June 11, 2019 at 16:24How to educate your community so as not to dance with a tambourine
Now everyone is talking about communities. This is fashionable, cool, but few people know what to do with them and how to create them. Gathering everyone in a chat room and saying “you are now a community” is not enough. I will talk about the mechanics of creating internal communities, about the culture and education of participants, and about how communities can help cover the needs of the organization.
This story will be useful to those who look towards creating a culture of communication through communities within the company, but don’t know where to start.
First, let me remind you what were the prerequisites for creating an intracom team:
As a result, there was a need for a team that understands the specifics of working with an IT audience and knows how to communicate with such an audience. Other structures did not have such needs and related tasks. So a small team appeared inside the IT department, which began to engage in educational work, talk about changes and reduce the level of fear in people.
Later there was a need to expand the staff of the company. But in order to hire staff, people need to explain where they are getting settled, what is the interior kitchen and the tasks that await them. All this needs to be told, and preferably not to HR employees. There was also a need for the exchange of knowledge between existing employees. That is, a means and medium of communication between different teams were needed.
At this stage, I joined the company. I came to a new corporate culture, to a team that had never before done such things, but understood their necessity.
They set me the task of creating a community, deciding what to do with all these people, their motivation, what goals and tasks they need to set, what problems to solve.
If you work in a company and the idea to create a community has occurred to you, then there are burning tasks that people simply don’t reach. Just like with hackathons.
Examples of similar tasks from employees and departments:
The community’s common goal was to communicate with people and departments, to communicate information about changes and events, given that the guys filtered out the mailings immediately in Done. Your community expectations often do not match staff expectations.
A community is a group of people united voluntarily and by a common interest (professional / nonprofessional). Man is a social being, generally quite weak. It just so happened that Mother Nature did not endow us with special obvious physical abilities, such as the super-speed of a jaguar or jaw-like sharks, so people united in groups to survive. Genetic memory is a wonderful thing, so let's use it.
We will understand what first of all gives a person such a union:
People are best united by hatred and profit. Common problems that are identified over time, and shared responsibility with a sense of strength and support (" I am not alone in suffering, we are many, and we can solve all problems together "). At first, people begin to hate something together, and then change.
Therefore, when you are building a professional community, you need to identify problems and give people a clear understanding of why it is beneficial for them to participate in the community. Your role here is the most important - to structure, promote and support. Otherwise it will not work.
If you have a great intranet, clear organizational structure and services in the format of social networks, then everything is simple, you can create a community in a company with just a half kick. But, alas, the reality is usually not so. You will need to overcome many difficulties in order to understand “Who? Where? And How?".
I did not have the above. I did not work in the company for a year to understand who to contact and what to do in order to obtain this secret information. I tried to find where it can be unloaded - I did not find it. I thought about the intranet - there was nothing in it either. Phonebook? She opened, learned what units and teams are officially called, got scared and decided not to return to this guide anymore. I thought that at least HR should have information about who writes on what. They did not have information either.
Despaired. How to carry out communication if there are no necessary channels for it? How to find your audience if there are no search tools?
An important quality in any work is the ability to think. I pondered the problem and weighed my skills. “I can talk, so I’ll go get to know people.” I greeted and talked with everyone, clarified who works where, what they do and who they know. I talked to people in the smoking room, in the elevators, went into the workrooms and started telling me how I can be useful to people and what issues I can contact. After some time, I found out in which chat the front-end developers were hanging out and got an incomplete sign “Name / stack of technologies”. HOW I WAS HAPPY FOR THIS FILE! An important factor was that the guys already knew me by sight, but did not fully understand how I could help them.
So, I have a list. What's next? First meeting.
Purely technically, we gather people to meetings and events like this. We have a list of technology and related technologies, or we do not have a list, but we know how to put it together. We create an event and invite people from the list to it. Honesty is important here. In the invitation, immediately tell us a brief agenda or format of the meeting. The community is a voluntary affair; you won’t be forcibly sweet, therefore, no pressure and compulsory tone. Your task: to set a friendly, informal mood in the tone of your letter.
From the first steps it is important to coordinate communication with people somewhere. If you have a blog / chat / space, then add the address to the newsletter. In the future, this will become your main tool for interacting with the community and will help a lot. The more interactive your platform, the higher the activity and involvement, the higher the ability to quickly reach out. We use Telegram as the main channel.
An event day is the most stressful day not only for you, but also for employees. For them, it is stressful, primarily because they left their teams, where everything is friendly and familiar. They came to an unknown environment, where many unknown people and it is not clear what will happen. An important factor is the creation of a welcoming and friendly atmosphere from the very entrance.
Tips for keeping employees calm:
Your role. You are the person who initiated the meeting. Start and drive it. The ability to tell with burning eyes about the reasons for the meeting and the ability to listen to others are your main tools. The general tone and mood depends on how you present the information. And, in turn, it depends on them whether your community will be successful. Therefore, first of all, they themselves sincerely believe in the need for the community to convey this to people.
Again, your burning eyes are one of the most important tools. You are associated with people with corporate culture. No matter how bad it may be, no matter how you feel, when the event begins and you face the community or go to a meeting, you need to believe in what you are saying and burn with it. It works.
What to talk about? The structure of the meeting is very simple:
Give the opportunity to suggest topics or ideas for future meetings and discuss them in the chat. It is absolutely necessary to end the meeting in a state of some incompleteness, so that some action or decision goes online, then offline, and so on through endless divine recursion.
What I described above is a standard meeting-dating scenario. In the framework of the formation and life of a community, there are a lot of events, entities and roles. We will discuss them further. Let's start with the entities and how they can be turned into tools.
Chat is the best and most affordable tool. It is easiest to enter and unsubscribe. It is not annoying with reminders. It has the fastest access to information, because it is there that people are located who, perhaps, know the answer to the question.
Why chat is useful for you:
In order for your chat not to die, you need a circulation of topics. Your role in this:
Gradually, the level of trust in you and the chat will increase, active participants without your tags, by inertia, will continue this activity and will independently engage colleagues. Remember to reward employees. Within a developed intranet, this can be done through gamification. If there are no such tools, think of offline chips ( use souvenirs: badges, T-shirts, lego toys. Anything that will make a person happy, and others will see it when they see it ). It is important not to overdo it so that devaluation does not occur. Souvenirs, as a tool, are generally a separate issue. Through them and their carriers it is possible to promote both large-scale and local small ones. And souvenir carriers are the best advertisement for you.
By doing this, you build community trust in yourself and in the company. Manipulating a chat or group allows you to determine the range of interests of each participant.
Then everything is simple - ask each of the employees to do what he likes. I want to investigate - let him write in Habr, there is a leader - let him help develop the community and look for speakers, like to speak - excellent, let's make a rock star out of him. Your task: to support each of them, to remind and motivate. It is very important not to go too far and always remember that the main activity of people is not the community, but the writing of the code, therefore you should be very considerate and respect their work.
In some areas, Raiffeisenbank has an officially fixed function of community leader. This person helps to develop the community and its members (jokingly, I call it the administrative director for IPRs). In communities where this function is unofficial, a leader grows out of chat and initiative.
Leaders help community members develop themselves technically and socially. For example, on their shoulder lies the motivation of the guys to perform, develop their soft skills, as well as technical knowledge. They help to actively create mitaps, interview new candidates and make processes in the company better.
For instance:
These are activities that are launched on the trust and understanding that employees will support in their undertaking to improve the company and processes, and will help in the development of themselves and others. As in any activity, an active initiator and desire are needed to start. And so that all this does not die at the embryo stage, we take on the most boring work, so that people enjoy their self-realization, and not the problems of “how to book a meeting room”, “how to make up a text”, “how best to tell about the undertaking”.
This story will be useful to those who look towards creating a culture of communication through communities within the company, but don’t know where to start.
The appearance of intracom
First, let me remind you what were the prerequisites for creating an intracom team:
- IT department has grown from 400 people to 1000+;
- the role of IT in the bank has changed from a “service provider” to a “core business”;
- many parallel transformations arose, and there was no information about this.
As a result, there was a need for a team that understands the specifics of working with an IT audience and knows how to communicate with such an audience. Other structures did not have such needs and related tasks. So a small team appeared inside the IT department, which began to engage in educational work, talk about changes and reduce the level of fear in people.
The advent of Devrell
Later there was a need to expand the staff of the company. But in order to hire staff, people need to explain where they are getting settled, what is the interior kitchen and the tasks that await them. All this needs to be told, and preferably not to HR employees. There was also a need for the exchange of knowledge between existing employees. That is, a means and medium of communication between different teams were needed.
“We need a community!”
At this stage, I joined the company. I came to a new corporate culture, to a team that had never before done such things, but understood their necessity.
They set me the task of creating a community, deciding what to do with all these people, their motivation, what goals and tasks they need to set, what problems to solve.
If you work in a company and the idea to create a community has occurred to you, then there are burning tasks that people simply don’t reach. Just like with hackathons.
Examples of similar tasks from employees and departments:
- Recruiters - urgent help with hiring is needed;
- T&D - help with professional skills training is needed;
- Inside - it is necessary for employees to find an occupation, to enhance corporate culture;
- Marketing / brand - there are no speakers at conferences, you need to advertise the brand;
- PR - select content for fashion publications;
- Leadership - communication problems with a large staff.
- Processors - it is necessary to change the process, but it is not clear how to motivate people;
- Devrell - all the tasks listed above.
The community’s common goal was to communicate with people and departments, to communicate information about changes and events, given that the guys filtered out the mailings immediately in Done. Your community expectations often do not match staff expectations.
Why do people need a community?
A community is a group of people united voluntarily and by a common interest (professional / nonprofessional). Man is a social being, generally quite weak. It just so happened that Mother Nature did not endow us with special obvious physical abilities, such as the super-speed of a jaguar or jaw-like sharks, so people united in groups to survive. Genetic memory is a wonderful thing, so let's use it.
We will understand what first of all gives a person such a union:
- The feeling of security.
- A sense of shared responsibility.
- The feeling that you are not alone.
People are best united by hatred and profit. Common problems that are identified over time, and shared responsibility with a sense of strength and support (" I am not alone in suffering, we are many, and we can solve all problems together "). At first, people begin to hate something together, and then change.
Therefore, when you are building a professional community, you need to identify problems and give people a clear understanding of why it is beneficial for them to participate in the community. Your role here is the most important - to structure, promote and support. Otherwise it will not work.
How to build a community?
If you have a great intranet, clear organizational structure and services in the format of social networks, then everything is simple, you can create a community in a company with just a half kick. But, alas, the reality is usually not so. You will need to overcome many difficulties in order to understand “Who? Where? And How?".
I did not have the above. I did not work in the company for a year to understand who to contact and what to do in order to obtain this secret information. I tried to find where it can be unloaded - I did not find it. I thought about the intranet - there was nothing in it either. Phonebook? She opened, learned what units and teams are officially called, got scared and decided not to return to this guide anymore. I thought that at least HR should have information about who writes on what. They did not have information either.
Despaired. How to carry out communication if there are no necessary channels for it? How to find your audience if there are no search tools?
An important quality in any work is the ability to think. I pondered the problem and weighed my skills. “I can talk, so I’ll go get to know people.” I greeted and talked with everyone, clarified who works where, what they do and who they know. I talked to people in the smoking room, in the elevators, went into the workrooms and started telling me how I can be useful to people and what issues I can contact. After some time, I found out in which chat the front-end developers were hanging out and got an incomplete sign “Name / stack of technologies”. HOW I WAS HAPPY FOR THIS FILE! An important factor was that the guys already knew me by sight, but did not fully understand how I could help them.
So, I have a list. What's next? First meeting.
Instruments
Purely technically, we gather people to meetings and events like this. We have a list of technology and related technologies, or we do not have a list, but we know how to put it together. We create an event and invite people from the list to it. Honesty is important here. In the invitation, immediately tell us a brief agenda or format of the meeting. The community is a voluntary affair; you won’t be forcibly sweet, therefore, no pressure and compulsory tone. Your task: to set a friendly, informal mood in the tone of your letter.
From the first steps it is important to coordinate communication with people somewhere. If you have a blog / chat / space, then add the address to the newsletter. In the future, this will become your main tool for interacting with the community and will help a lot. The more interactive your platform, the higher the activity and involvement, the higher the ability to quickly reach out. We use Telegram as the main channel.
An event day is the most stressful day not only for you, but also for employees. For them, it is stressful, primarily because they left their teams, where everything is friendly and familiar. They came to an unknown environment, where many unknown people and it is not clear what will happen. An important factor is the creation of a welcoming and friendly atmosphere from the very entrance.
Tips for keeping employees calm:
- Create the most informal atmosphere. If possible, hold a meeting on puffs. You can treat the guys with cookies and delicious tea. Set the table right in the meeting room.
- Communicate immediately. You should lead this event, respectively, meet the guests as if you have known them for a hundred years, talk with everyone while the participants are gathering. At the same time, it is very important to show goodwill and smile at people. After all, if you come to a meeting with a grim expression of dits, then even cookies will not help.
Your role. You are the person who initiated the meeting. Start and drive it. The ability to tell with burning eyes about the reasons for the meeting and the ability to listen to others are your main tools. The general tone and mood depends on how you present the information. And, in turn, it depends on them whether your community will be successful. Therefore, first of all, they themselves sincerely believe in the need for the community to convey this to people.
Again, your burning eyes are one of the most important tools. You are associated with people with corporate culture. No matter how bad it may be, no matter how you feel, when the event begins and you face the community or go to a meeting, you need to believe in what you are saying and burn with it. It works.
What to talk about? The structure of the meeting is very simple:
- What for? Introductory story about a bicycle and about the benefits for employees. The story about the bicycle sounds like this: in conditions when a large number of people work in the company and everyone is in different teams, it often turns out that people do not communicate with each other. Everyone sits on their own team and comes up with a bicycle, although it is possible that nothing needs to be invented and the other team has already done everything. And in order to be in the know you need to communicate.
- Acquaintance. Like in American TV shows at a meeting of anonymous alcoholics. We ask people to tell about their name, in which team they work, what they do, previous experience, problems and difficulties. This is a very important part, people often have overlapping problems, and the colleagues who are present at the meeting already know how to solve them. If not, it’s also good, because the community has difficulties that can be overcome together. A proposal for a solution to these problems may go to other meetings and develop into project teams.
- Record people on their experience and what else can be done within the community.
And this:
- joint, and most importantly, quick help in the framework of the chat;
- creating a common knowledge base;
- the opportunity to share experiences;
- working for an employer’s brand is beneficial if adequate, good specialists work with them in a team, so that they don’t have to work with incompetent employees, clean their tails and go to work like hard labor.
Give the opportunity to suggest topics or ideas for future meetings and discuss them in the chat. It is absolutely necessary to end the meeting in a state of some incompleteness, so that some action or decision goes online, then offline, and so on through endless divine recursion.
What I described above is a standard meeting-dating scenario. In the framework of the formation and life of a community, there are a lot of events, entities and roles. We will discuss them further. Let's start with the entities and how they can be turned into tools.
Chat is the best and most affordable tool. It is easiest to enter and unsubscribe. It is not annoying with reminders. It has the fastest access to information, because it is there that people are located who, perhaps, know the answer to the question.
Why chat is useful for you:
- First of all, it’s a census. You know how many people you have in the community;
- you can quickly announce something, conduct a survey and "measure the temperature in the hospital." If something doesn’t work for someone, or the pizza was not tasty, - first of all, it will appear in the chat, and you will quickly find out about it;
- Chat reveals active members of the community, and you need them like no other. It is thanks to them that they will be able to stir others and support the life of the community;
- chat reveals experts. An active user is not always a carrier of valuable information, so always keep track of who writes what;
- Chat reveals leaders or their absence. Leaders - a role at the junction of an expert and an active user. Leaders do not always appear immediately, sometimes they have to be created artificially.
In order for your chat not to die, you need a circulation of topics. Your role in this:
- as far as possible offer topics: look for articles on the Habré, announce events, place tags, arrange activities and polls;
- involve the participants: consult, ask for an opinion, provoke the dialogue to continue;
- take on activities that are boring and uninteresting for the children: explain to them that all problems are your area of responsibility (booking rooms, event announcements, reviewing articles, etc.);
- praise employees who are active;
- ask new members to introduce themselves. Put a welcome bot. Three simple chat questions for a novice will help you start a conversation, and you and the community will learn about his experience.
Gradually, the level of trust in you and the chat will increase, active participants without your tags, by inertia, will continue this activity and will independently engage colleagues. Remember to reward employees. Within a developed intranet, this can be done through gamification. If there are no such tools, think of offline chips ( use souvenirs: badges, T-shirts, lego toys. Anything that will make a person happy, and others will see it when they see it ). It is important not to overdo it so that devaluation does not occur. Souvenirs, as a tool, are generally a separate issue. Through them and their carriers it is possible to promote both large-scale and local small ones. And souvenir carriers are the best advertisement for you.
By doing this, you build community trust in yourself and in the company. Manipulating a chat or group allows you to determine the range of interests of each participant.
Then everything is simple - ask each of the employees to do what he likes. I want to investigate - let him write in Habr, there is a leader - let him help develop the community and look for speakers, like to speak - excellent, let's make a rock star out of him. Your task: to support each of them, to remind and motivate. It is very important not to go too far and always remember that the main activity of people is not the community, but the writing of the code, therefore you should be very considerate and respect their work.
Community leader
In some areas, Raiffeisenbank has an officially fixed function of community leader. This person helps to develop the community and its members (jokingly, I call it the administrative director for IPRs). In communities where this function is unofficial, a leader grows out of chat and initiative.
Leaders help community members develop themselves technically and socially. For example, on their shoulder lies the motivation of the guys to perform, develop their soft skills, as well as technical knowledge. They help to actively create mitaps, interview new candidates and make processes in the company better.
For instance:
- Designers and front-end developers came up with a hackathon to create a design system.
- In the evenings, Scala and Java developers conduct a functional programming club where everyone is taught this paradigm.
- Acceleration team help all teams come to common standards without problems and difficulties.
- Testers teach test automation.
- All communities actively initiate meetings in and out in order to share knowledge and promote the brand of the company.
- Employees themselves have created several non-core communities and involve others in their lives (English club, DIY, D&D, board games).
- My guys launched their external communities and are actively leading them (Camunda BPM, OmsDotNet).
These are activities that are launched on the trust and understanding that employees will support in their undertaking to improve the company and processes, and will help in the development of themselves and others. As in any activity, an active initiator and desire are needed to start. And so that all this does not die at the embryo stage, we take on the most boring work, so that people enjoy their self-realization, and not the problems of “how to book a meeting room”, “how to make up a text”, “how best to tell about the undertaking”.