Sentiment Analysis for Yammer Posts

Chris Bortlik (@cbortlik)
2 min readDec 28, 2018

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A common customer scenario is assessing employee sentiment and driving engagement. Many companies (including Microsoft) regularly employ formal polls and surveys to ask employees for their feedback and ideas for continued improvement.

As more companies embrace Yammer for employee engagement and continuous bi-directional communications, customers have been asking for ways to dynamically report on and respond to both positive and negative comments.

This post summarizes some work that we recently completed to build out such a demonstration for the worldwide Microsoft Technology Centers to leverage with our customer engagements. The solution was built with no custom code and includes …

A “CEO Connection” Yammer group for employees to connect directly with the CEO and participate in town hall live events.

Yammer CEO Connection Group

Microsoft Flow to monitor new posts to the “CEO Connection” Yammer group and assess the sentiment of the post leveraging Azure Cognitive Services.

Microsoft Flow Monitoring Yammer Post Sentiment

All results are logged via Flow to a SharePoint list for auditing and then provide the ability to perform historical reporting and trend analysis.

SharePoint List Logging History of Sentiment Analysis

If a post is determined to be “negative” (based on the sentiment analysis score assigned), an email notification is sent to the appropriate people to make sure someone reviews and follows up on the employee’s comments, questions, and concerns.

Email Notification for Negative Post

A Power BI report was created to visualize the average sentiment of posts per day reading the results logged to the SharePoint list. This report has been embedded in an HR department communication site for others to view using the Power BI web part.

Power BI Report Embedded in HR Communication Site

Hope this helps. This entire solution was designed, built, and tested in a couple of hours — all with no custom code. Happy New Year!

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Chris Bortlik (@cbortlik)
Chris Bortlik (@cbortlik)

Written by Chris Bortlik (@cbortlik)

Works for Microsoft as a Principal Technical Architect at the MTC in Boston, MA. Author. Speaker. Blogger. Husband. Dad.

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