Top 5 Yammer Alternatives for Internal Communications

The last couple of years have changed the workplace drastically. Hybrid work, the increased role of digitalization, the importance of employee engagement. Modern employees want greater flexibility and autonomy in their work, and employers are trying to catch up with these needs and keep their workforce engaged and productive.

This has resulted in an increase in internal communication and collaboration software. One of such solutions is Yammer powered by Microsoft 365. Yammer is an IC, collaboration and task-tracking software. Its main purpose is to allow seamless top-down communication while boosting social networking within the company. Yammer is quite popular among Microsoft fans. However, it might not satisfy all the needs of an IC professional.

If you’re looking for a Yammer alternative, you’ve come to the right place. Below you’re going to find the 5 best Yammer alternatives, one of which might be a perfect fit for you.

📚Read about other internal communications apps in our blog

How to Choose a Yammer Alternative

Before diving into Yammer alternatives, it’s worth to reflect on your why. What are the communication goals and KPIs you’re trying to achieve with the IC software? How are you going to tie those with business goals? What’s something that has been working particularly well? And are there any areas you’re missing out on? For instance, if your engagement rates have dropped recently, it might make sense to send out an employee survey to find out the reason behind it.

Remember also to look back on your Yammer journey and identify the characteristics that you liked and disliked. Yammer has many relevant features in areas of top-down communication, collaboration and task-tracking. You might want to create a simple table of pros and cons to make sure that your future IC tool will fit the requirements. For example, on the pros side there might be supporting different media formats, comprehensible news feed and collaboration features while on the cons side there will be information overload, too many notifications etc.

💡More on the topic: check out the 8 steps to build an effective internal communications strategy

Some of the feature to keep in mind while looking for a Yammer alternative are:

1. Targeted communications

One of the main reasons IC professionals are looking for Yammer alternatives is information overload. It’s been proven many times that information overload not only slows down productivity, it’s also detrimental to mental and physical health. Therefore, to keep your employees happy, healthy and engaged, it’s crucial to use targeted top-down communications. When looking for a Yammer alternative, pay attention that your potential provider has options to filter communications by language, department, location and so on.

💡Pro tip: targeted communications is a must-have if you want to attract and keep younger generations in the workplace

2. Knowledge management

Poor internal comms and knowledge sharing is quite costly. Employees spend 2.5 hours per day looking for the right information, which translates into thousands lost in revenue. Providing your employees with one comprehensible platform for knowledge sharing will both save your company money and improve levels of employee engagement.

3. Security

Data security is a must-have if you want to protect your employee and customer experience. Therefore, you should look for a solution that has, at least, GDPR and ISO 27001 compliance.

4. Extensive analytics

While many solutions provide some basic analytics on reach, engagement and reactions of your communications, it is important to go beyond these metrics. When choosing a Yammer alternative, check out whether the solution has granular analytics that provide you with the data on certain posts and audiences.

Remember that every number should be tied back either to your IC KPIs or business goals. If you’re not sure what drives a particular response to your communication campaigns, it’s worthwhile to send an employee survey to your audiences to identify the reason behind their behavior.

💡Learn more about employee surveys

5. Engagement surveys

Don’t just limit yourself to the features that are absolutely identical to the ones of Yammer. Take one step further: think of tracking the progress of your communication campaigns by measuring engagement and productivity.

Employee engagement is not just a trend anymore, it’s an important business metric internal comms and HR professionals have to take into consideration to prove the success of their initiatives. Companies with highly engaged employees are, on average, 20% more profitable and experience up to 41% less absenteeism.

Tracking the levels of engagement is easy if the Yammer alternative of your choice has a built-in surveys feature, which, in addition to extensive analytics, allows to get in-depth insights on your communication campaigns performance and prevent the problems before they occur.

📚Read on: Absenteeism In the Workplace: Definition, Cost, Reasons, and Best Practices

6. Integrations

Take a look at your current tech stack. You want your Yammer alternative to integrate with the other tools in your stack nicely. Remember to think about the future as well. According to HubSpot, 74% of businesses have disconnected tools they need to navigate in order to get the job done. Make sure you’re not part of this percentage by looking for software that enables integrations through third-party tools like Zapier.

7. Mobile app

The importance of mobile-first technology is ever-growing. Research highlights that 91% of employees are using at least one mobile app in the workplace. Therefore, when looking for the Yammer alternative, it is important to check that the mobile version of the software is adapted for mobile and it’s not just a sized-down desktop version.

It’s also worth checking whether the mobile app is suitable for deskless workers. As many frontline workers might not have a company email, it is a good idea to see whether the access without the company email is even possible.

8. User experience

This one might appear obvious, yet it’s important. User experience can make or break your adoption rates, and you want your Yammer alternative to be used internally. If your internal audiences consist of multigenerational workforce, it might prove worthy to run a short feedback survey on the current usage of Yammer. Keep in mind that simplicity, ease of use and reduced time on searching for information are welcomed features among users from all generations.

📚Read more about managing a multigenerational workforce

Top 5 Yammer Alternatives

Hopefully, the previous section helped you map out what the best Yammer alternative should look like for you. It is worth mentioning that there are many internal comms and collaboration tools that can be a solid Yammer alternative. However, in this blog, we’re only going to cover the 5 most suitable and/or popular Yammer alternatives to make your research easier.

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Haiilo

Haiilo is an employee communications platform that allows a 360° overview of your internal comms. Haiilo combines capabilities of top-down multi-channel communications as well as bottom-up comms, community features and knowledge storage. On top of that, it has engagement surveys feature and extensive analytics that’ll help you understand your workforce and tailor your IC strategy to their needs. This make Haiilo a perfect Yammer alternative.

Unlike Yammer, the Haiilo platform is very conservative with notifications. Your employees will receive targeted communications, which means that the message is always relevant for their role, location or whichever segmentation you decide to put in place. Speaking of segmentation, Haiilo allows for a granular role segmentation, which is crucial for many enterprise companies.

Haiilo has much to offer to enterprise companies: rich media content, white labelling, ISO and GDPR compliance, employee advocacy features. However, these features might be redundant for smaller companies. If you’re an IC professional from a start-up or a scale-up, keep reading! We might have a perfect idea just for you.

Haiilo’s top features:

• combines targeted communications and knowledge management
• mobile app that can be accessed even without a company email
• extensive analytics for better understanding of your internal audiences
• built-in employee surveys
• white labelling
• ISO and GDPR compliance
• supports various content formats
• calendar function for a better planning of your communication campaigns
• extensive advocacy features to help you tie internal and external comms together

Drawbacks:

• mobile version can be improved
• lacks the ability to link persons or companies directly in the sharing messages
• Excel export can be improved

Workplace by Facebook

Workplace by Facebook is the business version of the same social media. While Workplace and Facebook accounts are separate (meaning you will have to have two sets of credentials, and the accounts won’t be connected), the Workplace features are built on those of Facebook. This makes Workplace by Facebook a good Yammer alternative as it not only follows the same principle of combining collaboration and top-down communication, the functionality is already well-known to Facebook users, which should make adoption rates relatively high.

With that being said, it’s worth mentioning that employees will have newsfeed for top-down communication, chats for collaboration and building relationships with colleagues. Workplace supports video streaming, and there’s a shared library for all the essential documents you might want to store for your current and future employees.

On the other hand, users continuously report information overload due to extensive functionalities and intrusive notifications. Another area of frustration is the lack of autonomy since removing employees would require contacting the support.

Workplace by Facebook top features:

• features are known to your employees
• supporting different media formats for seamless communication
• support both top-down communication and collaboration
• will be perfect for small businesses
• live chat messenger
• single sign-on
• allows for video streaming -> you can save up on zoom licenses

Drawbacks:

• real time notifications can be distracting
• can create group chats for only up to 50 colleagues
• the need to contact customer support for some basic admin functions (like deleting employees)

Workvivo

Workvivo, as another Yammer alternative, combines social network and intranet features. It also integrates easily with many different tools in IC space and has developed omnichannel features. All of the above makes Workvivo a good Yammer alternative in collaboration and top-down communication. Unlike Yammer, Workvivo is quite popular among its users for its user interface and sleek design. It also allows white-labeling, which can be very important for many companies.

On the other hand, Workvivo users report that mobile and desktop versions are not identical, which makes it less convenient for deskless employees. Furthermore, Workvivo doesn’t have extensive analytics. The analytics will still be sufficient to track the overall performance of internal comms. However, if you want to drill down and get actionable insights on which type of content performs better and which internal audience is more engaged and why, you might want to look for another solution.

Workvivo’s top features:

• combines intranet and social network features
• user-friendly interface
• white labelling
• supports different content formats
• perfect for mid-size businesses
• extensive integrations list

Drawbacks:

• mobile and desktop versions are not identical
• advocacy features are limited to sharing external links only
• text formatting can be improved

SharePoint

Depending on your internal comms KPIs, you might consider SharePoint as a Yammer alternative. While SharePoint doesn’t have options for collaboration or social networking, its robust knowledge storage features can replace Yammer in terms of knowledge management and potentially top-down communication. Just as Yammer, SharePoint is one of the line products of Microsoft 365, which might make it easier to integrate in your existing tech ecosystem if you’re already using Teams or the whole Microsoft suite.

At the same time, SharePoint doesn’t have a user-friendly interface, which usually results in lower adoption rates. This issue, however, can be fixed with the right integration in place. Another issue is lacking targeted communications. Their analytics are at the basic level, which makes it harder to track how well knowledge in your company is distributed.

SharePoint’s top features

• robust knowledge storing features
• highly customizable
• integrates easily with other tools
• already familiar to many employees
• can work for a company of any size
• provides many templates

Drawbacks:

• sharing with external stakeholders is not possible
• the set-up will require professional support
• user experience can be improved
• requires an extensive onboarding in order to master the tool

Google Workspace

Google Workspace includes all the productivity and collaboration tools under one cloud. It has a similar interface to Microsoft 365 suite, which makes it a solid Yammer alternative. What’s more, Google Workspace will fit into your existing tech ecosystem nicely. G-suite allows for collaboration right within the project document, so there’s no need to switch between different tools to get things done. It has a user-friendly interface that is already known to most of your employees (if not to all of them).

On the other hand, while Google Workspace can be a good Yammer alternative when it comes to collaboration and knowledge storing, it doesn’t allow for top-down communication. Sure, you can use email for keeping your people informed. However, modern IC tools offer a more elegant and fuss-free way of sending out targeted communications that will find your employees where they are. The complicated language in the Workplace instructions appears to be another area of frustrations for many users, since it make the process of solving issues uneasy.

Summing it up, Google Workspace can be a good Yammer alternative especially in combination with some other IC tools.

Google Workspace’s top features:

• features allow for smooth collaboration within any of the Google documents
• robust knowledge storage with a search bar powered by algorithms
• customizable which allows your employees to adjust G-suit to fit their working style
• integrates with many tools easily
• includes video streaming feature
• mobile version is similar to the desktop version

Drawbacks:

• some integrations can be improved
• instructions are not very user-friendly
• the software is on the pricier end

Conclusion

Whichever Yammer alternative you choose, keep in mind that your end goal should be increasing levels of employee engagement. Of course, top-down communication is essential, and it is the first step towards a more aligned and productive workforce. However, in order to connect your communication goals with business goals, you should think of solutions that allow you to keep your employees engaged.

Get you free demo now to see how Haiilo can help you keep your employees informed and engaged.