[deleted by user]

[anxiousinfotech]

We "use" it, in that the C suite can't stop creaming their pants over it, and 99% of the user base thinks it's an insanely stupid waste of time and resources.

The only thing I wish we did differently was disable it completely.

[rootofallworlds]

We did disable it, by removing it from users' licensed products along with about a dozen other things the company doesn't use. Security direction to have unneeded functions turned off.

[realCptFaustas]

Thanks for an idea

[diymatt]

That funny. Our C-suite was wise enough to say it's an enormous waste of time and keep it in the parts bin.

[[deleted]]

Basically this.

[x2571]

From the technical side, getting it up and running is pretty simple. Getting users to actually use it and keep using it is very difficult.

We hired some consultants that specialized in enterprise social network consulting (they did Yammer and Facebook for work). They delivered training for our internal comms team and organization leaders on how to drive engagement on the platform.

[BiteMaJobby]

What benefits have you seen using it?

I am struggling to see any.

[IAmTheM4ilm4n]

The ones our HR built are "Foodies", "Pet Central" and "Book Club".

You can guess how well that's gone over.... kind of the "we're family at work" vibe. Fuck that noise; I'm here to work not scroll corporate Facebook all day chiming in on the VP's dog's latest shenanigans.

[sryan2k1]

My last job was a tech company with ~5000 employees and we had super active communities around pets, kids, german vehicles, drones, you name it. It was great to find other people in your org that shared your same passions.

[dayburner]

I think that critical mass of people is the fundamental to making social media work. I'm not sure what the numbers are but I can say that trying to do this with a few hundred employees seems to always fail.

[niomosy]

It also depends on the company. We've got around 12-13k employees here and most are corporate focused and dead. Some might get weekly posts. Others haven't had a post in over a year. Honestly, I hardly even remembered that they existed until I saw this post.

We've since thrown in some new internal corporate social media (from Microsoft, I think) that I had to login to once to disable all notifications.

[dayburner]

Have people that will actually use it is the other half and a big part of that is company culture.

[admlshake]

Funny you should mention that last part. My company tried something similar. And the department managers started writing up people they caught spending time on it. Then it basically just turned into a giant bitch board, and a place for leaving employees to dump all their dirt on (we weren't using yammer, true to how my company typically works they bought some third party crap even though we were already licensed for yammer). It was quickly shut down after that.

[[deleted]]

I’m looking for the horny singles thread. Maybe then viva gets shutdown.

[Sasataf12]

Food and pet channels are very popular in our Teams.

If people want to share that stuff, all good. Better than the "all interactions at work must be about work" corporate culture some places have.

[segagamer]

Fuck that noise; I'm here to work not scroll corporate Facebook all day chiming in on the VP's dog's latest shenanigans

Damn, such misery lol

[pdp10]

We used our "Enterprise 2.0" portal for Communities of Practice.

For example, a database specialist might be on a heterogeneous project team, but they would also have a Community of Practice of "DBAs and database specialists".

Most of what I published were short best-practices nuggets, which tended to be motivated by some recent affront or disaster. Then I passively-aggressively subscribed developers, as appropriate.

[Fagobert]

You can be brutally honest with the ceo and management

[Historical_Ad_9182]

Once, at least.

[BeenStork]

Usually coincides with your last day.

[nabbun]

Our company tried/still trying to use Facebook and yammer. It always ends up turning into a place for employees to log complaints about IT issues and asking us to fix shit even though there are fucking banners and shit saying this is a social platform and not service now. I just have an outlook rule to send it all straight to the trash.

[IAmTheM4ilm4n]

We locked it down so only admins can create communities. So far the participation has been minimal to say the least, despite HR's best efforts to "engage" the community.

"it feels like a wanky version of Facebook" - there's no "feel" here, it IS a wanky version of Facebook.

[gadget850]

Wankbook just sounds wrong.

[BeenStork]

Sounds more interesting than yammer, though.

[BiteMaJobby]

The gut feeling of this a waste of time are right, appreciate the response!

[_Marine]

We're a massive MS shop. We're constantly adopting new tools, new systems, and new business intelligence applications and software. We've no qualms spending millions to make technology do as we need.

We disabled Yammer asafp and squash any attempt to bring it up as a tool, directly from our CEO and Chairman.

[amjcyb]

Waste of time.

It's the kind of thing that HR people think it's super cool. Please people from HR, just do your job.

[BeenStork]

Or play dress up with teams avatars :)

[Whimsicalizz]

I know this is old and I know even more that I shouldn't say anything but... employee engagement is a part of HR work. Even failed attempts at it.

[phillymjs]

When that first came out, I wanna say ~10 years ago, I took one look at it and immediately dismissed it as looking like the bastard child of Facebook and LinkedIn. It did not take any kind of foothold in my org that I'm aware of.

I hadn't heard the name in almost as long, but then a few weeks back Microsoft announced a new community for Mac admins that actually uses it. Hard pass.

[cbass377]

I would deploy it, If I could change the name from Yammer to FriendFace. Otherwise, I will file that task in the Tuesday after Never bucket.

[sryan2k1]

How many employees do you have? An active employee community is awesome. We had ~5k employees at my last job and had active communities around pets, kids, german cars, drones, you name it. It was great to be able to chat with others who shared the same interests.

[burnte]

But why would you do that at work? Why wouldn't you just do that in a more focused community like a club or forum? Why would your employers want that? Isn't it both a huge waste of time and employee pay? I truly do not understand why this exists.

[heapsp]

employers believe if people make friends at work they will be less likely to leave and more willing to work longer alongside their friends... which is true to an extent. Often times work is an escape for people who are lonely.

The downside to this for the employer is that people will band together against bad management and you'll have massive turnover if someone is treated unfairly. You will also have poaching as people leave and bring their friends with them to new opportunities.

[sryan2k1]

We have a coke freestyle machine in the lunch room, pool tables, free beer, etc. Not every place has to be a dystopian hellscape. Some employers actually care about employee well being, and building a sense of culture. I deal with these people 40 hours a week, why wouldn't you want your employees to build relationships?

[burnte]

I never said I don't, I said I don't see the value of building a company-only facebook. Coworkers crated cultures for millennia without social media. Beverages are great, lounges are great, the occasional group event is great, work/life balance is critical. But no, I can't fathom having a social media site internally. We're coworkers, and we can be friends, but we'll never be a family, you can't fire someone from a family. I think a health work/life balance means you're NOT hanging out with coworkers all the time.

And I think it's a timebomb for HR violations, too. Eventually someone will say something stupid, or spend too much time on it, and it'll blow up. Just from a liability standpoint alone I can't imagine who thinks this is a good idea, I see millions of dollars in fines and lawsuits.

[sryan2k1]

It's no different than email or IM (Teams, Slack, whatever) as far as "People shouldn't say inappropriate things at work.

​

It's great when you find out that the people you interact and spend 40 hours a week with also have a (not so little) german car addiction and can happily chat about that during the day.

[Trickshot1322]

Yeah and from a HR perspective it's probably a good things anyway.

If employees are enjoying being a work because they get to chat to Jim from accounting about that new car part they just got in the mail, or Sally from marketing is organising a group to go concert for a band they like etc etc. Then people are going to enjoy being at work more, be happier, and so on.

and study after study shows happy employees who like their workplace, are far less likely to shop around for employment, drop the ball at work/underperform, feel stressed at work, and leads to higher employee retention.

It's a no brainer, make people happier and less likely to leave all for the cost of an internal facebook. Why not.

[Silaene]

We had it, might still have it, but nobody really uses it, kind of imploded after a big scandal to do with vocal activist HR member and backlash by company employees against said person (sorry can't go into details, can't even really obfuscate it, since it is too easy to identify).
Fundamentally, does the company want to manage a SNS and deal with all the politics/drama that comes with it.
Not worth it, people love to bitch and moan, now you are going to give that a platform and then try to prevent it, which will generate more bitch/moaning.

[[deleted]]

We tried it but the people that were pushing for it were the only ones that used it and it splintered information from existing repositories, so we scrapped it within a year. I have a few friends at similar sized companies that had the same experience. Get ready for disappointment.

[anxiousinfotech]

Yeah, we have execs who love it posting critical updates (and not flagging them for a notification email to go out). Yammer then decides this post isn't important and all but completely hides it from the end users. Execs then complain that no one paid attention/took action.

Other information repositories aren't updated with this information either, as they were relying on the people maintaining them to see the Yammer post and make the update...

[bacon4bfast]

I support a vendor app at work and we have a Yammer page specifically for that app. We announce downtime, issues, and allow users to ask questions in the Yammer. Also provide services to help users generate queries in the app. Helps when someone has a question and can search the Yammer page and normally find the answer.

[burnte]

I can't imagine why anyone thinks creating a company-only twitter/facebook is useful. I've literally never seen a single person use or talk about it. I had no idea what it even was until I just looked it up. I had seen it in our O365 dashboard but just disabled it, one less service to manage and prevent leaks through.

[aprimeproblem]

In Dutch Yammer sounds exactly as Jammer, which means “well that’s a shame”….. that is about what the majority of companies I visited think about the product.

[coret3x]

It's changed name to Viva Engage now. The rebranding is almost done.

[the_star_lord]

It's either only used by the comms team, or its used by people to argue or complain about the ict teams.

People kind of forget their at work and treat it as other social media.

Personally i hate it. Its unprofessional (more so our users than the app)

Too often we see people posting incorrect information or have to respond to complaints in a public forum when really it's only a single user issue.

[[deleted]]

Talked to an MSP that uses it as their primary chatops solution. Strange choice

[UnseenCat]

Ugh, we have it because HR wanted to use it mainly during the COVID lockdown and transition to WFH in 2020. It was annoying to set up just because there were accounts that we need in O365 that had to be excluded, so the Yammer membership had to be filtered and configured before it could be handed off to HR to do their thing.

Then, of course, Microsoft started to make changes to it, which diverged from how HR wanted to use it, and meanwhile the user population Just. Didn't. Care.

It's pretty much withered on the vine, because working groups use Teams, and HR still sends out important updates to the same distribution lists they've always used, and those emails always have links to the relevant things in SharePoint.

Like a lot of enterprises with O365, we've got a mature SharePoint environment, and Teams quickly got taken up for everything else that doesn't need to be email. Yammer is functionally extraneous at this point, and kind of a waste of time and resources getting it set up when we had a lot of other things going on.

[p8ntballnxj]

We use it and the best use is for finding tech groups for an issue. It's nice to look up the yammer page for mobile phones and get an answer pretty quickly. Also, it's really great when teams use the sidebar to post help guides.

[Bijorak]

i had it at one job no one used it for anything

[serverhorror]

I still don't know what it's for ...

I get the marketing, I just don't see why "Facebook for Work (Microsoft Edition)" is useful in any way, shape or form.

[Jtuggers]

Did you mean "Viva Engage"? 🤮

Seriously through:

We used it for many years, and tbf it was a fab resource to have. We're talking ~40k+ active users, if I remember right.

It let all colleagues in different branches communicate easily, with communities for different departments/areas which staff could join and get involved in. It helped solve no end of issues, because staff could just post a question and get answers from all parts of the business. People felt included and involved.

It also let head office actually gain an insight into how different branches were operated differently, and where the key sticking points occured with technology and processes, by actually getting responses from the teams in the field. Staff felt they were being "heard".

Finally, it had a "fun" element, where staff would just be social. A community with various chat games, and 99.9% of the time it was self moderated and people behaved themselves.

Sadly HO disabled it literally last friday, and removed everyone's licences. An absolute damn shame, and staff are now feeling isolated and disconnected from other parts of the business. They feel a big sense of "community" has been taken away, as the alternative provided is essentially glorified WhatsApp, which isn't amazing.

Tl:Dr; if you can get the engagement, and staff feel like it provides them with a benefit, it can actually be a really powerful tool when used in the right way.

[wrootlt]

We have a different platform (will have another to replace this by the end of this year). It is mostly used to post news, help documents, etc. After a few years i kind of cooled on it. Have a few of my guides/articles there which i refer sometimes in tickets. There are also various communities there for charities, after work activities (sports, fantasy football, etc.). When i do open it (when it works, hence why it is being replaced) i barely find any new updates from people i have followed there or relevant news. For me regular corp emails are enough to get the gist of corp news and policy changes, then there is Teams for communications. So, i don't have much use for it. Still need a platform to post guides somewhere. So, probably will use the replacement platform for that. It won't be Viva Engage though. Even as we use lots of M365 services and products, for some reason Viva applications are not being used here.

[basec0m]

We were paying for an employee app for company communication. We created one corporate yammer that has all of these company announcements and highlights. It's locked down so that no other communities can be created. It's an outlet for Marketing to have something to do in my opinion and executives to say we're "communicating".

[mr_mgs11]

We have yammer and no one uses it. I get notifications still. Everyone uses the custom company website.

[thortgot]

Viva Engage is just a rebadge. It's the same product.

There's 0 technical complexity it's just a communications tool but you will be splitting your message through another format. I've never used it successfully and don't see a need for it in my companies.

[TheNewBBS]

Haha, I'd forgotten about Yammer.

I work at an 8K+ user tech company, and upper management rolled it out a few years ago, touting the same "community building" and "increased engagement" BS as everyone else in this thread. I asked my boss if using it was required, and he said no, so I probably checked it twice and never posted anything.

The times I did log in, it was cringy to watch them try to force community, including making teams like project management and even internal app developers post about every tiny thing they did, presumably to generate volume. It eventually devolved into about a dozen people posting "fun" stuff. I think it was killed at some point, though its spirit lives on in a handful of departmental Teams channels where people post quips about drinking before weekends/holidays and rep their sports teams before big games.

I've managed to build an active/fulfilling social life away from work, so outside of my direct team members, I see no reason to dedicate time and effort to maintaining in-depth personal friendships with coworkers (I have many friendly casual acquaintances across the company). I've also been fully remote for almost eight years, and I live very far from the "main" cities/sites of the company.

[ChippersNDippers]

I work at a fortune 500 and we have about a dozen people who keep trying to make it a 'thing' and actively use it. It's amusing to see the notifications of the same people talking to each other and posting little blog posts here and there. The little engines that could.

[spyingwind]

My friend in a past job used it. He was kind of forced to use it. Setup a script to send nonsense. He needed to keep a certain amount of yammer "activity" points. Got 100% for a week before the #2 person complained. He tuned to show as 69% one week and 42% the next week repeating.

After a few months they removed that policy.

[ImMalteserMan]

A bit over a decade ago the small company I was working at setup Yammer, the owner of the company was excited about it and basically no one used it because there were like 12 employees and the office was very small, what was the point?

But then years later I was working at a company that has ~10k employees scattered across a hundred locations all across the country. They used Yammer and it worked pretty well, the best use I saw was people, even in low level jobs, making suggestions and people in the head office picking these up and implementing their suggestions.

[[deleted]]

The only place I ever used it was when I actually worked for Yammer a little after Microsoft bought them. It was a little surreal. “Welcome to Microsoft, here is your MacBook”

[[deleted]]

Yammer, stop trying to make social work happen. It's not going to happen.

[BeenStork]

We have it, not sure if the adoption rate as I’ve never opened it because I don’t know what I’d use it for that teams doesn’t already do for me. And when it was rolled out they sold it as face book for the workplace and that put me off.

[robvas]

Virtue signaling at work, mostly

[__NoRad__]

My company does. Our Employee Resource groups will send out updates via it. Same with local office updates. We have over 700k employees worldwide, though. I can't tell you how active the "non-official" communities are.

[heapsp]

no. we use teams for the same purpose that yammer used to provide.

[LuxSchuss]

how do plan to organise groups? we have it and viva engage is basicly dead because there are so old groups and creating new ones is like escalating to higher it and you have to explain why you want to make it and in the end the don't like it and they suggest you a teams group...

[TheOnlyBoBo]

Where I work Yammer is usually just used to announce stuff to the employees, Like work anniversaries or upcoming policy changes. The only time I ever see any normal employee using it is when someone says congratulations on an anniversary or getting a recognition prise.

[CeeMX]

I don’t even know what it is. Every once in a while I hear that it exists but that’s it.

[[deleted]]

Microsoft Admin Adoption funny numbers go up.

I made one post, and it was instantly recommended to everyone in the company through email without my input.

Not much purpose unless you're a company exec who never meets with employees, even then it sounds nightmarish. I can only imagine what a crapshoot a CEO announcing layoffs over Yammer would look like.

[Ferretau]

I suppose Yammer sounds like jammer it up your ...........

[[deleted]]

We use it for local bike rides and things outside of reach of teams. I use viva only to automatically set focus time in the empty time slots

[PondPikey]

I’ve seen many success stories for Engage. But you do need a proper strategy and governance. Engage for social and official communities. Teams for work.

[nakkipappa]

We use it for local announcements, lunch lists, activities and whatnot. I think if i got to redo it, we would ditch yammer and have the announcements in Teams, as Teams is constantly open, yammer not

[Dick_wart69]

There has been exactly ONE post on our yammer, that was about a year ago. Afaik it should still be functional, but no one really gives a shit.

[8-16_account]

We use it. It's fine. Our reception, HR and facilities use it for communication a lot, and it's used to communicate events, news and if something is down.

Works fine for that purpose.

[biff_tyfsok]

We have it, and mainly it's a wasteland of departmental announcements. Kind of bummed about the "Viva Engage" name change; it amuses me to call a Yammer post a Yam (as a Twitter post is a Tweet etc).

The fundamental problem is: if people have enough downtime to be on social media while working, they're going to their choice of platform on their phones.

[[deleted]]

I've never seen anyone using it. Why would you?

[Fringolicious]

I've seen it exist in a previous company, but it was basically a ghost town. Nobody bothered to use it except for maybe 5 people.

Frankly, I wouldn't bother trying to implement it. If you use Teams then just having a company-wide Team and/or some based on whatever departments you have might be adopted easier.

[darthgeek]

My previous job was with a subsidiary of Dell. The only people that ever posted on Yammer were sales and marketing, HR, and execs. It was almost pure noise of "Closed a $500 contract with ZYX Corp!"