Way of the goose – using Yammer in the Enterprise
A few years ago I read Gung Ho! by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. The book uses a parable style approach to story telling to introduce some important concepts for improving team enthusiasm, energy and performance.
One section of the book introduces the “Way of the Goose: Cheering others on”:
I also noticed that from time to time the lead goose would fall back and the V would form up behind a new lead goose. But again, there didn’t seem to be any connection to the honking.
…
I listened and Andy was right. They were honking encouragement and cheering each other. I’d been a cheerleader in high school and I knew a cheer when I heard one. These were enthusiastic, cheering honks.
…
“Those geese fly thousands of miles every year. They can move hundreds of miles in a day. They are truly one of the wonders of our world. And they do it cheering each other on every step of the way.”
…
“Andy, all the geese honk. It isn’t just the lead goose honking. They’re all honking. It doesn’t just have to be managers cheering the team members does it? We can get everyone cheering each other.”
[courtesy of http://www.pbase.com/sayer/image/50003092]
This truism struck a chord with me – how could we create a work place where everyone cheers each other on and celebrates the small, every day successes that go largely unnoticed?
The rise of social media platforms may well provide the enabling mechanism.
Most folk these days have heard of Twitter – although I suspect that many people (including myself) are yet to find much value in the service. I note on the Wikipedia page for Twitter the following quote from Jack Dorsey (credited with creating Twitter):
[W]e came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.
—Jack Dorsey
For me, the constant stream of ‘short bursts of inconsequential information’ within Twitter is intriguing, but not terribly useful; a concept that still lacks maturity in its useful application.
Yammer is an enterprise micro-blogging service and social media platform that is similar in concept to Twitter but, instead of broadcasting messages to the public, Yammer is used for private communication within organisations and between groups.
Access to a Yammer network is determined by a user’s internet domain, so only those with appropriate email addresses may join their respective networks. According to the Yammer website, the service is used by some 80,000 organizations:
Yammer enables users to communicate, collaborate, and share more easily and efficiently than ever before. Yammer reduces the need for meetings, increases communication across silos, surfaces pockets of expertise and connects remote workers.
As per the Wikipedia page on Yammer:
If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?”
Engineers at Geni created Yammer internally for the company’s own purposes, but Sacks liked it so much he decided to spin it off as its own company.
He explains: ‘The purpose is to allow co-workers to share status updates. You post updates on what you are working on. You can post news, links, ask questions, and get answers for people in your company. You can see the most prolific people and the most followed people. It is a good way to discover who is the most influential in your company.’
To me, the text-length characteristics of Yammer limits the wide applicability of the service. However, the high visibility, speed and inherent informality of the service means that it could serve as an effective collaboration tool alongside other Web 2.0 technologies such as Wikis, Blogs and collaborative work spaces that are far more suited to sharing insight and understanding around work-related knowledge areas.
How will people come to use Yammer? Hopefully they will learn to emulate the ‘way of the goose’ and cheer each other on and celebrate the small, every day successes that go largely unnoticed in many of today’s work environments.
Reference links:
Intriguing blog post, Carl! Indeed, Yammer is too goosey to be true. No doubt “Microblogging” is one of the technology that remain to be adopted for another couple of years as predicted by Gartner – the Hype Cycle of Social Software in 2010.
Apart from Twitter and Yammer, there are also other emerging microblogging tools like Plurk, SocialCast and Identi.Ca.
To be honest, I still haven’t got time to experiment all of them but one thing i noticed that has something in common – users can publish a one-line status message to their contacts, who have decided to follow their activities on the service. Users can see the collected statuses of the people they choose to follow. Even those who do not want to follow many people can search through the microblogging stream for topics or tags they are interested in. This trending topics provide a condensed view of what everyone on the service is talking about.
In spite of its popularity for being a fast and easy way to disseminate information, Microblogging will have moderate impact on how the community collaborate and share ideas in organisations. It has greater potential to provide enterprise value by bringing together large group of people and providing them almost to real-time insights.
Thus, a food for thought – Do you think Microblogging tools like Yammer could excel in the like of others?
I think the interesting bit around the Yammer discussion is how will the service distinguish it self from Twitter. With many of the large brands already using Twitter pages (sometimes multiple ones) to communicate with staff, customers and fans, im just not sure if theres a big enough niche for Yammer to succeed especially as its so similar as mentioned.
I just watched this interesting interview with Margaret Atwood (Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist) regarding the use and benefits of Twitter – worth a look: http://bigthink.com/margaretatwood
I work at Brisbane City Council, and we have recently adopted Yammer into the organisation. Although we have not been using it for long, it has been proving beneficial in the way we communicate effectively among teams and projects. It provides a forum to keep other colleagues up to date with what you are working on, and the progress on a certain body of work or project.