This post originally appeared on Janus Boye’s LinkedIn on July 2, 2015.
“What can you do to create a flourishing and responsive Yammer service at your organization? How do you get your co-workers to embrace the platform and prove its business value to senior management?
Lesley Crook, IC Digital Lean Strategist and speaker at J. Boye Philadelphia 15 conference, tells the story of how GSK’s Yammer service demonstrated business value by adopting her ‘qualitative’ model in this posting. The above photo is from her popular conference presentation back in May.
Read How GSK works with Yammer for additional details
Lean ways of working
GSK has a gold standard continuous improvement model called ‘Accelerated Delivery & Performance'(ADP), which is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS) model. It combines the best of Project Management, Organisational Development and Lean Sigma knowledge networking fundamentals. Coached in GSK businesses but not broadly encouraged in the internal communications area. Being curious I signed up for on-the-job Lean training with mentors and coaches. This opened my eyes to a different way of working and an output of mine was the creation of a unique Yammer ‘qualitative’ business value model.
ESN’s have only previously been determined by using quantitative measurements such as the size of the network and the number of ‘posts’ within groups. Although these measurements are important they need to be put into context.
My model helped to do just that. Yammer group owners are asked a series of short questions that extract key information about their group in relation to areas such as business strategy, project management, organisational development and business transformation, plus cultural behaviours and values. The responses demonstrate how successful Yammer groups are providing real business benefits and helping employees to understand the relevance of Yammer to themselves and their work.
The model also introduces and raises the relevance of ‘business intelligent #hash tags’ that enable searching and data mining strategic content. It helps to share knowledge networking stories cultural sentiments and captures meaningful, actionable tacit insights – not data. It enables working out loud in a network, creating a positive but somewhat disruptive flow – working up and out of silos. These stories can be shared back into the business.
#Yammer50k campaign
November 2014 the output of the model was our global communication campaign. This celebrated reaching the quantitative achievement of 50,000 registered users and demonstrated Yammers qualitative business value. Me and Matt Bartow took-over our intranet homepage and shared 10 Yammer success stories that spanned R&D, manufacturing, sales, marketing and corporate communications.
Each story contains a senior leader ‘golden’ quote describing how Yammer supported business objectives and company values. Also, how Yammer groups made their part of the business more ‘responsive’ e.g., decreased email trails and increased collaboration by working across business, time zones and geographical boundaries enabled by powerful translate functionality when appropriate.
Leaning up your enterprise social network
Lesley’s model has been endorsed in the private and public sector, Yammer Microsoft management and a Cambridge University academic, but how would her model apply to your organisation?“
This post originally appeared on Janus Boye’s LinkedIn on July 2, 2015.
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