Forum Discussion
Office 365 Groups What to Use When Framework and Inforgraphic
MicrosoftInteresting that you consider Yammer to be formal, as quite often I see it used in a more informal or conversational way. I would worry that if Yammer became too formal, it would simply turn into the old school intranet home page with nothing but company news that no one reads on it.
Clear and concise guidance though, good stuff!
Hi David,
When we were building this out, we were looking at this from the stance of 'how do you want to represent yourself'. So when we were deciding where to place Yammer, we said "well if we're going a broadcast to the company, we would write out the initial post as formal in case a C-Level were to read". But the hope was then to drive a conversational tone in the responses. Yammer was a tricky one!
Great feedback!
- David Rosenthal
Maybe just my slant on things, but I put much more faith in C-level who understand that there is a time and place for formal, and that there is a time and place for more conversational as long as it is still within social constraints. Since Yammer is internal, I consider that conversational and have much more faith in those that talk like a human as opposed to some internal comms washed robot ;)
Save the formal for external facing if formal matches your culture. Don't be a robot to your employees :)
Cheers guys, good discussion.
- Definitely agree. Culture and leadership play a big "outside factor" in many of these decisions. IT being a champion of those is definitely necessary today.
This was a tricky one for us. We believe that Yammer has an ad-hoc structure in communication but you should almost always have a "professional" tone since Yammer casts such a wide net across your org (or even across multiple orgs). There is still some wiggle room to be a bit more "fun" with your Yammer posts though.
Before MS Teams we were much more casual in our smaller Yammer Groups but as the platform took off we realized that more and more eyes were on this. We've since adopted a similar approach to social media with Yammer.
"Would you be OK tweeting this? Posting this to Facebook or LinkedIn?"
- I agree that Yammer being 100% only used for formal doesn't necessarily use the potential that Yammer can drive as a communication tool. As far as this infographic alignment, it does tend to fit better in the more formal category in my opinion. I have seen it mainly used as a mix of overall company formal groups and then smaller more ad-hoc groups but the all company solution more popular. Both scenarios for Yammer usage still lead under the great breakdown of tempo as "Any Tempo."
