PHS Group: Yammer Case Study with Q&A
EMEA | Yammer & Viva Engage Festival 2022
Join us with Amy Ellis from PHS Group where she's sharing how PHS were able to transform its communication culture in just one year! Particularly with the support from leaders and Amy details just how important their role plays in this transformation.
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So my name is Amy, I'm the head of internal comms at PHS group.
We launched Yammer in December of last year, so we're at our one year anniversary, so I'm just going to kind of take everyone through what this first year has been like for us, so bear with, here's my first challenge of the day. Okay, can you guys see this? Looking good, yeah I can see it. Cool, so first of all I thought I would take you through a little bit about our company, a little bit about what our employees are like, so you can understand the type of company we've introduced Yammer into.
So as I said, I work for PHS group, PHS are the leading hygiene services provider in the UK, Ireland and Spain, so we provide washroom, floor care, health care and a range of specialist services and people always go, oh I don't know who you are, and then they see our logo and they go, yeah the little yellow lozenge. So basically if you've ever been in a public toilet, particularly in the UK, Ireland and Spain, you have seen the PHS logo, so our hygiene business provides and empties like sanitary bins, nappy bins, soap dispensers, hand dryers, all the really sexy stuff that you get in a public toilet. So the average person that works at PHS looks like this, so he's male, he's aged 44, he's been with us just over six years and he's out in a van all day, so this is a particularly hard demographic to communicate to anyway, especially with digital tools and this was kind of the employee we were aiming to get.
So next year PHS are 60 years old and to be honest their channel mix massively reflected that, so there was no working from home, no Teams, no Zoom, not even a sniff of Skype and actually there was no desire to communicate digitally either and then the pandemic hit and like lots of companies they suddenly had to change everything and it had a really big impact on PHS and how they communicated. So traditionally they relied on posters, word of mouth, they had daily meetings with managers and suddenly they had to adopt new ways of working. So they rolled out Microsoft Teams overnight in March 2020 and they've been working flexibly and successfully ever since.
In January 2021 they asked me to join as the head of internal comms, so that's me out with the man in the van, that is Arvind, one of our longest serving employees showing me the ropes and it was very clear to me after chatting with people that worked there and after doing a channel audit of my own that there were actually a lot of broadcast channels at PHS and not enough collaboration channels but people were adapting to change well, there was clear momentum behind using more digital tools and I could immediately see the gap for some sort of kind of social media platform and I knew that I felt that was the right thing to do but actually I wanted to go to my board with some data and some analytics to say well this is what our people want. So I asked them what do you think of PHS, what do you think of our communication and generally they were very positive. So we had an 82% response rate and we had 75% positive employee engagement and our people generally told us they were really proud to work at PHS but we needed to work on making people feel valued particularly by leadership and to have better two-way communications.
So as a business these became our objectives and therefore they became our comms objectives as well and these were better leadership engagement so specifically seeing more of them and having direct conversations, being better at knowledge sharing so actually ensuring people knew how to find out what was going on and being part of the conversation. So having an inclusive community to create cross-business relationships and bring back some of the fun that people felt they were missing because they were now kind of spread out across the country. So with that in mind we made the decision that Yammer would be a good choice for us so how did I start? So before I even started anything I actually reached out to my external LinkedIn network and I got hooked up with an awesome communicator who I believe now works for Gemma Saint.
So Gemma and I have been friends now for about a year and Gemma helped me with my initial thinking around Yammer. Gemma actually recommended that I bring someone into the team who was to manage the setup and the launch of Yammer and who would really be the driving force behind the success of it so we hired James. When James joined the team we then reached out to our IT team and we formed a project team and what this did was it helped us to really ensure we had all the right policies and procedures in place as well as all the right permissions across the company so if we told people they were going to find it in Teams they would find it in Teams.
If we had a URL we knew it was whitelisted for everybody and they were really really helpful for us. And finally we looked across our business for our champions who are our comms champions and they were already there they were people who were passionate about engagement they were already doing comms in their own areas and they became our kind of eyes ears mouths and our biggest advocates for Yammer really so we gave them early access and they helped us with a lot of our early decision making and I think what I really want to say with that is that I didn't do this alone so it was a huge team effort and it continues to be every day to continue to make Yammer a success at PHS. So how do we do it? So as I said we launched in December so we launched with a Christmas Advent calendar that we called the Advent of Yammer and following Gemma's recommendation we shared snippets of little bits of Yammer every day in the lead-up to launch and it got people a bit excited.
We shared it via email and through teams because they were the channels that people were using at the time and then when Yammer launched we moved everything completely onto Yammer and had a completely Yammer focused campaign. So within about three months we had a third of PHS using it every day and it wasn't an initial objective but readership did increase but most importantly for me what we did was give people a voice as we can see very quickly and you can see the stat there that 96 percent of content was being posted by colleagues outside of internal comms. So yes we were there we were kind of needling away but people were generating their own content and were able to do that for the very first time ever.
So my next step was actually to bring in SWOOP. What I recognised quite early was that I could get my own data on how many people were using it, I could measure the number of reactions and comments compared to when we posted on the internet but SWOOP could actually help me measure what those initial objectives were. So these objectives, so the leadership engagement, the knowledge sharing and being part of the conversation and I'm just going to run through very quickly the reports that we have found most useful in measuring these kind of objectives.
So these are the ones that we're using so for better leadership engagement we massively use our influential people report. So you can see the two reports on the right there, the one to the left is influential people in the whole company, Matthew Brabin is our CEO and he's just behind me and James at the moment but I would like to see him overtake us in time and for us to drop out of this top 10. And the other one is our hygiene operations department which is our biggest department and Chris Rowe is the director of that department and Catherine Blackwell who sits at number one is his comms champion.
So we can see that these people are having better leadership engagement. For the knowledge sharing we use the most engaging post tool which the CEO and the head of showed you earlier but I'll show you again in a minute how we use that and then for two-way communication we rely on this two-way relationships report and the response rate report and it shows us that our people are more interactive across this platform than again they've ever been and we didn't keep all this data to ourselves we've actually rolled out SWOOP across PHS so our leadership have access to it, our comms champions have access to it and our well-being coordinators have access to it and these are all people that understand the role that SWOOP can play and it allows us to coach them in becoming better communicators themselves and I've got an example of this for you so this is Claire. Claire is our commercial director and this is a post that Claire put out in January and this is the post that Claire put out in August so they look like two very similar posts but they performed very differently and I'll just break that down on the next slide.
So in the August post Claire posted an all company rather than just to a small community like she had done before. She asked a question, she included a photo and she replied to all of the comments that came in as a result of her question and her post went from being seen from by 61 people to 919 people, had 10 reactions to 58 reactions and zero comments to over 50 and we were able to do this with Claire because we could show her using SWOOP what could look like, what were people engaging with using this tool, the impact of attachments report, you know she had access to this but we could sit down and say to her look these are the things that are performing and this is why and it's coached her to be a better communicator all by herself. So she obviously posted that second picture from her garden that's where she's doing it and she's taking advice and advantage of all of the data that we have available to us.
So where are we now? So we've just run our 2022 engagement survey, we had an 84% response rate this time which is up from 82 and our engagement has increased from 75% to 80%. Now every single question in our survey around communication improved and in fact every single question around leadership improved as well so we know Yammer has made a difference. We now have about 70% of people at PHS on Yammer every month, only about 35% of these are active so we know we have a way to go but for us as a team and people testament to this we're always saying well what can we do next, where are we going next so that is what we are looking at now is what do we do to make 2023 an even better year for us.
So for me we've developed a real Yammer powered communication culture which I'm really proud of and we've made the decision to simplify our channel mix even further so currently we only regularly communicate to people from the business via Yammer or via email so we do have quarterly webinars as well so people can hear from our leadership but they are our two core communication channels and what that simplification has meant is that our people know where to find information quickly and easily and that's especially true for those on the move so we're now in the process of removing our intranet so since the advent of Yammer it just does not get used like it used to it's no longer a news channel and instead for us we will just be using it as a SharePoint site where we keep our policies our documents and our useful links but the window to get there is still going to be through Yammer. In addition as I said we're about to hit our one year Yammer anniversary and we're using that as an opportunity to ask our people what do they love what do they hate what do they like what would they like to see more of what they like to see less of and we're asking this in an email rather than on Yammer because we want to get feedback from people that aren't using it so we can understand that a little bit better as well so that will be happening in the next week or so so keep posted how that goes but we know that Yammer has positively influenced the channel mix and the communication at PHS so far. So this is my last slide what I've taken you through is a very whistle-stop tour of our first year but what I want to point out is that it wasn't all perfect yes we've come out with a really great result after year one but we absolutely had challenges and these are the things if I were to do it again I would do the same and the things that I would do differently so I'll just talk through those very quickly so I would hire James again he's on the call so he's probably really pleased to hear that but Gemma was absolutely right having someone who owned the channel loved it was active answers questions connects people it was just absolutely invaluable and it's not something I could have done alongside my day job I would have brought in Throop again because it's allowed us to measure the business objectives and we've become a much more strategic function as a result our board and our leadership are no longer looking to us to just push out an email they're actually listening to what we're talking about we have a seat at that table because we can you know put data into their business objectives which is something that obviously they're aiming towards so our objectives is I would say be really clear on them because it does help drive decision making so we wanted Yammer to be a really open and inclusive space so we made decisions very early that we only have open communities we have no closed communities in Yammer at all and we also made the decision not to pre-populate any communities either we wanted people to feel like it was relevant and for them to choose what they wanted to see and the only exceptions with that is the news channel and the channel that holds all the information around our EAP other than that people are free to choose what they want to opt in of rather than opting out of so the comms champions so absolutely love this I support this as a concept we absolutely could have done more and I'll come on to that in a second the leadership engagement was such an important piece so we spent months in the lead up to launching Yammer going through the what ifs what if this happens or what if this person does this or what if they say that spoiler alert no one has actually done that but all of that months of hard work has been so so valuable because when Yammer was ready they were ready so they were on there on day one they had no worries about it and that has allowed us to to give permission to others if the HR director is talking about the world cup last night other people feel like they can get involved in that conversation so they really have allowed people to know this is something that they're allowed to do in work time and it doesn't have to be just about work stuff.
I would collaborate with IT again they were our allies and not our barriers in this and they wanted it to work just as much as we did and they're still really helpful to us they set up a lot of reports where if people use the naughty word you know us getting notified of it or what happens if someone reports a post and their kind of service desk is available a lot a lot quicker than we are so they're still actively involved in the day-to-day of Yammer as well and I would use any data that you have to align what people are telling you and where Yammer can fill the gap so it's not just about what you can see as a comms team as an opportunity it's what your people are saying and I honestly believe it's the reason we've been so successful is our people wanted this they just didn't know they did it they didn't know they did they were telling us all the things they wanted and it was our job to fill the gap that they wanted this and then the things that I could have done differently so I would have engaged a lot earlier with our middle management particularly those managing our drivers so we've done a piece of work around who currently isn't using Yammer and in our hygiene operations area 75% are using it but the 25% that aren't are drivers and they're in the older age category so they're kind of 55 plus and so now we're working with their managers who see them at least once a week to help them engage with Yammer so they can sit down with them and say oh have you seen Yammer let me help you get it onto your phone let me help you show you how you can use it and what you can find on there and we're playing catch up with that a little bit now and I wish we'd done it earlier and the comms champions so as I said I love the concepts but I believe we could have done a lot more I feel like we were focused on what we needed from them to be successful as opposed to what we could have done with them and for them so I think we could have really made them a stronger network and a stronger tribe where they could have learned from each other and shared ideas and I would have done that if we'd done it differently and finally and I think the Danfoss guys talked about this is have pre-dated content because we didn't do this and on day one our champions were really good at going in and having a look at what was on there but there wasn't an awful lot of stuff to look at so it almost felt like a little bit of an anti-climax on day one so yeah we just shoved in some competitions quickly but yeah that's something again that I would have done a little bit differently if I'd have my time again. So that's it from my story obviously I know there's probably some questions, James is also on the call so if there are any questions specifically around communities I'm happy for James to answer those as well. I think we're about on time Pete, thank you.
You've nailed it Amy that is fantastic we've had a bunch of questions lots of comments and I saw lots of emojis flying around while you were talking so really appreciate you sharing your experience and some amazing results that you've had. I'll start with a few questions from the Q&A and the first one I wanted to pick out is interesting from Lisa who is in Germany who says what are your suggestions to motivate colleagues to engage more on Yammer? In Germany we have the problem that they can't see the added value and they're still very reserved what do you do to inspire and motivate colleagues to get involved? Yeah it's a great question so we run a lot of Yammer only campaigns so we almost want to make people have a bit of FOMO of what am I missing out on so we never, what I will say is never underestimate the power of still using something like email when you're still really early in your Yammer journey so very rarely do we send out an email that doesn't have some sort of link to something in Yammer to kind of get people to click through and get on there and actually just have a look so for us the motivation is just telling people what's going on on there and what they're missing out on and that's that is working in terms of getting people on there. We've also done a few other tricky things so we moved the link where people book holiday and see their payslips off our internet and onto Yammer so they can only access that now if they go on to Yammer so we just try out a few things like this and that's why I love this community because I'm sure there's so many things we haven't tried and something that I am really proud of is that we're always happy to try anything and give anything a go and our leadership are behind that so in terms of motivation what we have used so far is more the FOMO so rather than it being the stick it's the carrot of what you're missing out on and we run a lot of competitions we run a lot of questions that we ask people what do you think about this or polls on that so the company that owns us is a company in South Africa and they recently asked our people well we've got a new engagement app what could we name it so we ran the poll on Yammer so giving people the opportunity to get involved on those things on that platform is what it seems to kind of get people to go on there a little bit more.
Yeah cool, I had a question that I selfishly want to ask but it did get a few likes in there you mentioned your average employee is this man in a van how much training did you need to give them to get them across how to use Yammer if any at all? So we never sat down with them all individually and I think as I said that's the bit that we missed I think that we should have done more and we could have done more but as a team it is only me and James so we are a very small team trying to do this so James did a lot of work I'm very blessed to have James, James used to be a cameraman at the BBC so he's very good with video but we made a lot of videos for people to watch and we've done a lot of lives like team lives James is always really happy to jump on to calls on one-on-ones he attends team meetings so we have done a lot of training in that respect and we didn't do a lot of it up front we let people make their own way to Yammer and as they've had questions as they've gone along we have done that we did train the comms champions and we said to them you know you guys can now go and you know if people have specific questions help us out a little bit but yeah we did a lot on video we did a lot of recorded stuff we also did stuff live so people could ask us questions but we didn't have a set way of how we were going to do it because PHS have never ever ever had a tool like this in their lives we didn't know how this was going to be adopted so we kind of just wanted to see it play out and see what would happen and what people would think and we've adapted our kind of comms strategy as we've been going along which so far has proved to be the best way to do it I think for us. I think having sort of been with you on a lot of that journey and catching up with you over over the months I think it is worth remarking on the your team yourself and James really have that mindset of adaptability and discovery and so it's been really cool working with you seeing how you're using the data giving the insights trying stuff learning and then adapting so I just want to kind of give yeah give you a big thumbs up from me having I work with lots of organizations and yeah you're you shouldn't have favorites but I think PHS is up there as one of mine. Another question we've got a couple more minutes a few more minutes I do want to ask this question it's come up from a couple of people around sort of saying could you please elaborate on how you see Yammer replacing your intranet and someone else was saying they're wondering why you're not embedding Yammer in the intranet rather than keeping them separate so a little a little more on that intranet piece and how you see that working would be great.
Yeah absolutely so the intranet of PHS is about seven years old and it's something that I inherited when I got there and I'll be honest it was a mess it's it's never really been reviewed in those seven years it was very hard to look at anything on there the search function was useless and we could see from the analytics in the background that it wasn't just us that thought this people weren't really using it anyway and the only reason news was being posted on there was because there was nowhere else for it to go so we didn't want to make the decision very early on to get rid of the intranet we wanted to make sure that Yammer was going to be a success first and what it has shown is even one now as Yammer usage is increasing the use of the intranet is going down and down and down so we are not replacing I know it sounds like dramatic we're replacing our intranet but we're not replacing a tool that is actively being used by majority of people we're replacing a tool that actually isn't fit for purpose anymore it isn't a news channel people don't need to use it like that if we had a successful intranet maybe our strategy on that would have been different but what we had was somewhere that people thought they could find news but it was too difficult to find news and people weren't using it effectively and as I said the analytics in the background told us that like 0.1% of users were a mobile user when you consider the majority of our guys that are a mobile user out on the road they weren't using it so that's why we didn't embed Yammer into it properly it's why that we aren't looking at keeping it as it currently is it's just it's not fit for purpose for us anymore but I wouldn't have been able to make that decision a year ago because I didn't have anything to replace it with now we've got something that is being able to replace it with that is working that leadership are behind it makes the most sense to put our time and effort into that than any more time and effort and money into replacing an intranet that just isn't isn't being used. Now fascinating really really interesting I and yeah I respect again your experimental nature you're pushing boundaries I'm also thinking James got mentioned in the chat a couple of times your pay rise conversation after all the praise you're getting today there's another angle the cost of the reduced cost of owning of managing an intranet you know you can put a money value to that right and buy that but like it's just brilliant to hear you know most people let's be fair when they're washing their hands in a public restroom and seeing the PHS logo they wouldn't necessarily think this is a super innovative organization that's breaking boundaries as far as internal communications digital communications goes but I think you've shown that don't judge until you know the story so it's really cool to hear the fantastic work you're doing at PHS and yeah I look forward to seeing where it goes next I think it'd be fascinating we're launching SWOOP for SharePoint as you know and maybe in a year's time we do a SharePoint festival and you can come and tell the story of how you don't have an intranet and what that looks like so it might be an interesting angle but like thank you thank you so much for for coming on and sharing your story there are more questions in in the Q&A section if anybody we have one minute left if anybody has a burning desire to come off mute and ask a question of Amy or James you have one minute to do just that I will open the floor now that's a shame isn't it back on mute and off camera yeah yeah it's a it's a scary thing when you've got this many people on a call to jump off mute but yeah thanks again both and really appreciate your time and your sharing I think a lot of people would have taken a lot away from from your your presentation so thank you yeah and we're happy to be contacted if anyone wants to so obviously like to find us on LinkedIn and yeah happy to have those conversations we wouldn't be where we were if Gemma hadn't offered to do that for me so we're always happy to to share the love lovely thank you for having us guys cheers thank you so much
Meet the speaker:
Amy Ellis
Head of Internal Communications,
PHS Group
