Editorial
Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have been with us now for over two decades. Largely led by Yammer from 2008 and later Workplace by Meta from 2016, the ESN has been ever-present but never dominant. Launching our 9th Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) benchmarking report has led us to reflect on where we are and where the future is taking us.
The question of who should take “ownership” of the ESN platform was problematic in the early days. An acquisition by Microsoft legitimized Yammer’s credentials as an Enterprise ready tool in 2012, while Facebook chose to mark this entry with the release of its Workplace product, which was modeled on its own internal use.
As a knowledge management (KM) consultant for over a decade, myself and many of my KM colleagues were excited by the prospect of what Yammer could bring to the sharing of informal tacit knowledge. We could finally challenge the notion that KM was just information management by another name. However, what we found in our report suggests we need internal communications involved to make a difference.
Tacit Knowledge Shared Though Conversations
We have spent a good part of the last decade designing and reporting on measures for online conversations on the ESN. To measure people-to-people engagement, we look at levels of two-way conversations that are being conducted as well asthe average number of discussion threads being created per employee.
We have even developed what we believe is the ideal persona for personal knowledge sharing behaviours: the “engager.” Engagers are positioned as brokers in the network of conversations occurring online. We have been tracking the percentage of engagers that exist on the ESN.
The reason we pause for reflection is because these conversation monitoring metrics have been trending downwards over the past three to four years after a previously steady uptick. This is not something a KM practitioner would like to see (including myself). Are we really sharing less tacit knowledge? Has the ESN lost its ability to help employees form meaningful and long lasting relationships? Is COVID-19 to blame?
Reflections?
Despite the downtrend, this is not a disaster case. ESNs are experiencing high levels of readership (well over 80% of employees). Much of this has been achieved by improving access channels e.g. through email and teaming applications. With increasing readership, we have seen the willingness of internal communications (IC) functions to now become the natural enterprise owners of the ESN platforms
IC leaders themselves are looking to evolve from the ‘one-way publisher of internal news and announcements’ to facilitating two-way interactions with published content. Our benchmarking has revealed several organizations that have chosen to use the ESN as the prime news channel — opening up the opportunity for news to be published from multiple sources and not just the IC department.
So what might be causing the drop off in conversations? Perhaps nothing too sinister. It’s likely a change in focus, potentially triggered by the pandemic. During that time, we analyzed the changes in usage of Microsoft Teams and Yammer. While Yammer usage grew a healthy 84%, Teams usage grew 210%. So Teams had significantly reduced the focus on Yammer. That said, Yammer users had their own good stories to tell, as senior leaders adopted the platform to keep all staff appraised of their remote working policy developments. Helping senior leaders communicate with employees is the purview of IC, therefore bringing the ESN more squarely into focus for IC departments.
With respect to Viva Engage (formerly Yammer), the natural customer has moved to IC. This change is best reflected in new features like information Campaigns support, Leadership Corner and Audience analytics — which are all targeted at IC.
The consequence of the shift in focus has been less attention to the core community activities, which had previously been the key focus for KM professionals and consequently Yammer and other ESNs. This is not to say that well operating communities are no longer operating well. We have many example case studies of such communities in our benchmarking reports. It is more likely that those new to ESNs (and there have been many new ‘readers’) are not aware of the community heritage and therefore less inclined to participate in them. Yet, communities are the richest source of conversations, connections and relationship building.
Beyond sharing internal news and messages, IC is also well placed to impact cultural alignment of remote and flexible working staff. Viva Engage and the cross-organization communities it supports is one of the key technical platforms able to bridge the gap in face-to-face in office connections, being experienced post-pandemic.
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What IC Departments Can Do to Help
We have observed an evolution in thinking about what IC departments should be responsible for. Many of the forward thinking practitioners we have interviewed are keen to use their published content to provoke more two-way engagement between leadership and employees and between employees themselves. Here are some suggestions:
- Look at your ESN communities. Which ones are the most engaged? Seek out and engage with their leaders to identify and share their ‘best practices’.
- Seek out those responsible for Knowledge Management. Aim to learn from them what are the industry best practices for community building and facilitation.
- Use your relationships with senior leadership to influence them to support an information campaign around ‘building better (internal) communities.
- Start measuring and monitoring the breadth and depth of your ESN conversations. You may find it is a leading indicator for employee engagement and cultural alignment across your organization.
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