Multinational insurance firm RSA Group has used Yammer since February 2012. Around 10,000 of its 19,000 global employees are users, and approximately 5,000 of these are engaged, making posts or commenting on posts daily.
Jenny Burns, director of internal communications, brand and social media at RSA Group, says: “From a communications perspective, Yammer has completely turned everything on its head.”
The business has used Yammer around employee benefits in three ways. First, when it decided to make changes to its flexible benefits package, a closed group of employees came together using Yammer to discuss the offering. Then it went out via the network to ask employees to vote for benefits they wanted in the scheme. “We added things such as a Gourmet Society discount card because people said they were interested in getting more discounts,” explains Burns.
Lastly, it used Yammer to communicate the changes once the new package launched.
Rather than posting messages from the HR or reward department, RSA has around 500 ‘Trail Blazers’: individuals it uses to communicate with the Yammer population who have built a good following. “We used people in the network to communicate what their favourite elements of the proposition were,” explains Burns. “It isn’t a corporate channel. It is a channel for the people so we try to avoid anything that looks slick and official.”
Yammer also allows the organisation to target communications. “In the last [flexible benefits] sign-up period, we gave employees the opportunity to buy a discounted bicycle so we tapped into a Yammer group about cycling to work,” says Burns. ”[We] can target specific communities rather than doing big blanket communications, which we would have done in the past.”
