How to educate your community, not to dance with a tambourine
Now everyone is talking about the community. It is fashionable, cool, but few know what to do with them and how to create them. Gathering everyone into chat and saying “now you are a community” is not enough. I will talk about the mechanics of creating internal communities, about the culture and education of participants, and how communities can help close the needs of an organization.
This story will be useful to those who are looking towards creating a culture of communication through communities within the company, but do not know where to start.
First, let me remind you of the prerequisites for creating the IntraCom team:
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As a result, a need arose for a team that understands the specifics of working with an IT audience and is able to communicate with such an audience. In other structures there were no such needs and related tasks. So, a small team appeared inside the IT department, which began to engage in educational work, talk about the changes and reduce the level of fear among people.
Later, there was a need to expand the company's staff. But in order to hire staff, people need to clarify where they work, what is the internal kitchen and the tasks that await them. All this needs to be told, and preferably not to HR employees. Also, there was a need for the exchange of knowledge between existing employees. That is, a means and medium of communication between different teams was needed.
At this stage, I came to the company. She came to a new corporate culture, to a team that had never dealt with such things before, but understood their necessity.
I was given the task of creating a community, deciding what to do with all these people, with their motivation, with what goals and objectives it is necessary to set for them, what problems to solve.
If you work in a company and the idea to create a community has occurred to you, it means that there are burning tasks that people simply don’t reach. Just like with hackathons.
Examples of similar tasks from employees and departments:
The common task of the community was to communicate with people and departments, to bring information about changes and events, given that the newsletters are immediately filtered by the guys in “Done”. Your expectations from the community often do not coincide with the expectations of the staff.
A community is a group of people united voluntarily and by common interest (professional / non-professional basis). Man is a social being, generally rather weak. It just so happened that mother nature did not give us special obvious physical abilities, such as super speed jaguar or jaws like sharks, so for survival people were united in groups. Genetic memory is a beautiful thing, so let's use it.
Let us see what primarily gives a person such an association:
People are best united by hatred and profit. Common problems that are revealed over time, and joint responsibility with a sense of strength and support (" I am not the only one suffering, we are many, and we can solve all problems together "). First, people start hating something together, and then change something.
Therefore, when you build a professional community, you need to identify problems and give people a clear understanding of why participation in the community is beneficial for them. Your role here is the most important - to structure, promote and support. Otherwise it will not work.
If you have a great intranet, understandable organizational structure and services in the format of social networks - then everything is simple, you can create a community in a company with just half a pitch. But, alas, in reality, this is usually not the case. You will need to overcome many difficulties to understand “Who? Where? And How?".
I did not have the above. I have not worked in the company for a year in order to understand who to turn to 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 discovered, learned how the units and teams are officially called, she was frightened and decided not to return to this handbook anymore. I thought that at least HR should have information about who writes what. There was no information from them either.
I was desperate. How to communicate if there are no necessary channels for it? How to find your audience if there are no search tools?
An important quality in any job is the ability to think. I thought about the problem and weighed my skills. "I am able to talk, it means that I will go to meet 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 work rooms and started telling me how I could be of help to people and what questions I could contact. After some time, I found out in which chat front-end developers are hanging out and got an incomplete name “full name / technology stack”. HOW I WAS HAPPY FOR THIS FILE! An important factor was the fact that the guys already knew my face, but did not fully understand how I could help them.
So, I got a list. What's next? First meeting.
Technically, we gather people for meetings and events. We have a list of technology and related technologies, or we do not have a list, but we know how to collect it. Create an event and invite people from the list to it. Honesty is important here, in the invitation immediately tell a brief agenda or format of the meeting. The community is a voluntary affair, you will not be forcibly nice, therefore there is no pressure or compulsory compulsory tone. Your task: already in the tone of a letter to ask a friendly, informal mood.
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 greatly help. The more interactive your platform, the higher the activity and involvement, the higher the ability to quickly reach. We use Telegram as the main channel.
The day of the event is the most stressful day, not only for you, but also for employees. For them, it is stressful, first of all, because they left their teams, where everything is friendly and familiar. They came to an unknown environment, where a lot of unknown people and it is not clear what will happen. An important factor is to create a welcoming and friendly atmosphere right from the entrance.
Tips on how to keep employees calm:
Your role. You are the person who initiated the meeting. Start and lead it. The ability to tell with burning eyes about the reasons for the meeting and the ability to listen to others - these are your main tools. How you present information depends on the general tone and mood. And in turn, it depends on them whether your community will be successful. Therefore, first of all, you yourself sincerely believe in the need for the community to convey this to people.
I repeat, your burning eyes are one of the most important tools. You and people associated with corporate culture. No matter how bad, no matter how you feel, when an event begins and you stand up in front of the community or go to a meeting, you need to believe as much as possible in what you are saying and burn with it. It works.
What to talk about? The structure of the meeting is very simple:
Give an opportunity to suggest topics or ideas for the next meetings and discuss them in the chat. To finish the meeting must be in a state of some kind of incompleteness, so that some action or decision goes online, then offline, and so on by infinite divine recursion.
What I described above is the standard meeting-dating scenario. Within the framework of the formation and life of the community there are so many events, entities and roles. About them will be discussed further. Let's start with the entities and how they can be turned into tools.
Chat is the best and most accessible tool. It is easiest to join and unsubscribe. It is not annoying reminders. It has the fastest access to information, because it is there that there are people who may know the answer to the question.
What is useful for you chat:
So that your chat is not dead, 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 begin to independently engage their colleagues. Do not forget to encourage employees. As part of a developed intranet, this can be done with gamification. If there are no such tools, invent offline chips ( use souvenirs: badges, T-shirts, lego toys. Anything that will make a person happy, and others, when they see it, will also want to ). It is important not to overdo it so that devaluation does not occur. Souvenirs, as a tool, generally a separate topic. Through them and their carriers it is possible to promote both something large-scale and local small. And carriers of souvenirs are the best advertisement for you.
By doing this, you build community confidence in yourself and the company. Manipulations with chat or group allow you to determine the range of interests of each participant.
Then everything is simple - ask each employee to do what he likes. I want to explore - let him write on Habr, have a leader - let him help develop the community and look for speakers, like to speak - great, let's make a rock star out of him. Your task: to support each of them, remind and motivate. It is very important not to go too far and always remember that the main activity of people is not a community, but writing code, therefore you should be as tactful as possible and respect their work.
In some areas, Raiffeisenbank has an officially assigned function as a community leader. This person helps to develop the community and its members (for fun, I call this the administrative head of the IPR). In communities where this function is unofficial, the leader grows out of chat and initiative.
Leaders help community members develop themselves from a technical and social perspective. For example, on their shoulder lies the motivation of children to speak, develop their soft skills, as well as technical knowledge. They help to actively create meetings, interview new candidates and make the processes in the company better.
For example:
These activities, which were launched on trust and understanding that employees will support in their endeavors to improve the company and processes, will help in the development of themselves and others. As with any activity, you need an active initiator and desire to start. And so that all this does not die at the stage of the embryo, we take on the most boring work, so that people enjoy self-actualization, and not problems “how to book a meeting room”, “how to impose a text”, “how best to tell about an undertaking”.
This story will be useful to those who are looking towards creating a culture of communication through communities within the company, but do not know where to start.
The appearance of the internal committee
First, let me remind you of the prerequisites for creating the IntraCom team:
')
- The IT department has grown from 400 people to 1000+;
- the role of IT in the bank has changed from a “service provider” to a “business foundation”;
- many parallel transformations have arisen, and there was no information about it.
As a result, a need arose for a team that understands the specifics of working with an IT audience and is able to communicate with such an audience. In other structures there were no such needs and related tasks. So, a small team appeared inside the IT department, which began to engage in educational work, talk about the changes and reduce the level of fear among people.
The appearance of Devrel
Later, there was a need to expand the company's staff. But in order to hire staff, people need to clarify where they work, what is the internal kitchen and the tasks that await them. All this needs to be told, and preferably not to HR employees. Also, there was a need for the exchange of knowledge between existing employees. That is, a means and medium of communication between different teams was needed.
"We need a community!"
At this stage, I came to the company. She came to a new corporate culture, to a team that had never dealt with such things before, but understood their necessity.
I was given the task of creating a community, deciding what to do with all these people, with their motivation, with what goals and objectives it is necessary to set for them, what problems to solve.
If you work in a company and the idea to create a community has occurred to you, it means that 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 - need help with training professional skills;
- Inside - it is necessary to find an occupation for the employees, to raise the corporate culture;
- Marketing / brand - there are no speakers at conferences, it is necessary to advertise the brand;
- PR - pick up 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;
- Devrel - all the tasks listed above.
The common task of the community was to communicate with people and departments, to bring information about changes and events, given that the newsletters are immediately filtered by the guys in “Done”. Your expectations from the community often do not coincide with the expectations of the staff.
And why do people need a community?
A community is a group of people united voluntarily and by common interest (professional / non-professional basis). Man is a social being, generally rather weak. It just so happened that mother nature did not give us special obvious physical abilities, such as super speed jaguar or jaws like sharks, so for survival people were united in groups. Genetic memory is a beautiful thing, so let's use it.
Let us see what primarily gives a person such an association:
- Sense of security.
- A sense of shared responsibility.
- Feeling that you are not alone.
People are best united by hatred and profit. Common problems that are revealed over time, and joint responsibility with a sense of strength and support (" I am not the only one suffering, we are many, and we can solve all problems together "). First, people start hating something together, and then change something.
Therefore, when you build a professional community, you need to identify problems and give people a clear understanding of why participation in the community is beneficial for them. 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, understandable organizational structure and services in the format of social networks - then everything is simple, you can create a community in a company with just half a pitch. But, alas, in reality, this is usually not the case. You will need to overcome many difficulties to understand “Who? Where? And How?".
I did not have the above. I have not worked in the company for a year in order to understand who to turn to 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 discovered, learned how the units and teams are officially called, she was frightened and decided not to return to this handbook anymore. I thought that at least HR should have information about who writes what. There was no information from them either.
I was desperate. How to communicate if there are no necessary channels for it? How to find your audience if there are no search tools?
An important quality in any job is the ability to think. I thought about the problem and weighed my skills. "I am able to talk, it means that I will go to meet 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 work rooms and started telling me how I could be of help to people and what questions I could contact. After some time, I found out in which chat front-end developers are hanging out and got an incomplete name “full name / technology stack”. HOW I WAS HAPPY FOR THIS FILE! An important factor was the fact that the guys already knew my face, but did not fully understand how I could help them.
So, I got a list. What's next? First meeting.
Instruments
Technically, we gather people for meetings and events. We have a list of technology and related technologies, or we do not have a list, but we know how to collect it. Create an event and invite people from the list to it. Honesty is important here, in the invitation immediately tell a brief agenda or format of the meeting. The community is a voluntary affair, you will not be forcibly nice, therefore there is no pressure or compulsory compulsory tone. Your task: already in the tone of a letter to ask a friendly, informal mood.
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 greatly help. The more interactive your platform, the higher the activity and involvement, the higher the ability to quickly reach. We use Telegram as the main channel.
The day of the event is the most stressful day, not only for you, but also for employees. For them, it is stressful, first of all, because they left their teams, where everything is friendly and familiar. They came to an unknown environment, where a lot of unknown people and it is not clear what will happen. An important factor is to create a welcoming and friendly atmosphere right from the entrance.
Tips on how to keep employees calm:
- Create the most informal atmosphere. If you can - hold a meeting on the poufs. You can treat the guys with cookies and delicious tea. Cover the table right in the meeting room.
- Chat immediately. To lead this event to you, respectively, meet the guests as if you have known them for a hundred years, talk to everyone while the participants are gathering. At the same time it is very important to show kindness, smile to people. After all, if you come to a meeting with the grim expression of ditsa, then even cookies will not help.
Your role. You are the person who initiated the meeting. Start and lead it. The ability to tell with burning eyes about the reasons for the meeting and the ability to listen to others - these are your main tools. How you present information depends on the general tone and mood. And in turn, it depends on them whether your community will be successful. Therefore, first of all, you yourself sincerely believe in the need for the community to convey this to people.
I repeat, your burning eyes are one of the most important tools. You and people associated with corporate culture. No matter how bad, no matter how you feel, when an event begins and you stand up in front of the community or go to a meeting, you need to believe as much as possible 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 the bike and about the benefits for employees. The story about the bike sounds like this: in conditions where a large number of people work in a company and all in different teams, it often turns out that people do not communicate with each other. Everyone sits in his team and invents a bicycle, although perhaps it is not necessary to invent anything and in the other team everything has already been done. And in order to be aware of - you need to communicate.
- Acquaintance. As in the American TV shows at the meeting of anonymous alcoholics. We ask people to tell about their names, what team they work in, what they do, previous experience, problems and difficulties. This is a very important part, often the problems of people overlap, and colleagues who are present at the meeting already know how to solve them. If not, it is also good, because the community has difficulties that can be overcome together. Offering solutions to these problems can be transferred to other meetings and develop into project teams.
- Fix people on their experience and tell what else can be done within the community.
And this:
- joint, and most importantly, quick help within the chat;
- creation of a common knowledge base;
- the opportunity to share experiences;
- working for an employer’s brand is beneficial so that adequate, good specialists work with them in the team so that they don’t have to work with incompetent employees, clean their tails and go to work like hard labor.
Give an opportunity to suggest topics or ideas for the next meetings and discuss them in the chat. To finish the meeting must be in a state of some kind of incompleteness, so that some action or decision goes online, then offline, and so on by infinite divine recursion.
What I described above is the standard meeting-dating scenario. Within the framework of the formation and life of the community there are so many events, entities and roles. About them will be discussed further. Let's start with the entities and how they can be turned into tools.
Chat is the best and most accessible tool. It is easiest to join and unsubscribe. It is not annoying reminders. It has the fastest access to information, because it is there that there are people who may know the answer to the question.
What is useful for you chat:
- first of all - this is a census of the population. You know how many people you have in the community;
- You can quickly announce something, conduct a survey and "measure the temperature at the hospital." If someone doesn’t work, or the pizza was not tasty, first of all, it will appear in the chat, and you will quickly find out about it;
- Chat identifies active members of the community, and you need them like no other. It is thanks to them that they will succeed in stirring up others and supporting the vital activity of the community;
- chat identifies experts. An active user is not always a carrier of valuable information, so always watch who writes what;
- chat reveals leaders or lack thereof. Leaders are a role at the interface of an expert and an active user. Leaders do not always appear immediately, sometimes they have to be created artificially.
So that your chat is not dead, you need a circulation of topics. Your role in this:
- as much as possible to suggest topics: look for articles on Habré, announce events, arrange tags, arrange activities and votes;
- Involve participants: consult, ask for opinions, provoke to continue the dialogue;
- take away boring and uninteresting activities for the children: explain to them that all problems are your area of ​​responsibility (room reservations, event announcements, review of articles, etc.);
- Praise active employees;
- ask new members to introduce themselves. Put the welcome-bot. Three simple questions in the chat for a beginner will help unleash 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 begin to independently engage their colleagues. Do not forget to encourage employees. As part of a developed intranet, this can be done with gamification. If there are no such tools, invent offline chips ( use souvenirs: badges, T-shirts, lego toys. Anything that will make a person happy, and others, when they see it, will also want to ). It is important not to overdo it so that devaluation does not occur. Souvenirs, as a tool, generally a separate topic. Through them and their carriers it is possible to promote both something large-scale and local small. And carriers of souvenirs are the best advertisement for you.
By doing this, you build community confidence in yourself and the company. Manipulations with chat or group allow you to determine the range of interests of each participant.
Then everything is simple - ask each employee to do what he likes. I want to explore - let him write on Habr, have a leader - let him help develop the community and look for speakers, like to speak - great, let's make a rock star out of him. Your task: to support each of them, remind and motivate. It is very important not to go too far and always remember that the main activity of people is not a community, but writing code, therefore you should be as tactful as possible and respect their work.
Community leader
In some areas, Raiffeisenbank has an officially assigned function as a community leader. This person helps to develop the community and its members (for fun, I call this the administrative head of the IPR). In communities where this function is unofficial, the leader grows out of chat and initiative.
Leaders help community members develop themselves from a technical and social perspective. For example, on their shoulder lies the motivation of children to speak, develop their soft skills, as well as technical knowledge. They help to actively create meetings, interview new candidates and make the processes in the company better.
For example:
- Designers and front-end developers came up with a hackathon to create a design system.
- Scala- and Java-developers in the evenings spend the club on functional programming, where they teach everyone to this paradigm.
- Acceleration team helps all teams come to a single standard without problems and difficulties.
- Testers teach test automation.
- All communities are actively initiating meetings inside and outside to share knowledge and promote the company's brand.
- The employees themselves have created several non-core communities and involve others in their lives (English club, DIY, D & D, board games).
- My guys have launched their external communities and are actively leading them (Camunda BPM, OmsDotNet).
These activities, which were launched on trust and understanding that employees will support in their endeavors to improve the company and processes, will help in the development of themselves and others. As with any activity, you need an active initiator and desire to start. And so that all this does not die at the stage of the embryo, we take on the most boring work, so that people enjoy self-actualization, and not problems “how to book a meeting room”, “how to impose a text”, “how best to tell about an undertaking”.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/455588/
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