Yammer continues to be a critical part of a successful large-scale digital workplace. It is where communities flourish and where key scenarios like questions and answers are handled best. Organizations are eager to leverage and integrate Microsoft Viva’s new set of experiences to improve their digital workplaces.
Many customers have been asking us: “How does Yammer align and integrate with Microsoft Viva?” In this article, we will explore that question and outline the ways Yammer and Viva work better together.
Yammer is now a cohesive experience with recent versions of Microsoft Outlook where the full authoring experience can be used to interact with Yammer conversations, questions, polls, and praise without users leaving their inbox.
With the Yammer Communities app on the left side of Microsoft Teams, it enables you to engage with leaders, watch live events, ask questions, get answers, and stay up-to-date with news and announcements. Additionally, Yammer can be added to targeted teams as a tab to simplify workflow and help employees navigate to targeted communities from within a related Microsoft Team.
If you want to keep your conversation experience in your Microsoft Teams Channel, add a tab to your Channel that connects directly to Yammer. Now that we have given you a very basic overview of where to champion Yammer – look to our upcoming eBook for more information – let us jump to how it can improve Microsoft Viva today.
Last but certainly not least (and most commonly leveraged) is how it integrates with existing Intranets and SharePoint sites/pages. By leveraging Yammer web parts, you can bring the Yammer experience into key pages related to the communities that exist or improve employee engagement and community connection.
In Microsoft Viva Connections, the Feed will surface key announcements and communication that enable more employees to keep up with what’s new in their communities. This Feed is meant to incorporate more signals and content over time and will include Yammer signals and content relevant to the user in its early state.
Yammer information will appear in your Feed but keep in mind that Feeds are already personalized for the user. So this is Yammer content that is relevant to you specifically as a user. What’s more, this ‘card’ of the Yammer post will enable quick actions such as sharing, posting a comment, reacting, and of course, quick navigation into the Yammer experiences for more advanced community, conversation, or Q&A activity.
Note that this may blend quite nicely with dashboarding approaches already used today for Intranets with more highly personalized Yammer calls to action or awareness on key communication.
In Microsoft Viva Connections, you can use the resources to easily navigate to your Yammer communities, providing more ways to get to the places you want to engage in.
Not only is this shown with your pinned resources, recently opened news, global navigation (like the Microsoft SharePoint App Bar), your sites, and your stream channels. This also strongly indicates that you can expect these kinds of experiences to be appearing in the Microsoft SharePoint App Bar or other places that light up in your Intranet environment as well more directly over time.
In Microsoft Viva Connections, you can use the Dashboard to surface key calls to action for a user to help them engage and leverage Yammer more.
In the example above, you can see a dashboard card that encourages this employee to ask their leadership team a message, while it’s too early to confirm if this will be available at launch (likely as it’s not a complex card). You can always create your own cards or use the other cards we know will be coming at launch to enrich experiences further and integrate Yammer.
Since these dashboard cards can be targeted to specific audiences, you can create targeted cards for specific scenarios like ones that target new employees and encourage them to post questions or participate in a specific new hires community.
In Microsoft Viva Topics, each topic in the future can display related questions and answers from Yammer. This means curated questions in Yammer can light up as you reference topics throughout Microsoft 365. Not only can you surface the questions and answers from Yammer, but it also brings reactions, the best answer, and quick access to the comments and community that the comment came from.
Topics appear everywhere, from Outlook to Teams messages to SharePoint pages. Since that is the case, when a topic is referenced, you will find an incredible amount of Yammer value in the form of questions and answers being only a few seamless clicks away.
Naturally, many users will also have a question that relates to the topic they are exploring. With one click, they can ask their questions which further improves integration and ease of ‘asking out loud’, which will benefit future people who explore Yammer or the associated topics. Since the full experience is available here, it is easy for a poster to share that question.
Also, note the automation of Q&A shown here where Viva has suggested experts and aligns them with the ask. There are other potential ways you can further improve this experience. For example, you could suggest the answers to questions to the experts who commonly answer them via using simple capabilities available today in Azure QnA maker, Power Automate, and more (this can even be free depending on the question volume).
In Microsoft Viva Topics, each topic can display related communities from Yammer. This means curated communities in Yammer can light up as you reference topics throughout Microsoft 365.
These communities are an important part of this discovery process. Showing related sites and communities makes it easier for an employee to navigate topics to join and engage in the future in communities related to topics of interest for themselves. These don’t just show the community but also indicate how relevant they are to the topic. In this example, 31 conversations about SOAR (the topic) occurred in the past 28 days.
Microsoft Viva can positively impact your entire Microsoft 365 experience, and we hope you have enjoyed how it enhances Yammer. While this blog hopefully provides a better understanding of how Microsoft’s latest employee experience platform enhances Yammer, we would love to show you what we can do for your organization when we get prescriptive.
Need help with internal communication, collaboration and communication tools? Let us tag along and help you build communities that can grow and adapt.
