As we draw to the end of another unsettled and challenging year, it’s good to spend these final weeks to take time out and reflect on some of the positives we can take into 2022. It has been a challenging year, no doubt. You only have to consider your local shopkeepers, and the impact the pandemic has had on their livelihoods, to put into perspective your own business challenges. As a virtual company, we at SWOOP Analytics are grateful for being one of the lucky ones who have experienced minimal disruptions to our day-to-day work. 

In this review we are looking at the key topics and trends we have analysed and reported on in 2021. Knowledge sharing is in our DNA. We believe that by freely sharing what we know, and helping others to do likewise, we can build a healthy and vibrant company, with customers and partners that share our values. 

SWOOP review in numbers

We are analytics company, so don’t be surprised that we want to indulge in some vanity metrics with you:

This is the first time we have done this, so it was somewhat of surprise to just how much we have shared over the past 12 months.

Topics we have reported on

Not surprisingly, we started the year advising on goal setting; a common activity to start the year with. And to help our SWOOP customers set and monitor their collaboration goals, we built a facility directly into the SWOOP dashboard. 

It’s nice to think that having set our goals we would diligently work towards achieving them, and nothing will divert us from that journey. In reality, the world is never that simple. Invariably we will fail to meet some of our collaboration goals. In these cases, we need to know how to respond and course-correct. We provided some guidance to our SWOOP customers on what to look for.  

Emerging from our 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report, it quickly became apparent that staff were unclear about just where to host their digital group activities; Teams, Yammer, Workplace, email? We addressed this in several blog posts. We advised on promoting group activity on the enterprise social networking (ESN) platforms of Yammer and Workplace from Meta. We provided guidance on how to develop a thriving community on your ESN platform. We promoted multi-group participation on these platforms as a means for diversifying your experience and expertise. Groups in the Microsoft Teams context was addressed as a “right-sizing issue”. We identified how Teams were created and defined in Teams was variable. Finally, we identified that moving groups between Yammer and Teams might become a more frequent need. We provided some guidance on moving groups between the two platforms. 

If your organisation was slow with digital transformation, the choice was largely removed when staff were forced into working from home (WFH) in 2020. We used our 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Study to identify just how progressive organisations were actually changing. We found many organisations were only minimally changing; simply swapping in-person meetings with online meetings. Others, however, had embraced the opportunity to fully exploit the functions provided by their digital platforms; and were reaping the benefits. We called on our consulting partners, who have helped many organisations with their digital transformation journeys, to share their best tips. 

Our Teams benchmarking identified use cases for different roles. We provided specific guidance for project managers, teachers, IT staff and frontline workers for their use of Teams.  

Educating leaders on their digital engagement skills has become a common use of SWOOP. Leaders are now expected to be competent on both internal and external social media channels. We explored with our partner the Propel Group, who specialise in coaching leaders on their use of external social media, to provide commentary on leaders that are excelling on both internal and external social media channels. 

In November we released our 7th annual Yammer Benchmarking Report. This year we decided to award Yammer leadership across the three regions of APAC, Europe and the Amercias. For the first time we looked for Yammer community stories from our benchmarked leaders; and were delighted by the response. Here is just one from one of our European benchmarked leaders, Transport for London, with many more provided with the report. 

Our crowning collaboration event for 2021 was the inaugural Yammer Community Festival, a joint event with Microsoft. With almost 1,200 registrants from around the world, the event was a raging success. If you missed the event we recorded it all, freely shared here. 

As we spoke to our benchmarked leaders for Yammer and Microsoft Teams, we were consistently being told, “it’s not just about Yammer/Workplace and Teams; we have people who live in email, OneDrive, SharePoint etc.” What we were hearing is that organisations were suffering from collaboration channel overload. We heard about a lack of governance on what tool to use when. The result was that people were now very digitally active, but the mismatch in collaboration channels was creating collaboration chaos. At SWOOP, we sat back to reflect on what we were hearing from both our clients and consulting partners. It became apparent the problem was in mismatched digital collaboration habits. We bit the bullet and nominated 7 digital (bad) habits we heard about across the full Microsoft M365 suite. We followed this up with some guidance in developing good digital habits. We were careful to identify that best practice digital habits involved a balance of tool usage and not a selection of one tool or usage pattern, at the exclusion of others.  

We have not stopped at simply reporting on these issues. We have developed a product (SWOOP for M365) focused on helping people develop better digital collaboration habits. As with all SWOOP products, we believe that when staff can see how they are working, they are better placed to change entrenched bad habits. It’s currently in its beta release and will be available for full release by the end of January 2022. 

Beyond publishing 

While we see that sharing what we know and discover is central to being seen as thought leaders in our area; we always aim to follow our own advice, and aim to engage in two-way discussions. Our benchmarking is central to facilitating the rich two-way discussions that we love to engage in. 2021, paradoxically, has been the year we have been able to engage in the most number of formal interviews and conversations ever; all online. If anything, working from home has been able to better facilitate this.  

We certainly miss the ability to meet with our customers and partners face-to-face. And we hope that 2022 will enable us to resume that practice. But even if this proves again to be beyond us, we know that 2022 will also be filled with rich conversations that we will continue to freely share with you. 

We would like to acknowledge those that have given freely through our benchmarking, events, videos and webinars. You are the best! 

Accenture, Aggreko, ANZ, Aon, Blue Yonder, Carpool, Chaucer, Coca-Cola, Cognizant, Comcast, Cricket Australia, Designing Collaboration, Engage Squared, EY, Fidelity Investments, Griffith University, Humana, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, LinkedIn, Medibank, Microsoft, Nestle, NRMA, NZ Post, NSW Department of Education, OrangeTrail, Origin Energy, RACQ, RealFoundations, Regione Emilia Romagna, Richemont/Cartier, ROI Communication, Sanofi, Siemans Energy, St John WA, Talk Social To Me, The Big Picture People, The Home Depot, Transport for London, Union for Reform Judaism, Victoria Police, Wiley, WM Reply and more.