internal communications Archives

Fostering a Productive Workplace Culture with Community

January 9, 2024 By Jim Storer

Community Conversations is a long-running podcast series highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #95 of Community Conversations features Michael Watkins, Community Manager at Research Innovations Incorporated.

Hosts Jim Storer and Shannon Abram chat with Michael about his community building journey from gaming to engineering, fostering productive workplace culture with community, and ideas for effective programming across diverse office spaces.

Michael also shares best practices for the balancing a structured plan in place for community building in place, while also being willing to take risks and learn from mistakes.

Fostering Productive Workplace Culture with Community

Listen to Michael Watkins on Fostering a Productive Workplace Culture with Community

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About Michael Watkins

After starting his community career in the gaming industry, at organizations including Accelerate Gaming and GreyComm Studios, Michael now works in community at Research Innovations, Inc.

About Research Innovations, Inc

Research Innovations Inc. (RII) supports critical defense, intelligence, and cyber customers across the U.S. Government and with select international customers. RII is a leader in Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) efforts with its cutting-edge solutions, rapidly delivering transformative technology to customers and end-users to achieve its core purpose of “Creating RIIdiculously Awesome® solutions that make the world safer.” By combining user-centered design and agile development methods, they create innovative products and solutions for our customers. They focus on performing cutting-edge research and development of information systems that support Joint Command and Control, Mobile Computing and Cyberspace. Research Innovations is headquartered in Northern Virginia with several work locations and provides an environment and culture that rewards talent and accomplishment. They are a company of mission focused people who are satisfied when they deliver excellence and success to our customers.

The Economics of Culture Change

July 14, 2020 By Rachel Happe

Why is Culture Change Such a Strategic Priority?

Culture change is a hot topic in organizational development and leadership circles and for good reason; there is finally a growing understanding of its impact on the performance of organizations. The economics of culture change is driven by culturally normed behaviors. Culture acts as a powerful controlling determinant. Culture determines how quickly an organization can pivot, react to crises, and pursue new opportunities.

The less trust there is in a culture and between groups within it, the more structural force and extrinsic motivators are required to create and deliver products and services. Francis Fukuyama’s treatise Trust is a newly relevant read on how social structures impact wealth, prosperity, and economic growth.

The Employee Value Proposition has Decreased Dramatically

Organizations have traditionally used extrinsic motivators to maintain performance and productivity – initially physical force and more recently economic pressure. You can read more about how this evolved in my musings while on sabbatical. In any negotiation, coordination or collaboration information is power. Historically large organizations had much greater access to information than individuals in negotiating wages and salaries. This gave rise to unions and associations, which restored some balance but far too many individuals were still left to their own individual resources. Along came the Internet and with it, the explosion of access for everyone, which has dramatically increased the power of individuals to understand, pursue, and negotiate options.

This tweet, from Josh Bernoff, perfectly encapsulates this trend – smart, well-connected individuals who understand and can communicate the value they offer will create a work life that fits their unique interests, needs, and circumstances.

Jim Storer and I co-founded The Community Roundtable because we could not find an employment model that worked for us. We didn’t want to maximize salary at the expense of our personal and family lives – and we didn’t want to sacrifice doing interesting and valuable work either. What we’ve found is the ability to do valuable work much more productively and with people we truly enjoy – but work that gives us plenty of flexibility and time to invest in our personal relationships. We are not forced to compromise.

Organizations will likely never be able to get many individuals back into full-time fully committed roles – at least not in the way those positions are currently constructed. This trend will continue for the most valuable individuals. Far from the typical gig worker who serves at the mercy of commoditized, atomized tasks with little security, these are people with the leadership skills and experience to negotiate for the career they want. Many others will follow. Over time this will hollow out organizational leadership and expertise, leaving only the more risk-averse and complacent, who will reinforce the status quo making it almost impossible for organizations to change.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and its rapid acceleration of virtual work, has added even more competitive pressure on organizations because it is clear that many jobs can be done remotely, giving even more flexibility and options to employees. How do organizations compete and keep employees when they have less and less power to dictate employment terms, and employees have more power to define what kind, how much, and from where they contribute value?

Employees Want Security AND Meaning

In communities, the bulk of the power and control lies with individual members. Individuals determine how, when, and how much they participate and they are driven to do so primarily by intrinsic motivators – things that cannot be influenced by force. Intrinsic motivators include the need to cooperate, the joy of riffing and playing with others, the pursuit of new challenges, and the search for meaning; all the things that drive online gaming, open-source software development, and any healthy community.

Intrinsic motivators are so powerful that people will volunteer considerable amounts of their time and money to their pursuit, creating immense loyalty to causes, movements, and communities in the process – as well as accepting lower salaries to work in cause-related organizations. These intrinsic rewards are what allow individuals to thrive, making them feel alive and worthwhile. But people also need extrinsic rewards in the form of money, food, insurance, and health care to ensure physical security.

Organizations that can offer the extrinsic rewards people need PLUS the intrinsic rewards that offer deep satisfaction are the ones that will thrive in an environment where people have much more power and choice.

Jessica Jackley, founder of Kiva sums this up perfectly. Money is nice but Money + Love will always win.

<br><br>And yet, most organizations are structurally designed and optimized for the exchange of extrinsic rewards for transactional work. They get exactly what they pay for and no more. It is a fair exchange but not an optimized one. In a production economy, it is good enough and because it standardizes work, it has operational efficiencies that allow organizations to scale.

The Knowledge Economy Changes the Dynamics of Work

When most work done by individuals was in production, coercion worked. One unit of work could be standardized to exchange consistently for a unit of extrinsic reward or force – the proverbial carrot or stick. It was considered a fair exchange but it never maximized productivity – it standardized, moderated, and made production predictable. This helped organizations manage risk but it also capped potential.

The bulk of production tasks will soon be completed by machines, robots, or algorithms. The unique value that people can add is in their creativity, perspective, innovation, and energy. Those outputs are neither standard nor are they specific transactions that can be turned on and off. To produce creativity, innovation, and energy organizations must engender behaviors and habits that, over time, cultivate unique outputs. To generate these, organizational culture must reinforce and normalize different behaviors. More than behavior, however, is that creativity and exploration require people to care, both for their own work and the work of others. Organizations cannot care. Only other people can care. What organizations CAN do is create the environment and manage the boundaries around who cares and who does not – creating the conditions that generate both the extrinsic rewards that people want and need to both live and thrive.

Communities Support and Normalize Change

Communities have long been a requirement of human potential. People thrive when their communities support who they are and challenge them to grow into their best selves. Communities are ever-changing and evolving – they are complex adaptive systems that can quickly respond to individual needs.

Organizations are taking note and intentionally fostering internal, employee-facing community ecosystem to address organizational and culture change. Community programs are increasingly integrated with digital transformation efforts.

What we know from successful, healthy, and productive communities is the following:

Measuring engagement behaviors and how work happens is as important, if not more, than measuring outputs and transactions.
Aligning, hiring, and leading requires a compelling shared purpose that is bigger than the organization and is meaningful to every participant in the community.
Management needs to focus on the system; business model and exchange rates for different kinds of value, infrastructure, programming, and managing boundary conditions rather than on managing the work and tasks of individuals.
Decision-making needs to be maximally inclusive but with clear responsibility for resolution given to specific individuals.
Leadership needs to be distributed and an attribute that is given to those who are motivated and influential, rather than something bestowed upon people based on their role and structural authority.
Learning, growth, and exploration need to be built into the structure in a way that diversity becomes a feature that is maximized and celebrated instead of a bug that is moderated.
Metrics and progress need to focus on behaviors, not content.

This community-based business model is a powerful driver of commitment and loyalty – both for employees and customers. It too requires investment before it pays off – but the dynamics of that investment and the return happen differently. In this year’s State of Community Management report we were able to quantify this investment and, interestingly it has a similar curve to other types of business investments but the focus is on normalizing new behaviors and motivators using a relationship-centric approach vs an infrastructure-centric one. Both are needed by the primary means of influencing change changes.

Community Business Models are Generative

While communities change the balance of power between organizations and individuals – and give individuals more control over how they work – the real power of communities comes in their ability to rapidly distribute and share value. The challenge is that community value takes time to build and the value of communities has been mostly implicit. Over the years, my work has focused on making community dynamics and value more explicit – creating TheCR’s Community ROI model and investing my time in deep research to better understand the investments required for organizations to maximize community value.

Initially, communities are small and experimental and require human facilitation and relationship building. As the community consolidates around and norms behaviors that generate shared value, the cost per member goes up because infrastructure can now be built to make those behaviors consistently easy and rewarded. Once that is completed, the cost per member of communities drops precipitously.

This cost model is rewarded by a compounding growth in value generated by the community, which flattens as the shared purpose of the community gets addressed and fulfilled.

The biggest difference in community business models is that investment and returns are more equitably shared – while communities CAN have sponsors that invest in them, that is not necessary. Members of the community, compelled by the shared value that motivates them intrinsically, contribute their attention, curiosity, time, and expertise. By sharing the value contributed by every member, the value compounds as more and more people join the community and benefit from it – creating a generative value loop.

In this year’s research, we translated the investments of both organizations in the form of management, investment, and programming, and by members in the form of attention, questions, and expertise. We did this by dividing the average community program cost per member (the organizational investment) and the average answers contributed per member across communities and multiplied it by the average value of answers (the member investment). We then looked at the rewards of communities. For organizations, we looked at the engagement and expertise provided by members that offset the need for the organization to invest in providing it. For members, we looked at the average number of answers they accessed in a year and multiplied that times the value of an answer.

The results were compelling – generating ROI not just for organizations but also for each individual employee.

As compelling as the results are, they are also profound.

Looking at how communities generate value we see that by sharing the value generated, it can increase the value… of its value. Sharing knowledge allows more people to apply it – and more people to build off of it rather than repeating its creation. It allows innovation to happen much more quickly.

Communities Fuel Innovation

This is the power of the Internet if you think of it as a global community that increases transparency and access to information. The result is increasingly fast innovation and adoption cycles of new technology.

What smaller communities – organizational communities – add is an increase in trust focused on a more specific objective. This focus is required to innovate around increasing complex challenges; challenges like global health pandemics, climate change, health care delivery, and education.

The question for organizational executives is no longer should we intentionally invest in the development of communities but…

…will we survive if we don’t invest in community development?

Using Online Community to Transform Internal Culture and Communications

April 27, 2020 By Jim Storer

Humana is a healthcare company that has transitioned through its 50+ years from operating nursing homes to operating hospitals to offering health insurance to millions of people. In recent years, Humana has focused its efforts on the senior population through Medicare Advantage products, as well as promoting value-based care through providers.

Historically, internal communications were one-sided, and increasingly employees wanted to have a voice in the organization.

Their internal community, called ‘Buzz’, was created so employees could:

ENGAGE in conversations.
LEARN about the latest company updates – events, announcements, and more.
REPLACE lengthy, siloed email communications with public-facing interactive conversations.

In this case study, Jeff Ross, Community Manager at Humana shares how he and the Humana Community Team used their internal community to transform the internal culture and communications at their organization.

Download the Humana Case study.

Managing Teams Who Are Suddenly Remote

March 10, 2020 By Rachel Happe

The dramatic spread of COVID-19 is making people scramble. Colleges and Universities are transferring to virtual learning. Employers are shutting offices and encouraging people to work from home in industries where that is possible. Events and conferences are being canceled. People are starting to avoid large gatherings.

It is an anxiety-inducing time. Entire industries – events, food service, hospitality, entertainment – and the millions of people that work in them are struggling already. For those of us who work in the knowledge economy – we have it relatively easy; we CAN work remotely and for the most part, organizations have the technical infrastructure set up to support this and here are some great recommendations by Dion Hinchcliffe to ensure you are set up for it.

However, if you are a manager who works primarily in an office with your teams, there are real challenges to moving work online, especially as it relates to working together. Virtual work is particularly challenging because

The cadence and routines of work change
It is harder to communicate and understand nuance and emotion
Addressing conflict requires more explicit intent and because of that escalates its impact and reaction in ways that are not helpful
The small daily interactions that allow people to connect, support, and enjoy each other are more difficult.
Online meetings can be harder to manage in a way that everyone gets heard and acknowledged.
Some personality types really struggle with digital environments because they don’t get immediate emotional feedback

There are also some real benefits to working remotely, including:

Less wasted time commuting that can help people feel less squeezed between home and work responsibilities.
More flexibility to blend home and work responsibilities in ways that fit individual work styles and preferences.
Higher ability to focus on work and production tasks.
Communication needs to be explicit, which increases accountability and clarity.
Some personality types that struggle to communicate in person assertively are more comfortable in digital environments, elevating their perspectives.

Most of us who are knowledge workers have some experience working remotely, although it’s worth exploring recommendations of those who do regularly. Things like creating a home office space, getting ready and dressed for work, and keeping to a daily structure can help tremendously.

For managers, however, there is another layer to consider because they are the ones typically tasked with creating a positive work culture, resolving conflicts, and ensuring their team members are productive and engaged. Online community managers have been addressing these issues for years and it’s worth leveraging what they know about building relationships, connecting people virtually, engaging people, and prompting productive behaviors.

Recommendations for Managing Virtual Teams and Communities

I have long said that the future of all management is community management and it looks like this crisis may make it so. My recommendations for those managers who are finding themselves to be newly online (community) managers:

Think about your team’s weekly routines. How can you help create the prompts (community managers call this programming) that help provide critical touchpoints for people? This might be a Monday Work-Out-Loud or #ThreeFrogs post so everyone sees what’s going on with everyone else. It could be a virtual Happy Hour.
Practice the Language of Engagement so that you are not inadvertently shutting down conversations and ensuring people feel comfortable sharing their perspectives online and transparently.
Make sure you include fun ways to connect, which builds empathy and makes it easier to resolve conflict when it does happen. It could be a space for people to share what they are eating, ways they are investing in their wellness, pictures from vacation, or what their pets are doing.
Design your workspace so that people can find what they need and are not overwhelmed. At The Community Roundtable we have channels for each major function and project/initiative as well as all team channels like #ProTip, #ShoutOuts, #Flip_That_Sh*t, #Wins, and #Noteworthy that provides intentional spaces to encourage the sharing of general information and constructive behaviors that are helpful but not specific.

Interested in Learning More?

Access the Managing Remote Teams webinar archive here.

Consider taking Internal Community Management Fundamentals course designed for those managing employee communities or subscribing to TheCR Library, both of which are also available for enterprise licenses.

What other resources have you found valuable? Please share in the comments!

Using Gamification to Increase Engagement In Online Communities

May 27, 2019 By Jim Storer

Heifer International is a global nonprofit with a mission to end hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth. For 75 years, they have provided resources and training to improve the lives of those who struggle daily for reliable sources of food and income.

To celebrate their 75th anniversary, they launched a points and status gamification feature within their digital workplace. Over 1,100 global employees were encouraged to:

INTERACT with the community platform by updating their profile information and adding a photo.
LEARN about the features and functionalities of the digital workplace.
COLLABORATE and share information across global teams.
INSPIRE each other to live the core value, “Passing on the Gift” by giving another colleague a chance to win a prize.

Download the Case Study