Echometer vs. Microsoft Viva Engage

I think Echometer is perfect for anyone who wants to bring better structure, accountability, and historical tracking to their retros. Anyone who wants to convert feedback into action items and track progress between retros will be particularly suited for Echometer. This is also a great tool for someone trying to figure out how to run retros, as it provides structures and lots of presets to try out!

Yammer is great when you have a company culture that encourages friendly collaboration and communication. It can be a great supplement (but certainly not a substitute) for bonding and sharing ideas and thoughts. Certain channels can be really successful, too, like a channel where people can post dog pictures or something fun like that!

Incentivized

• Collecting feedback via survey prior to our retros
• Real-time feedback collection during our retros
• Easy to review feedback and prioritize
• Historical views of trends over time

• Providing a platform for social news in the company where "bottom up" topics can percolate freely across department
• Social networking across the company where folks can divide their work into topics instead of teams
• Basic collaboration within a group including document sharing with ability to pin documents to a team

Incentivized

• It would be nice to treat action items as more of a checklist
• We occasionally have issues with participants dropping and re-joining

• Although the social enterprise network works very well, there is room for some slight improvement - such as the ability to attract users. By being part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is offered as an "add-on" and many overlook it and see it as unnecessary at first. It would be smart for Microsoft to sell it as its own product so it could gather more popularity as a "social network".
• Giving an option to filter results could be better as well as giving an option to turn off the "recent activity" bar on the home page.

Incentivized

Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.

It took just one retro to explore the UI and figure out what features and functionality are available, and to understand how to run retros in the platform! I always prefer to try something out in order to learn it, and this platform was easy to understand. The survey collection is especially intuitive and easy to follow, and makes it as easy as possible to collect team feedback!

Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.

Very available

It's a simple product but it does provide value.

We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.

Incentivized

The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand

We organically implemented the product

Figma provided us with a basic whiteboard to collect team feedback asynchronously and all in one place, but we specifically wanted to be able to collect anonymous feedback and also collect feedback via surveys prior to our Retros. Echometer provided both of those functionalities, while still giving us the collaborative structure we needed around our review time!

Our team briefly used Salesforce.com's Chatter product before switching over to Yammer in 2012. While Chatter is essentially the same product as Yammer, it left much to be desired. Chatter's design was (and remains) clunky and difficult to navigate. Yammer is a simple, easy-to-use product that offers similar functionality as Salesforce's Chatter.

Incentivized

• This has helped us surface feedback quicker and track response
• Team alignment around changes we want to see has been faster
• We've seen so many great suggestions we wouldn't have otherwise

• My company is pleased with the positive impact Yammer has created departmentally and on an individual basis with work flow efficiency.
• Adversely, most old and new employees are more familiar with SharePoint, causing the company to pay for training for all current and incoming employees.
• As Yammer becomes more widely used, the need for training may diminish, which is where we will see our return on investment, as the product clearly provides a more effective form of file sharing and communication between employees and their department.

Incentivized