Yarno. What does it mean? Is it a chat you have with your mate? Is it a long piece of thread? Was it just an available domain name? Or was this just a long series of questions to show that we don’t really know what it means?
Yar-(k)no(w) what, it doesn’t really have one definition. But I’m going to tell you about one its meanings – the ability to start a conversation.
Nothing quite sums it up like the timeless words of Chazz (Will Ferrel) in the 2007 masterpiece by MTV Films: Blades of Glory.
Chazz when questioned on the term “Lady Humps” explains:
And Yarno does exactly what Chazz says before he is cut off by that Youtube link – it gets the people going! Not quite enough to be sampled in a Kanye and Jay-Z collab… yet. But it was enough to inspire a new fresh face in the rap game – MC Lachy, AKA The Christmas Wrapper.
So besides conversations about why the tall man with the beard and the sideways hat is doing a rap in a Korean restaurant, Yarno starts a lot of off platform conversations.
The primary reason is that by quizzing people, it gets them engaged and ultimately challenges them. We know inherently that quizzing people about something is going to get much more excitement than just blurting the information at them. I bet you’ve never gathered with friends and family to read your encyclopaedia. But you’ve probably played Trivial Pursuit. And damn is that fun! A quiz and a competition – IT GETS THE PEOPLE GOING.
Getting the conversation going is one of the things we didn’t initially anticipate as one of the key benefits of Yarno, but it has proven to be one of our greatest assets.
Some clients may have remote workers out on their own who don’t often engage with other team members, or even their managers. They almost certainly won’t want to discuss training materials. So how do you make that happen? Well one way people have found is… Yarno.
Let me show you a pretty simple 3-step process of how a Yarno question, turns into stronger lines of conversation throughout organisations:
1. People start discussing things on the platform
The questions – sometimes in a job, people may feel they know it all, or are simply not bothered to engage. But by asking someone questions, they’re going to engage. With this engagement comes a conversation – was this question right? why did I get it wrong? But that isn’t actually how I do it. And before you know it, people are talking.
Gamification – all our Yarno content is gamified, we’ve got points, leaderboard and badges. People get engaged and they start to talk. There starts being some friendly banter between people and teams – often people and teams who didn’t really talk before. Again, Yarno has helped open up those lines of communication.
2. People talk about the actual processes behind the questions
All our questions are based around things we want our people to DO, or things they need to KNOW. So if you start talking about these questions to a colleague, a manager or a trainer, you’re helping to open up lines of communication about how things work organisationally. You might help higher ups understand where the training materials diverge from reality. Or you might learn why you need to follow that training advice where you previously weren’t. But either way, we’ve got people talking.
3. People have started talking, so now they just keep doing it.
If you had teams that weren’t talking before, now those lines of communication are open. And in talking about a question or a process, other things might come up that add organisational value. Or you might have remote workers who didn’t really engage with their colleagues or mangers, now they’re talking. Yarno has started a conversation.
Now I can’t give you a measurable figure for what this process does, but by looking at our churn rates, I’d say we’ve discovered something pretty special. People want to “skate to one song, and one song only”, and that song is Yarno, it gets the people going!
So if you want to investigate more about how Yarno could work for your business and get a conversation going, get in contact with Mark.
