Microsoft Yammer is like Workplace by Facebook in many ways. It is indeed a corporate social network as Microsoft positions it. The main purpose is to make instant communications easy, fast, and concentrated in one place. It is not about custom design or massive customizations (if you are interested in such, you should consider SharePoint), it is about communications and familiar unified design.
Project goals
- Show people how Yammer can be a useful and affordable tool in your pocket.
- Engage and motivate employees to use Yammer.
- Sell the idea of Yammer as a universal playground for communication to the company’s top managers and content leaders.
Obstacles we had
- The vast majority of the top managers did not see many advantages in Yammer. They saw Yammer as a non-functional tool that will only be an additional place to gather the information that only comes bundled with Microsoft Teams and other tools.
- Yammer has limited possibilities for customization. There are not many options to customize Yammer. Of course, this is because Yammer has another purpose, that is, to make communication easy and accessible.
- Small budget as there were not many expectations from the Yammer launch. We knew that most of the workload will lie on content leaders so we needed to make them happy and motivate them to produce a lot of useful content.
Solution
We decided to make Yammer associate with fun and comfort, was for them a kind of island of cozy information. To make it happen we built a massive gamification project that did not involve any major customizations. We paid attention to the people, to their happiness and joy. We decided to let them know that they are the most important goal of this project and that this project is about them.
We developed this project to be dedicated to the people and their interests. Birthdays, hobbies, sports activities, charity, personal and professional growth, etc. All of these activities became separate topics in the Yammer community.
Our statistic was about people’s interests, we analyzed not the number of likes and views but the number of likes and shares within the topics. It helped us to understand what people like the most and what they want to see in our community. Metinvest digital’s team wanted their employees to feel free to express their personalities in all areas of their activity. It helped us to show them that they can freely develop their careers as a harmonious part of their lives.
We paid additional attention to making a friendly recognizable design for the group headers. The main idea was to make Yammer unified yet branded and personal for Metinvest Digital company.
To sum up, the idea was about minimum customization, maximum encouraging people.
Gamification
The purpose of collecting statistics was, first of all, the analysis of popular topics and areas of communication so that we could encourage users to develop their interests by rewarding them with related gifts.
The Gamification project itself should have been about the hobby. It would help people to want to be a part of this project. We decided to take one of the popular hobbies (and one of the CEO’s hobbies), that is, the conquest of peaks.
So we decided to suggest users have achievements in Yammer and get awards for conquesting peaks. By the way, if you are interested in making a gamification project, feel free to use our ideas in the company’s blog or just ask us to help by contacting us.
The gifts for such achievements should have been very personal and tangible, so spent the biggest part of the project’s budget on the gifts. People got a lot of things, from socks and power banks to mountain trips, smartwatches, and Airpods.
Do we need to say more about this project if the users got the opportunity to write about their hobbies, get the most recent information about the company’s life, and be awarded for their activity real cool gifts? 🙂
