As the new month and new year are upon us, it’s time to resume our monthly tradition of celebrating the people who drive Yammer at their organizations. These everyday heroes and their teams (Yammer is a team sport!) lead and inspire. Jessica Elliott is a Communications and Deployment Manager at Red Robin and is January’s customer of the month. Jessica’s passion, vision and enthusiasm are contagious; check out her story in her own words:
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Red Robin has a unique culture.
Now, a lot of companies say that, but in my experience, Red Robin really walks that walk. When I started with the company 12 years ago, though I was sure I would still be in love with the veggie burger (a.k.a. the reason I applied), I did not anticipate that I would still be so in love with the company.
We live this culture in a lot of ways – we celebrate and recognize unbridled acts (ways that our Team Members take care of each other and our Guests) to start every meeting. We infuse our core values into conversations about and decisions pertaining to the business. And most importantly we believe in our people, and that when we take great care of our Team Members first, they will take care of our Guests (and as a company, we will reward our shareholders). Though our brand is well-recognized and over 40 years old, in the past few years, we have taken on initiatives that allow our business to evolve in a really exciting way. Our business is hyper-competitive and requires flexibility and agility.
But no matter how exciting or needed a change may be, its success lies with the people who execute it. Yammer is changing the way we change.
My role is communications and deployment manager, and that means that I’m working with our Team Members every day to evolve the brand. Even with all of this talk about evolving the brand, much of our communication centers around keeping the lights on. Communication isn’t designed for the sender, it’s designed for the receivers. Memos, rollout books and emails serve the sender. Which is why Yammer works for us; it allows us to speak with our teams in a way that they communicate – point–in-time, multi-directional, small bite, direct and in-direct, multi-media, should I go on? Though Yammer is a tool that our team needed to better communicate and deploy initiatives, it is because what we get out of it: better connections with the teams who are delivering our brand’s promise to our Guests.
To me, the part of our Yammer story that I get jazzed to tell is the way that we can engage our most powerful asset, our people. We use Yammer to provide a forum for questions, feedback and resources (whether they be documents, media or people). On top of that, our Team Members are constantly coming up with new ways to use Yammer (or Yummmer as we call it – get it? Yummm?) to stay connected with each other and the organization.
Never before would we be able to deploy a video of our CEO speaking directly to Team Members in a way that it could get 400 views in the first weekend. We have used Yammer to connect our managers with each other, and with the business in a way that we haven’t done in the past. On the horizon, we extend those connections to all of our Team Members through a coming soon network – Yummmerversity. We are so psyched to supplement our learning and development and communication efforts by reaching Team Members directly in this network.
We are on a journey at Red Robin that Yammer is letting us bring our most important stakeholders, our Team Members, on board with. I’ve never been more excited to be a part of the Red Robin team than I am to be a part of our story today (well, maybe the day I got my first veggie burger with my Team Member discount).
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Learn more about Jessica below and connect with her on Twitter!
