Is It Time to Put Yammer Out to Pasture?

Traffyk.ai data suggests that over 95% of knowledge workers barely glance at Yammer, opening it just once or twice each week. With such a low Cut Through, there's little chance of communicating anything truly vital through the channel, but it can be a distraction.

Enterprise social networks (ESNs) like Yammer emerged over a decade ago with lofty ambitions – to become the digital “watercooler” for organisations. The premise was improving connectivity, collaboration, and culture. However, the excitement around these tools has faded. Despite changing the name in 2023 to “Viva Engage” – and adding a smattering of new features – our latest data on Microsoft’s enterprise social platform hints at wider issues of poor user adoption and interaction.

At most, Yammer serves as a "nice to have" for scattered updates. But for those tasked with managing it and keeping workers informed, Yammer looks more and more like a wasted effort spinning its wheels. To drive real strategy, we need channels workers actually check daily. Our Cut Through numbers don't lie – Yammer isn't it.

The Link to “Right to Disconnect”

The data exposes a clear need - we require communication channels that Cut-Through daily, not just distract sporadically. Yet in the rush to connect, the temptation arises to over-communicate, risking the drift of the communications load into out-of-hours. But this flies against the likely new “right to disconnect” legislation aimed at protecting work-life balance. If we want Cut-Through while respecting worker rights, we need to consolidate efforts on actively used channels reaching every employee during the workday. Using too many channels adds to every employee’s daily communications load and risks increasing out-of-hours communications. By fixing Cut-Through hours first, we can minimise the communications drift in the evenings and weekends.

Defining a Yammer “Active” User

To see the problem, firstly you need to understand what an ‘active user’ is. Yammer/Viva Engage defines monthly active users (MAUs) as those who interact once with the platform and its content in a rolling 30-day period through actions – like posting, liking, or reading messages. Our analytics, however, show the bar for being “active” is depressingly low. The majority of users deemed active by Yammer standards are only logging in 1-2 times a week on average. Even then, their interaction is typically limited to briefly scanning the activity feed before logging back out.

Are enterprise social networks driving meaningful impact if most usage resembles a quick skim, like an old-school newsletter? If the dominant interaction with these expensive tools is fleeting, passive consumption, not interaction, it’s fair to ask whether they’re at a dead end.

Modest Interactions Among “Active” Users

Infrequent logins are not the only indicator that enterprise social networking tools are missing the mark for driving collaboration. Users considered active on Yammer also exhibit worryingly low posting and interaction metrics:

• Average messages posted per month among active users: less than 1
• Average comments left on others’ messages per month among active users: less than 1
• Average likes on messages per month among active users: less than 1

Such low engagement happens because of a relatively limited number of people actively posting – in some cases, just 6% of an organisation’s active users are responsible for all new posts and comments. So that’s 94% of workers who may occasionally browse the posts!

Again, this points to these expensive tools potentially being underutilised when comparing reality versus vision. If the vast majority of active employees dive into their corporate social feed just a few times a month on average, scroll briefly, potentially drop a short post, comment or like, then disengage – how much collaborative value is that really driving? The data suggests that in many organisational contexts, these platforms are peripheral.

Expensive? Isn’t Viva Engage included in our license?

Just because something is included doesn’t make it “free”. There is a real but often overlooked and never measured cost involved in driving adoption, managing a community, and directing resources to populate forums, publish content and manage the responses (if you get any). If this multi-faceted investment isn’t producing results, should these resources be freed up or redirected where they can be more effective?

Behind the Low Engagement Numbers

There are myriad reasons for declining engagement on tools like Yammer beyond the inflation of what counts as an active user. Enterprise social networks arrived with great fanfare, but have they delivered measurable business impact equal to their deployment and maintenance costs? Or are they more often written off as nice-to-have rather than need-to-have tools?

Here are 5 hypotheses around the disappointing numbers:

1. Poor integration: Yammer and other tools may feel “tacked on” rather than embedded in existing workflows. Switching between apps can sideline engagement.
2. Irrelevant content: Employees may disengage if forums are overrun by too many meaningless announcements or social groups. The signal-to-noise ratio matters.  
3. Weak sponsorship: Leadership advocacy and community management drive adoption. Absent this, many spaces have grown cold.
4. Baggage: with genuinely successful ESN implementations few and far between, many employees will have had multiple experiences using tools like Yammer and no longer want to contribute.
5. Other tools have superseded them: In most organisations, tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have superseded the likes of Yammer as the go-to apps for chat and collaboration, while external tools such as LinkedIn and even Instagram have become hotspots for professional connections and workplace culture promotions.

The premise is that these tools enhance transparency, access to expertise, problem-solving, and camaraderie – but the reality seems to be trudging along with modest interest at best. Traffyk.ai’s Yammer Noise and Cut-Through scores show the bumpy road these enterprise social networks have faced in transitioning from novel ideas to indispensable staples of modern knowledge work.  

How is your communication infrastructure fairing?

The above analysis may seem bleak, but opportunities exist to refocus or rationalise effort on your tools and channels – what we at Traffyk call “communication infrastructure”.

The first step is to get some proper data! The second step is to analyse at scale and go beyond the basic and often unhelpful metrics that are presented by default in product analytics dashboards. We call these “legacy metrics”.

Traffyk.ai plugs into a wide range of technology tools – including Microsoft 365 (Viva Engage, SharePoint, Teams, etc.), Google Workspace, Workplace by Meta, Slack, Confluence, JIRA and more. It provides analysis and recommendations on where and how best to invest to activate your employees.

By automatically collecting and analysing data from different platforms and benchmarking your organisation against other organisations, we can help you get a much more exact health check on your channels, focus on what’s working, cut down on noise, reduce wasted effort and align more closely with your organisation’s strategic objectives.

The bottom line is that there is only so much time in a workday. With the new reality of the likely new ‘Right to Disconnect” legislation, there’s huge pressure to reduce distraction so teams get their work done during the working day, to limit the need for out-of-hours contact.

Get on board. Contact us: hello@traffyk.ai

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