Try Yammer; Maybe You’ll Learn Something

This is a guest blog post written by Mike Petersell, Management Center for Learning & Performance Director at Pitney Bowes. His team is focused on management development for the Mailing Solutions business unit. Follow Mike on Twitter or check out his personal blog.

Without question, Yammer is a great tool for social networking. Since we’ve adopted it in Pitney Bowes, we’ve seen steady, organic growth in the number of users from all parts of the organization and a proliferation of communities built around areas of common interest. But my view of Yammer is a little different. As someone who is accountable for management development, I’m interested in its power as an engine for learning. You may find it surprising to think of Yammer as a learning tool but that’s how I see it. I scroll through a user’s activity stream like a miner, seeing discussion threads as veins of knowledge sharing, attachments as resource nuggets, and links as gems of information; all with the potential to help people meet their individual development needs.

Most of my career has been devoted to helping people meet their learning needs by meticulously analyzing those needs and addressing them through rigorous instructional design. And yet, with all the formal learning I have designed and delivered over the years, I recognize that what makes people most successful is not what they learn from the content of the programs we provide, but what they learn from one another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very proud of the work that I have done and the significant impact it has had in helping people learn and grow at work. But I realize a lot of the value created in the classroom comes from the informal elements of the learning experience such as the dynamic of the group, the experiences each member brings to the table, and the tools and resources they share with one another. That is why, to me, Yammer is a learning goldmine. It enables those special connections we had created by bringing people together in the classroom to happen all the time. 

Learning guru, Jay Cross, defines informal learning as, “that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you.”  It is the “unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs.”  Isn’t that what Yammer provides?  Isn’t it really a mechanism for unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu learning opportunities?  That is what I see when I delve into my Yammer feed. And that is what I hope others in my company will see in their feeds as well.

To this end, my team plays an active role in our Yammer community. We create and join groups and use hashtags to post items on topics that are important to our learners such as #managing, #leadership, #remote-management, #change, and #engagement. We encourage everyone to do the same.  By sharing messages, links and attachments, we hope our employees find value when they go fishing in their activity streams. We recognize that they each choose when and where to cast their line. But we figure, why not seed the waters?