How Microsoft implemented Yammer (Part II)

We continue the story of how Yammer penetrated Microsoft, this time in the Russian office. Since I was a direct participant in the events - it will be a bit personal.

Before turning to the Yammer penetration history in the Russian office, I’ll say a few words about the means of communication used by Microsoft itself at that time.

• The most popular way of communication is meetings. The meetings are an integral part of Microsoft's DNA, and the infrastructure for this was excellent. So, each department holds a meeting every week. Each working group holds a weekly meeting. Every weekly you talk one-on-one with each employee, and so on. It even happened that some employees did not reach their workplace, since their entire working day from the top to the bottom was packed with meetings. But this is not a problem if you have ...
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• MS Exchange Email. Megapoleznaya thing in person, especially when you sit on a meeting you do not understand. And terrible spam if you get into group mailing lists. And I really, really don't like it when I have unread messages. It's like unfinished business. I have always been sincerely admired by people who can keep several thousand unread messages in their inbox.
  
  
• Corporate instant messenger and telephony MS Lync. The last old-school phone was removed from the office sometime in 2010. People were given personal phone numbers and headsets. Therefore, meetings of the distributed department were held in Lync.
  
  
• MS SharePoint portals. There were more than 700 of them in the company. The problem is that they were mainly used as file storage. But the saddest thing is how SharePoint is looking. Here, let's say you need a vacation. To do this, on our portal is a file called "Application for vacation.docx". But if you try to send a request "application for vacation", the search engine you need will give out on the third (!) Search page. Therefore, everyone collected their personal collections of documents and stored them in MS OneDrive.
  
  

Here comes the summer of 2012, and invitations from Indian colleagues fell on me, they say, join our corporate social network Yammer. I do not know why from Indian, perhaps, it was an additional social burden on their technical support centers. Then they explained to us that we bought the business, and we begin to master it.

In general, people perceived the topic of the corporate network ambiguously. Someone is positive and active, someone is passive and negative. I myself went from rejection to complete delight. Here are some examples of office life.

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The easiest and most effective way to implement Yammer in any department or department is to redirect subordinates to Yammer. Those. If your subordinate sends you a question regarding the work of the department in the mail or messenger, you send him an answer with the word “Yammer”. This means that the employee must ask his question there and further discussion is already there. That is exactly what the head of our department did. The first month the staff suffered, after all the habit is a matter. And then it turned out that it was interesting and useful for other colleagues to know the answers to these questions, or they wanted to ask the same thing, yes, they were shy. As a result, Yammer became the start page in the browsers for most of the department’s employees, and the head of the department stopped responding to the same questions from different people every time.

The next stage of development in this department was crowdsourcing. People began to offer new ideas for working with clients, for example, how to use the Microsoft Technology Center in Belarus correctly . Sometimes you even wonder that such a simple idea never occurred to you before.

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Around the time when the progressive global public was bathed in icy water, Microsoft was inspired by the idea of The Challenger Sales and began to actively train salespeople in a new way to work with CxO customers. And for this you need to train a lot. Well, who likes to learn from us?


And then someone came up with the idea to launch ice bucket challenge in Yammer. Two people record a video of a salesperson’s meeting with an imaginary financial director, upload to the network and challenge the next team. Those are either shamefully silent, or write down their video and pass the banner on. So it went.

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As a salesman, I suddenly felt that I was reaching the level of top managers of our clients much more often than before. And not only me. What is interesting, in terms of sales, Russian and foreign offices have much more in common than differences. Therefore, when foreign luminaries come and tell us how everything is wrong with us and how it should be right - you can be sure that they have the same problems.

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The online translator built into Yammer seemed very interesting. If I communicate with foreign colleagues, then I can enable automatic translation of the correspondence into Russian. It is clear that Bing Translator is behind all this and the translation is not perfect. But several times when I corresponded with the Americans, I sometimes suddenly realized that they were writing to me in English, and I told them in Russian. We see the same tape in different languages, but we are well aware of each other.

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Summary.

Thus, in the US office, the main working tools (scenarios) of Yammer implementation turned out to be: complete refusal of mail for a month, publication of a report on executive travel, creation of competence centers. In Russian: an example of a manager, crowdsourcing, socialization of the learning process.

Many things in the Russian and American offices occurred in a similar way. This is a heterogeneous perception, the growth of interest in Microsoft on the part of HR directors and marketing directors, it became easier to work at the level of top managers.

As a main difference, I will say that in Russia adaptation has been very heterogeneous. And it is primarily dependent on the leaders. Where the manager personally uses Yammer, the adaptation reaches a very high level.

However, as always.

Our leaders are our everything)))

Vladimir Ivanitsa Facebook | LinkedIn
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