ABB employees have 50,000 reasons to discover Yammer

If two is company and three is a crowd, 50,000 is one pretty large community. As of today, ABB employes now have 50,000 reasons to be on Yammer – and counting, fast.

ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the company employs 150,000 people and operates in approximately 100 countries. The firm’s shares are traded on the stock exchanges of Zurich, Stockholm and New York.

Here Veronique Vallieres, @verovallieres, Internal Communications & Community Manager at ABB shares their story.

Over to you Veronique…

50,000 ABB employees are now members of our enterprise social network (ESN) introduced earlier this year: that’s one third of our global workforce and it also makes us one of the fastest growing ESNs in the world.

Across our complex and varied organisation, people have equally diverse reasons to embrace enterprise social collaboration.

Many use it to capture, share and spread knowledge faster with their teams. Bill Black, head of Quality and OPEX (Operational Excellence), says Yammer makes a difference in the OPEX and Project Management communities, the largest in our Yammer network with more than 2,300 members.

Some managers use it to engage in a more transparent dialogue with their teams, often spread across the globe in different time zones.

This is the case of Pether Jonsson, head of Customer Contact Management, who shares his insights around Yammer.

Others, such as Alex Hall, head of Group Function Finance, use it to crowdsource input across the group function and beyond in a way that wouldn’t be possible via email or teleconferencing.

Whether it is used to achieve faster response time to our clients, a more transparent team culture in a business unit or shorter time-to-value around a project launch, there are probably 50,000 ways in which Yammer can generate value for our business.

Rome wasn’t built in a day of course: going social is a journey, not a sprint, and we will need time to adapt our ways of working to fit these modern collaboration tools.

There are challenges that come with empowering employees to evolve freely, but investing quality time in enterprise social is key to driving innovation in ABB.

On our journey to enterprise collaboration, Yammer is just one piece of the puzzle where collaboration comes to life through exchanges and conversations away from our silos.

What’s next?
With the upcoming migration to the Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise suite as a next step, it is as if all the new and upgraded tools came together to work seamlessly across devices and platforms, online and offline, making collaboration around documents and with people inside and outside of the organisation easier to use and more accessible than ever.
 
The final piece of the puzzle will come soon in the form of a new landing page, expected to be launched in late Q1. It will act as a hub for all our collaboration tools onto one platform, integrated and personalised in a way that will greatly simplify cross-functional collaboration.

Post author: Veronique Vallieres.

Thank you for sharing your story Veronique. Lots of excellent examples there of how Yammer is helping ABB employees connect and communicate internally, and brilliant to see it being championed and used from the top. What did you think when reading through?

Got a story to share or question about using enterprise social networks? Feel free to comment below or Tweet me @AllthingsIC.

Further reading
Want to know more about using Yammer? I’ve published numerous articles on my blog over the years. You can see some of them below.

Rachel Miller.