The Official Blog of Benifys HR Solutions

Anyone who follows Web 2.0 with any level of interest in all probability already knows what Yammer is, if you are not one of them, here is a guide to what you need to know, why you need to know it and how to implement it for your organization.

What is Yammer?

Yammer is a micro-blogging platform made specifically for organizational use, consider it a ‘version’  of twitter that is used for work (not that it is affiliated with twitter in any way). By way of posting short status updates, one can be constantly aware about what his colleagues are up to, it is also a great tool for encouraging a team support system wherein the team can not only be updated about any problem that their co-worker is facing but also discuss it in real-time and provide a solution.

Why do I need Yammer?

Did people ask why they need email, while they were using snail mail? Quite an interesting thought that! There are other tools which can and are being used to the same effect, but none that matches the popularity and features of Yammer, you need Yammer because:

• It brings a real-time element to the conversations.
• It is more collaborative than other modes of communication because of threaded commenting system.
• You can attach files just like email.
• You will gradually build a searchable database of all conversations that occur: A knowledge bank.
• Yammer provides free applications to use the platform with Blackberry, iPhone, SMS and even IMs.

While a total replacement of email might not seem like a legitimate option, Yammer does indeed have its share of benefits over it.

Implementing Yammer

Setting up Yammer is a very straightforward process, although it might take a little co-ordination to get it up and running. We will provide you with all the links that you might need in order to setup yammer for your organization at the end of this article. But before that, let us tell you how it works – once a person signs-up at Yammer with the domain name of their organization (e.g. Allen@abc.co.uk), they are sent a confirmation link to confirm the sign-up, after which they can invite other people from their organization from within Yammer.

Every employee gets a profile on Yammer where they setup a profile picture, expertise, role and background. An organization chart is built after the relationship between the employees is entered in the database.

In our team we have a blackberry that runs Yammer by the application provided by them, and the others are a combination of a very nifty Firefox plug-in and Yammer desktop client. Irrespective of where the Yam (that’s what an update is called) originated, everyone is pinged in real-time through their respective services and then they can respond to the message or just follow the flow of conversation.

Resources

Yammer Website

Firefox Plug-in for Yammer

Thanks to Leila Bulling Towne of the The Bulling Towne Group for sending in this submission, there are some great videos in this series from Leila which you can check out at BNET.com. You can follow Leila on twitter (@leilabt) or connect with her through LinkedIN.

The month is almost about to end, and we are just gearing up for the finalization and distribution of the Fourth Edition of our in-house Newsletter HR@Work for which we have been consistently getting great feedback; well, this issue is extra special then… why you ask? That’s because the newsletter now has a completely revamped look and let us tell you we just absolutely love it, and know that you will too! So here come the updates:


When we conceptualized HR@Work, we were not sure how it would be taken and whether we would be able to pull it off to any degree of success, now fourth month into it’s run, it now has a circulation of around 2000! The primary target audience and majority of the opt-ins that we get are from people working in the HR leadership domain in India with the occasional sign-up from professionals overseas who happened to stumble upon the Blog.


As I said earlier, the Newsletter has a complete new look and will have a guest column starting this month. We plan to use this space to not only get experts to talk on varied aspects of business like management, motivation, workforce management, people issues, organizational climate and the likes, but also as a space where our clients and partners can talk about the challenges they face in their day-to-day business affairs and what is it that keeps them going.


We love experimenting with Web 2.0 and believe there is a vast latent potential to it, once the targeted users reach a critical mass; taking action on that thought we are now on Facebook and Twitter (and are about to cross 4000 followers on the latter!). Eventually, we also plan to open a support group on LinkedIn where business professionals and budding entrepreneurs can discuss the problems they face while implementing their HR, or the lack of it.


This update is rather special, thanks to Shauna Moerke of the HR Maven Blog, we are now participating members of the “Carnival of HR” community and besides being featured in that space, we will be hosting it on our Blog on the 14th of April, 2010! Check out the latest carnival post hosted by Effortless HR Blog here.


A little late in the day to mention, but we signed a content partnership with HRguru (Part of the Monster.com Worldwide Company) for syndication of our articles on their website. HRGuru is an online community dedicated to advancement of current and future human resources professionals and of the improvement of HR as a whole. We plan to help each other in our online promotion efforts besides content sharing.


Lots of birthdays this month in our team, three to be precise and what fun it was! We wanted to share the photos but then someone suggested (smart thinking indeed) that posting our cake covered faces all over the internet might not be a very good idea and it for sure wouldn’t do any wonders for our branding effort! So I guess we wait until we can get some no ‘cake on the face’ photographs of us, fat chance of that I think! You can check more information about our team here, for once we have clean, bright faces .

In this video executive coach Leila Bulling Towne talks about three mistakes that leaders should avoid making under any circumstances. Leila guides leaders to business and career growth, her passion is drawing connections between organizational goals and individual strengths. You can also find her on twitter.