Yammer

August 1, 2018 By PC Portal

4 steps to engage employees with new live events in Microsoft 365

Earlier this month, we announced new intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365 that enable anyone to create live and on-demand events for teams and across the organization. Today, we invite you to use the public preview of live events in Microsoft 365 and discover new ways to foster connection and engagement between leaders and employees at every level in your organization.

More than ever before, employees in the modern workplace seek work environments that unlock creativity, make their lives more productive and fulfilling, and foster a sense of connection with their organization’s mission and purpose.

A critical first step for your organization to thrive in this new culture of work is to drive alignment of your people around shared purpose and goals. Leaders realize that organizations who do this well have an advantage in attracting and retaining an engaged workforce.

Here are four ways your organization can enable leaders and employees to connect with new live events in Microsoft 365:

1—Use live events to kickstart interactive discussions across your organization

Today, executives at Microsoft—including CEO Satya Nadella—use Microsoft 365 to connect and communicate with employees around the globe. Now, any company or organization with Microsoft 365 can create these moments of high engagement, where people are focused on leaders and their messages and ask questions to clarify or reinforce conversations in the community.

Using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Yammer, you can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides. Attendees receive notifications and can participate in real-time, with high-definition video and interactive discussion using web, mobile, or desktop.

Following an event, it’s easy to make the recording available on an event page, allowing you to watch the event on your own schedule and catch up quickly with powerful AI features that unlock the content of the event recording. The recording is automatically transcribed and detects changes in speakers—making it simple to search for content later.

For employees who are in different time zones or unable to attend live, the conversation keeps going, so they still feel connected to leaders and peers—helping to overcome geographical or organizational boundaries.

The event and recordings are powered by Microsoft Stream, the intelligent video service in Office 365.

Image of a laptop open to display a live event in Microsoft 365.

2—Foster sustained dialogue in open communities

Give everyone a voice—before, during, and after a live event in Microsoft 365—with Yammer communities that span functions or the entire organization. Providing a forum for employees to be heard is an important piece of transforming a culture. These communities are where people can come any time to raise ideas, concerns, or questions, and where leaders can reply in an authentic way.

An active Yammer community builds trust and a sense of connection and belonging. And it provides a forum where employees who might not feel comfortable speaking out during a live event can connect directly with leaders.

With inline message translation, live events in Microsoft 365 empowers people to express themselves in their own language.

3—Create an intranet site for leaders to share events, blogs, video, news, and resources

Communicate at scale as a leader with a continuous, online presence using content, conversation, and video channels within a SharePoint communications site. You can optimize for news distribution and blogs, and deepen engagement with related content, polls and surveys, and readership analytics.

This is also a great spot to share recorded events for later viewing. Simply create a dedicated page for each event where employees can submit questions and comments in advance. Leaders and organizers can then use this input to craft the messaging and content of the events.

4—Plan corporate communications and measure impact

Executive and internal communications may be managed by a team of one or a team of many—but it takes careful planning and execution to ensure success. Microsoft Teams—the hub for teamwork in Office 365—is ideally suited to work together in the creation and production of events and other executive communications. It provides an effective backstage for your live event, giving you a shared space to work with speakers and approve content before sharing with a broader audience.

Once you have begun engaging your audience, every message within a Yammer community has a visible count of how many people your post has reached. This helps both community organizers and employees understand what is being read. Group insights demonstrate how the knowledge and information created in the community benefit people—regardless of their membership status in the group. For example, passive visitors may gain value from group conversations and apply the information elsewhere in their daily work. You can also see the number of views for an event recording and across a channel, and how many people liked the video. Pages and news articles also have statistics to understand readership.

Empowering all leaders across an organization

Leadership, of course, does not just refer to organizational leaders. Leaders of communities may be subject matter experts, functional managers, or passionate individuals who are leading areas of expertise, practices, or interest groups. These same capabilities in Microsoft 365 can enable leaders at any level to create and sustain connection with their communities.

Patrick Yates, manager of Diversity and Inclusion at TDS Telecom, considers community connections and engagement an important part of the employee experience, and a boon to recruiting talent. “Younger generations entering the workforce especially want a modern, inclusive environment—to be part of something that’s larger than themselves.”

Connect your employees and leaders today

Experience the public preview of live events in Microsoft 365, and get started on connecting your leaders and employees today. We will be adding additional features and functionality based on your feedback in the Tech Community.

To create a live event, you will need an Office 365 E3 or E5 license and your admin must give you permission to do so. To attend a live event, you need an Office 365 license for authenticated users. Public (anonymous) access is possible in specific configurations.

To learn more, visit Connect leaders and employees on Office.com, and for more information on intelligent event capabilities, visit the Microsoft 365 live events post on Tech Community.

The post 4 steps to engage employees with new live events in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

February 27, 2018 By PC Portal

Wipro drives innovation and encourages social learning through Yammer

Today’s post was written by Anurag Seth, vice president and global head of Talent Transformation, TopGear, and Business Continuity at Wipro.

Profile picture of Anurag Seth, vice president and global head of Talent Transformation, TopGear, and Business Continuity at Wipro. Digital transformation at Wipro includes a proactive evolution of our skills and qualifications to better serve customers. If Wipro is to help customers succeed on their own digital journeys, it’s critical that we stay ahead of the rapid evolution of technology in a world where cloud computing is the new normal. That means our employees need to become proficient with leading-edge technology concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to help customers gain business value from these latest innovations in IT.

Our challenge, then, is to manage the rapid pace of new training—e-learning and hands-on experience—which is required for more than 160,000 employees working in 62 countries to offer expertise in the kind of technology and services that will help customers solve 21st-century problems. We’re doing just that by choosing Office 365 collaborative cloud tools to help develop a social learning platform that uses the enterprise social network Yammer.

Although we deployed Yammer two years ago, today more than 4,000 public groups and 100,000 employees are active in our Yammer network, and we are one of the first companies to introduce the role of social officer to create a strategy for using Yammer as a social learning platform. The social officer encourages the formation of dedicated social learning groups on Yammer, and employees subscribe to those they are interested in. These groups could unite a single role, such as project manager, where participants in more than 175 cities across the globe share their challenges and learning at a scale and pace we could never achieve with traditional methods. Most of these groups come from the 40,000 members of our Talent and Transformation Yammer group, which represents the learning and development function at Wipro.

As soon as employees saw their contributions recognized by senior leaders—our CEO regularly follows Yammer threads and adds his input—there was a groundswell of participation. When a social learning group appeared for the first time in the top five most engaged Yammer groups at Wipro, it was a breakthrough. Today, of the top 100 most followed people in the organization, 51 are from social learning groups. That represents strong leadership in a culture change that’s happening organically at Wipro—for millennials who are joining the company now, as well as our long-term employees.

Yammer also supports an exciting new learning initiative called Topcoder for our crowdsourcing platform at Wipro. This initiative acts as a crowdsourcing mechanism to discover and develop new expertise across the organization. For Topcoder, we created training, case studies, and learning refinements that are open to all employees, along with exciting, real-life projects and challenges—all publicized through Yammer. As employees work on the projects, in their own time, they create groups and collaborate on Yammer to learn new skills and solve the challenges, gaining companywide recognition in the process. Over time, we are seeing the growth of permanent communities of practice on Yammer—mainframe, Java, architects, and consultants—which raises the level of discoverable expertise that we can bring to bear on behalf of our customers.

All this represents a culture change at Wipro that has huge business value. As more employees participate in Yammer-based social learning—sharing their expertise and engaging with the company—or participate in Topcoder’s projects to solve real-world problems, we’re developing better skills to more quickly serve customers. For example, a recent challenge in Topcoder that generated buzz on Yammer asked employees to create an exciting UI for a mobile app. We received many entries and awarded prizes to the top three designs. Now when a customer comes to us with a similar challenge, we have dozens of Topcoder participants with relevant experience, ready to go.

As the number of people participating in social learning increases, Yammer provides a mechanism to tap into the talent of our more than 160,000 employees. This will take our digital journey to the next level. With an increasing pool of consultants rapidly honing their skill sets by learning in a more natural, engaging way, Wipro is in a better position to increase its competitive advantage.

—Anurag Seth

Read the case study for more on how Wipro used Yammer to deploy its social learning program.

The post Wipro drives innovation and encourages social learning through Yammer appeared first on Office Blogs.

January 23, 2018 By PC Portal

Mondelēz International engages and inspires global workforce with Yammer

Today’s post was written by Russell Dyer, vice president and global head of communications at Mondelēz International.

When I joined Mondelēz International from Kraft Foods Group, I was excited by the challenge of communicating and building connections across a dispersed, culturally diverse workforce operating in many time zones. A leader in the snacking market, with iconic brands including Oreo, belVita biscuits, Cadbury and Milka chocolate, and Trident gum, Mondelēz International is a truly global business, operating in 165 countries, with more than 75 percent of its revenue generated outside the United States.

The business value of standardizing our best practices—what we call “The MDLZ Way”—is that it builds a company better equipped to compete in today’s global, digital markets. Our Information and Technology Solutions team is helping us achieve that goal by deploying Office 365 cloud services to our entire organization. Now that everyone uses a standard toolkit to communicate and collaborate, we’re starting to see some erosion of corporate silos, improved search and discovery, and easier access to colleagues and expertise.

Yammer is a great example. Our colleagues were craving a better internal social platform for that human connection, where they could share information and tell great stories about the company. Yammer improved our social collaboration with its simple, familiar interface and easy integration with other tools and services. While Yammer has had a presence at Mondelēz International for a few years, in May 2017 we relaunched it as our primary enterprise social platform for our entire organization.

The Yammer mobile app is the most seamless mobile experience we’ve ever delivered to our workforce, making the relaunch incredibly easy to drive adoption for our workforce. Today, there are nearly 20,000 individuals, more than 170,000 posts, and nearly 1,500 groups active among a range of communities, from functions like Corporate & Legal Affairs and HR to subject matter groups, social groups, and business strategy groups. Over seven months, we have seen a nearly 70 percent increase in active users and 13 percent increase in new groups.

Deploying a vibrant social platform is even more important as we build virtual workplaces to facilitate remote, mobile work scenarios. Where our employees sometimes felt a lack of human connection due to new, virtual ways of working, Yammer shrinks our world and makes us feel better connected. Our global sales force, one of the more remote populations of colleagues who use Yammer, stay engaged with their teams and the company. Sales reps take pictures of their stunning in-store snack displays and broadcast their innovative shelf setups to inspire other in-store reps.

Top-down and cross-functional communications that include the whole organization are now more frequent, natural, and interactive—driving overall engagement with our growth strategies. When we better understand our company, we feel more pride and are better engaged. For example, in a few of our quarterly conference calls for various regions and functions, we’ve hung up the phones and opened up “YamJams” to colleagues all around the world. With hundreds of questions and comments, and the most senior members of our leadership teams interacting with junior colleagues out in the markets in real time, everyone feels like they are at a virtual cocktail party.

Unexpectedly, but with remarkable success, Yammer has even served as a business continuity tool by helping us recover from a global malware incident that impacted many large corporations in June 2017. Starting in the minutes and hours immediately following the incident, Yammer became one of the reliable corporate communication channels that we used to run our playbook for managing this situation and staying connected. We shared official updates in real time around the clock, helped colleagues with questions, and broadcast technical FAQs so everyone knew what they needed to do as we managed through the recovery. And as teams worked hard to ensure business continuity, Yammer was a great way to celebrate our successes, sharing photos of teams all around the world tackling the same challenges in unique ways. It was an amazing use case for Yammer. It’s moments like these that are invaluable in building a winning culture.

Similarly, in Q4 we used Yammer to bid farewell to our long-time CEO, Irene Rosenfeld, after an amazing 11-year tenure leading our company. Colleagues from all around the world were able to say #ThanksIrene by sharing photos and personal stories of their fondest memories from Irene’s tenure. Best of all, everyone, including Irene, was able to engage in this global conversation. And when Dirk Van de Put, our new CEO, officially took over the company, he posted a selfie from his first town hall meeting, bringing our entire global employee base in on a fun and important message he shared that day.

At Mondelēz International, we believe that an engaged workforce is a more powerful one. It’s the rationale behind the first of our three corporate growth strategies: grow our people. We’re using Yammer to help achieve this goal. Today, we have a social enterprise platform that colleagues all around the globe use to celebrate their successes. One interaction at a time, we’re building an engaged, connected global workforce that pulls together to help us live our purpose and vision—to create more moments of joy by building the best snacking company in the world.

—Russell Dyer

The post Mondelēz International engages and inspires global workforce with Yammer appeared first on Office Blogs.