few of the most noteworthy features to take advantage of on Viva Engage (Yammer):
- Groups – This tool allows lists of users to post, target messages, and share files to a specific group based on teams, projects, interests, or anything else.
- Polls – Viva Engage (Yammer) makes it easy to create polls and very quick for other users to complete. They appear in your activity feed, making it an accessible way to ask a question to your general community.
- Feed Settings – Viva Engage (Yammer) allows you to modify your feed settings and will notify you about highlights in your stream. Similar to Facebook, they are available in the interface as well as by email.
- Microsoft Flow – This cloud-based tool creates automated workflows between Viva Engage (Yammer), SharePoint, Outlook, Dynamics, and many other third-party apps to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and automatically post and share to and from external services.
Out-of-the-Box Analytics for Viva Engage (Yammer)
Microsoft provides 3 ways to analyze Viva Engage (Yammer) engagement at the user, device, and group levels:
- Office 365 Usage Reporting Dashboard
- Office 365 Adoption Content Pack
- Microsoft Graph reporting APIs
Everyone within a group has access to view Group Insights, which helps you know how many users are active in a group, observe general activity, and get a quick overview of metrics such as the number of active people, number of posted messages, and how they’ve changed over a specific period of time.
Enhancing Viva Engage (Yammer) Using Advanced Analytics
Third-party tools can elevate your experience with Viva Engage (Yammer) by providing the information necessary to improve adoption, usability, and employee engagement. It can give you insight into who’s creating the content, collaboration, and engagement buzz on Viva Engage (Yammer) and who’s in need of more guidance or training. Viva Engage (Yammer) provides organizations with access to a variety of content, and by surrounding it with metadata such as tags, ratings, and more, your search options are expanded to further access information within Viva Engage (Yammer).
CardioLog Analytics is one third-party service that provides intricate details about Viva Engage (Yammer) activity for organizations to optimize productivity. This software enables you to see:
- Trending content – See which posts are most popular by tracking what is most frequently followed and shared to better understand what users are most interested in, use the most, and respond to.
- Top contributing and influential users and groups – Identify your Viva Engage (Yammer) champions and their followers to conclude which matters require attention.
- External activity – Seek out the external collaborative efforts including contacts, organizations, content, and likes from the networks beyond your organization that are driving productivity and progress.
- Inactive users and groups – Know which of your users to target for more training by identifying who has set up their account, but hasn’t yet immersed themselves in the Viva Engage (Yammer) sphere.
Access to analytics will allow organizations to better understand what information people are looking for, what are popular discussion topics, and who the most active users are. Having more knowledge and concrete data about your employees can lead to higher adoption rates and collaborating efforts.
For more information about Viva Engage (Yammer) analytics, check out our website.
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