On a panel on the future of communication in the workplace, Nicky Wakefield, Human Capital Partner at Deloitte Australia, said “We have found a strong correlation between use of Yammer and staff retention.” Can we add employee retention to the ways to make the case for microblogging in the enterprise?
Wakefield went on to say:
Deloitte Australia is world’s largest user of Yammer, with over half of 4,600 employees using it, having sent over 24,000 messages. Use quickly shifted from social use to business applications. People are looking to communicate with each other and the organization. Workplace communications is a key part of the answer.
She also said that Yammer had been successful in that oft-cited goal of enterprise 2.0 technologies: transcending silos. She cites the fact that Deloitte Australia’s CEO is one of Yammer’s most active users as evidence.
Others on the Future of Workplace Communications panel, part of Viocorp‘s Future Forum webcast series, included Oscar Trimboli of Microsoft, Phil Cronin of Intel, and futurist Ross Dawson, who blogged notes from the panel.
Cronin noted the difficulty in measuring the productivity of remote workers. Status updates could be useful in this regard as well – as a way to evaluate both remote and on-site productivity. Programmers, for example, have often been evaluated by code check-ins.
