With the rise of remote work and distributed teams, improving workforce engagement has become more challenging than ever. Shockingly, less than 1/3 of US workers are engaged with their work in 2022. Yet studies have shown that engaged employees are more productive, more committed to their organization, and more likely to stay with their current employer, making it critical for organizations to prioritize engagement.
Building an engaging and productive digital workplace is key to helping employees feel connected and fulfilled, but technology alone won’t solve the problem. Organizations need to pair tech with insights into how employees are using digital platforms and communication channels; by measuring what works and what doesn’t, organizations can develop an insight-based approach to these tools to ensure they have the impact they are looking for.
In this blog, we’ll show you how the right technology and data-driven insights can help transform your employee experience to foster deeper engagement and enhance your digital workplace.
Maximize the Power of Viva Engage
Many organizations have turned to Viva Engage (formerly known as Yammer) as their go-to internal communication and collaboration network, and it’s not hard to see why. With Viva Engage, employees have access to all the tools, resources, and information they need to excel in their roles and work together seamlessly. It’s a central hub that connects teams across the organization and fosters a culture of engagement, productivity, and innovation.
However, as the platform grows, it can become overwhelming and noisy, with employees losing interest in the content shared. One AvePoint customer reported her team thought it was all “pet pictures and chicken recipes.” While there’s always room for personal expression, organizations must balance it with relevant and meaningful content to foster engagement and drive business success. Otherwise, you may end up wasting your investment.
But how do you determine what content will be relevant and meaningful to your team? Natively, Viva Engage offers some helpful insights, but the limited retention (just 90 days) and analytics in the out-of-the-box environment can only give a small taste of what’s working and what’s not.
Instead, you need powerful metrics that can tell the full story over time, helping you identify key metrics like top-performing communities, key influencers, and content that resonates best with employees.
With powerful analytics from tyGraph for Viva Engage, you can gather all the insights you need to achieve your employee experience goals in one place.
What is tyGraph for Viva Engage?
To get a deeper view into how your employees are leveraging your platforms and communication channels – and how you can improve that experience – you need tyGraph for Viva Engage.
tyGraph for Viva Engage is a robust analytics solution designed to optimize employee communications and leverage the value of your Viva Engage network with actionable insights gathered in one place. With tyGraph for Viva Engage, you can measure internal discussions around your initiatives – where they’re happening, who’s participating, and how it’s impacting your organization. This allows you to validate your internal messaging, measure its impact, and refine your strategy with analytics purpose-built for Viva Engage.
With tyGraph for Viva Engage, you get:
Rich Communication Analytics: Gather adoption metrics, engagement signals from posts, and cross-functional collaboration analytics in the context of your organization. Discover usage patterns, community performance, and communication trends to measure the success of your internal communications and identify areas for improvement.
Optimized Collaboration: Uncover engagement across your communities and assess the health of your network to improve its value. Target content towards top-performing communities and remove inactive communities to create an engaged and collaborative network.
More Impactful Communications: Shape your future initiatives by understanding how employees perceive your content. With insights into topics of interest and employee sentiment, deliver relevant content that resonates with your audience and drives engagement.
tyGraph for Viva Engage provides the critical analytics you need to transform Viva Engage into the employee engagement engine it was meant to be. When Viva Engage is operating at its full potential, you have a communication tool that hosts content that resonates with your employees, builds a more connected and engaged workforce, and enhances your digital workplace.
Strategies for Optimizing Your Company’s Viva Engage Platform
With tyGraph for Viva Engage analytics at your disposal, you have the power to transform your Viva Engage platform into a hub of communication and collaboration. Here are three strategies to get started:
Create a Viva Engage training program
When building a new community or launching a new campaign, your community managers are excited about the potential and possibilities – but that doesn’t mean they know how best to achieve their goals. With insights from tyGraph for Viva Engage, you can develop best practices that can help these managers succeed – like the type of content that works best, how often they should post, and the key influencers that can help their community grow. This program not only ensures community managers start on the right foot, but can help ensure these communities stay active, avoiding network sprawl for you to clean up later.
Curate your network
A cluttered and disjointed network can result in missed opportunities to engage with your target audience. Use tyGraph for Viva Engage to identify top-performing communities to ensure that your messages reach the right people, particularly useful when you need to communicate time-sensitive information. Take this a step further by getting rid of communities with low performance or worse – no activity in years. These communities add no value and will clutter your network, making it harder for employees seeking cross-functional collaboration opportunities.
Get leaders on board
Your employees want to hear from company leaders – and now you have the evidence you need to support this. With tyGraph’s new Q&A and Live Events features, you can quantify the value of executive engagement and offer them evidence to support their efforts. By using tyGraph insights, you can guide leaders on the right content, communities, and sentiment to have the most impact and foster a positive workplace culture.
The bottom line is this: tyGraph for Viva Engage provides a powerful set of tools to build an innovative digital workplace. By leveraging data insights, you can enhance employee experience, drive engagement, and boost productivity.
Final Thoughts
Internal communications tools are often overlooked when companies are defining their broader communication strategy. However, employee communications are the heart of the digital employee experience, and tools like Viva Engage can be a linchpin, connecting employees to build relationships with colleagues from around the globe…if you properly use them.
For leaders to make the most of these tools, they must have awareness of how they can best be leveraged for impact. This is only possible if you can measure performance metrics like adoption, usage, engagement, sentiment, and more. With tyGraph for Viva Engage, you can do all that and more, driving insights-driven communications and enabling you to leverage the value of your employee network for digital workplace success.
Kayla Haskins is a Content Marketing Manager at AvePoint, writing about all things cloud collaboration – including Power Platform, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. An advocate of operational governance and process automation, Kayla creates content that helps businesses manage technology to drive efficiencies in the modern workplace and make work/life balance a reality.