New fleet-wide dialogue network for ESVAGT sailors

Social network to strengthen dialogue and knowledge sharing between sailors on every vessel.

A sailor on an ESVAGT vessel mislaid his suit and wrote on “Yammer” to hear if any of his colleagues had found it.

”Someone from our crew had seen it on board the crewchange vessel, the “Esvagt Beta” on the 27th,” was the response.

Put simply, “Yammer” is a traditional intranet whose platform is based on the social media sites that are already familiar to us, for example Facebook or Twitter. “Yammer” is a Microsoft product that has been developed for use in organisations. It is especially suitable for companies in which colleagues are geographically dispersed and in which not everyone sits in front of a computer.

ESVAGT has recently implemented “Yammer” in the entire fleet; as far as they know, it is the first fleet in the world to have it.

“ESVAGT chose “Yammer” based on a needs analysis,” Brian Schildt from the company, Collibre, which, in cooperation with Klingenberg Data, has assisted ESVAGT in the process:

”There are over 800 sailors in ESVAGT who do not have a company email address and do not need one in their daily working life. At the same time, these are people with a wealth of experience and knowledge that is good to share. “Yammer” is the ideal tool for this,” he says.

Extending collegiality

“Yammer” is similar to Facebook and you can log on via pc, tablet or smart phone. You can post something on a group or company wall to which colleagues can comment. You can make new groups and share experiences with others with the same job function.

“Creating communities with the same interests makes good sense in a company like ESVAGT. These groups can be internal vessel groups or groups based on function or work tasks. A colleague had issues with a paint that would not harden and sought advice on “Yammer”. A number of ESVAGT colleagues who attend navigation school have also formed a group. “Yammer” transfers the advantages there are with social networks onto a company level,” says Brian Schildt.

““Yammer” will help increase dialogue and experience sharing between people who would otherwise have difficulty contacting each other on a daily basis. It is user friendly and is a significant facilitator of collegiality and a useful tool in day-to-day work. For example, the crewchange vessel overview that was previously difficult to distribute to every sailor is now available on “Yammer”,” says Brian Schildt.

More conversation

Another ambition for “Yammer” is to establish a practical channel for open dialogue and knowledge sharing.

“Crewchange vessels have been one of the platforms for dispersing information to colleagues because these are places where everybody comes at one point or other - but this kind of communication is only one-way. “Yammer” provides something else. The weekly “ESVAGT Weekly” from the HSEQ department is now distributed on “Yammer” and the function for asking concrete questions about, for example, new instructions, is already in use. We expect that this will be a tool for dialogue that HSEQ, Ship Management or other departments can use to share knowledge both from vessel to vessel and between vessel and land,” says Brian Schildt.

Another good example of the advantages with open dialogue is a debate about sizing of the new work clothes. Several colleagues found that the sizes they receive have varied from the ones that they have tried on:

“This could have been 40 problems for 40 individual vessels but by sharing through “Yammer” it became one dialogue that lead to the supplier being contacted to solve the issue,” says Brian Schildt.