s internal community Archives - The Community Roundtable

The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Building and Maintaining a Strong Internal Community

By

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

Episode #93 of Community Conversations features Helen Chen, Senior Community Manager at Research Innovations Incorporated (RII).

Hosts Jim Storer and Shannon Abram chat with Helen about her work building community at Research Innovations, including programs for remote employees, executive lunches, and philanthropy activities. She shared advice for community teams looking to more deeply connect with a internal audience and shared best practices for building and maintaining a collaborative and innovative culture for employees.

Building and Maintaining a Strong Internal Community

Listen to Helen Chen on Building and Maintaining a Strong Internal Community

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

About Helen Chen

Helen Chen is a Senior Community Manager at Research Innovations, Inc. She is a seasoned community strategist with proven experience leading public, private and social channel communities at organizations including VMWare, Carbon Black, and TheMathWorks.

Her specialties include community management, online learning, social media strategy, collaboration, web content development, organizational development, process optimization.

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 Crisis of Organizational Communications

By

The Crisis of Organizational Communications in 2020

Do you work in or with an organization?

Are you overwhelmed?

Do I even need to ask?

Organizational communications in 2020 is in crisis. Communications channels and content have exploded. Information outside organizations changes with every 60-minute news cycle, while organizational processes and tools seem decades out of date and supported with a fraction of the staff needed. The friction between how fast information flows in public and how slow information flows in organizations increases daily, leaving everyone frustrated, anxious, and immobilized.

In 2011, in a keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I used the Red Queen Hypothesis as an allegory for organizations and their need to change dramatically if they want to survive because the approaches that got them here won’t take them any further. They are, in fact, losing ground – slowly at first and then more rapidly.

The Crisis of Organizational Communications in 2020

Over the past decade, this dynamic has only increased, with employees in every department running and getting further behind. Organizational boards and executive teams risk extinction by not dramatically restructuring their corporate governance for the knowledge economy. COVID-19 has accelerated that risk. As I projected, people are now the weakest link – they are breaking. Many individuals spend most of their time communicating instead of working – so when do they work? By working longer and longer hours.

The way we have always worked is unsustainable.

Customers Feel Alienated

Customers have noticed. While customers get information on social media, in communities, and through their networks, they often have a challenging time getting anything directly from a person at an organization. The impenetrable fortress is making them wonder what’s going on back there while the world keeps spinning. The silence is often deafening.

When customers can connect, it is more often than not with an online form, an email distribution list, a chatbot, or a faceless social media account. If they need help or an answer from an individual, there are hoops, hurdles, and queues to make it through – a veritable ninja course of obstacles. These experiences leave them feeling burdensome, exhausted, and unappreciated – and very often annoyed. It does not create a good customer experience.

Employees Are Overwhelmed

If you work in an organization, you probably have a contentious relationship with your email inbox. Between the emails, texts, websites, files, chat tools, business systems, community platforms, and social media channels, you are assaulted with information and options. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, you likely added five to eight hours of video meetings per day on top of that.

When do you actually work?

Employees are drowning in information, coming at them from all angles with little rationalization or standardization across different people, teams, and communities within and across organizations. This communications environment is both bewildering and taking an increasing amount of time to navigate. There is little support or guidance, even as organizations continue to deploy and adopt more technology without rationalization, integration, design, or intelligence. Most employees don’t have the skills, the time, the experience, or the access to navigate this ecosystem effectively. So employees tend to default to what they know and are comfortable with even if they also understand it is not effective.

Increasingly overwhelmed and stressed, employees cannot rethink how they work but are in dire need of a reboot. Add with the stress and risk of working through the COVID-19 crisis; there is little incentive to rock the boat or the time to experiment.

HR Is In a Tenuous Position

Human Resources groups have always been primarily tasked with protecting and mitigating the organizational risk of having employees. People are accounted for as liabilities and not assets on balance sheets. Because corporations are set up to maximize shareholder value and profitability, they necessarily seek to minimize their liabilities. One of their liabilities is the cost of employees. This accounting standard puts the incentives of the organization and shareholders at direct odds with employees. HR departments exist to manage and negotiate that inherent conflict with the goal of maximizing contributions while minimizing costs. Trying to improve the employee experience with the fundamental incentives are broken is impossible – and so is dramatically increasing engagement.

Social technologies have increased information and transparency, giving employees more options and better information with which to negotiate. The competitive pressure on HR departments has increased significantly as the balance of power between organizations and individuals have shifted. As we move into a knowledge economy, the friction increases with traditional risk management and HR approaches, which typically seek to standardize roles. Organizations need creative and innovative employees, two things that cannot be forced with extrinsic motivators, which is HR’s primary toolset. HR staff is overwhelmed navigating this new power dynamic while applying the standardized processes, roles, and governance that mitigate risk.

IT Sees the Approaching Storm

IT departments are often the first to see the enormous implications of the changing communications landscape – but with little authority or capacity to address them. Most organizational IT budgets are consumed, supporting legacy technology, ensuring security, and managing users. With the remaining resources, IT teams look to adopt and deploy technology and applications that will help the organization innovate – but most often without the design, UX, consulting, and analytics resources or capacity to help ensure its successful use, rationalization with existing tools, and impact on the business.

Cloud technology has also dramatically changed IT’s role and ability to impact organizational change. Cloud solutions are adopted across the organization as individual groups and departments see the necessity, creating an explosion of technology that is not integrated, used consistently, or managed by the organization. IT has lost much of its control and ability to aggregate data across the organization rendering it impossible to understand, rationalize, report, and act on what is happening. IT is overwhelmed, trying to keep track of all the organization’s technology just to ensure they have it identified and secured.

Executives Remain Isolated

Executives, surrounded by assistants and communication teams and in meetings constantly, see and experience little of the chaos. With a ‘bias toward action’ and a mindset that prefers solutions to problems, they often dismiss issues assuming they are driven by politics or personalities.

The challenges and opportunities for organizations have changed significantly, however. In production economies, the business opportunities were often logical and mechanical; standardizing supply chains and communications increased outcomes. Today, the opportunities for most organizations are complex and include many valid options, most of which are not obviously better than others. This new dynamic requires a far different approach to analysis, decision-making, and leadership. It is a decision-making environment with which many executives are not intuitively comfortable.

Current executives, educated and experienced in a different environment, have little time in their daily routines to explore this shift and little motivation given their past success, which is what got them to their role. These concurrent dynamics are colliding in ways that make change extremely challenging.

Meanwhile, crises are coming in quick waves. Executives are trying to address them in the ways that always have – but by the time they have assessed, discussed, and made decisions, their employees and customers are on to the next crisis. Their decisions and communications, when delivered, are already dated and out of touch with the fast-moving environment around them. These executives are overwhelmed with the pressure to change the organization but little confidence in taking the bold steps necessary and even less comfort with dismantling carefully crafted communications that are reviewed by multiple departments.

Community Managers Are In the Crosshairs

Organizations with limited capacity for direct engagement and small communications teams are using social networks, collaboration, and community channels to connect individuals to each other.

Externally, a small cadre of community managers ensure these channels give customers answers and information – and they do. Communities have been wildly successful at supporting customers, building awareness, and increasing product use – and the 2020 State of Community Management research shows that Advanced Community programs continue to invest and grow these programs and the governance required to support them.

IT groups have also invested in the infrastructure to support employee communities, hoping to relieve some of the communications tangle internally and to fill many of the enormous communications gaps across the organizational ecosystem. This effort, however, has been less than successful. While the infrastructure is available, there is little understanding, interest, and motivation to change. For employees, communication behaviors are driven by power dynamics, and the power dynamics of organizations have not changed. When a community manager (and it is usually only one) is hired to support this change, they typically sit in IT, internal communications, or learning & development – siloed and confined to a narrow objective with no visibility, support, or resources to fundamentally change how the organization works. They see many of the problems, support change in pockets, and see the huge opportunities squandered, but they are completely overwhelmed juggling basic needs against tantalizing opportunities.

Communications is a Mess

Everyone is overwhelmed. No one has the authority, influence, and expertise to make needed changes.

And the new information environment is impacting and changing every corner of organizations, how they work, and what is possible. In a world where innovation and creativity drive success, how an organization communicates and the culture that creates IS its business model. Communications can no longer be thought of as the group the manages websites and static content. It is a critical driver of becoming an agile and adaptable organization.

Because communications teams are not strategically positioned, the wave of new information channels is overwhelming everyone and pushing them to the breaking point. When used strategically, new communications channels and processes create transparency, easy alignment, more time to work, and increased flexibility. Those organizations that seize the opportunity to dramatically retool their organizations will reap unprecedented rewards in employee loyalty, customer satisfaction, and financial stability.

However, like seized gears, most organizations are stuck because they try to change their approach in any one area on its own – and stalls as it runs into traditional processes in other areas. Without a systemic change to corporate governance – adapting HR policies, management practices and objectives, accounting standards, and metrics – each effort to change communications will hit a wall and revert to the organizational standard, aligning with existing power dynamics and motivators.

I suspect many organizations will not survive because of this challenge and its scope. It is an existential threat that will come quietly at first – and then feel like a freight train bearing down on the organization. How many boards are sensitive to and prepared to act?

Organizations As Communities

Community structures are among the few governance approaches that can address this seemingly chaotic environment by distributing leadership and capacity to its members. As complex adaptive systems, communities are dynamic and diverse enough to react effectively; addressing, and responding to the complex system around them.

When we develop the Community Maturity Model is was, in effect, an organizational governance model designed to help organizations move from rigid and fragile hierarchies to dynamic and adaptive networks of communities. It reflects all the areas that are impacted by a changing information environment and how to nudge each competency into a looser state – from rigid processes and detailed rules to higher-level principals that inform but do not restrict decision-making at the edges. This adaptability allows organizations to evolve in a phased way that leans into its strengths while filling gaps.

What to see where your organization sits?

Take the (free) Community Score Assessment to find out where to prioritize your focus and resources.

How to improve online engagement

Organizational Governance in Crisis

The communications crisis has created division not just within society but within organizations – pushing each functional area to extremes. Everyone is overwhelmed and reacting to that anxiety in different ways. Some groups are shutting down, others are trying to control the chaos by organizing, what is fundamentally unorganizable, and some are denying a problem exists at all.

What do you do when you are running twice as fast and still falling behind?

You need to play a different game.

The old rules are broken beyond repair. Using them is a fool’s errand. Finding a way to fundamentally restructure organizations for a new era is imperative. Global organizations that benefit from market inertia and diversity may not feel the existential threat at the moment but have no doubt it is coming. Watching this space over the past decade, I have seen the impact of this crisis accelerate – and that acceleration will continue and increase in speed.

Organizations need a new governance model – one that does not pit its employees, customers, and partners against itself and each other.

Start with a BOD committee and a strategic task force that includes communications, IT, HR, L&D, KM, a community strategist, finance, legal, and the CEO.

Using Online Community to Transform Internal Culture and Communications

By

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:

Humana online case study
  • 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

By

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?

Managing Remote Teams
Managing Remote Teams

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!

Julie Blutstein on Communities of Practice

By

Welcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

  • What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
  • What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
  • How can you approach a global audience to encourage productive engagement?

Episode #55 features Julie Blutstein, the Global Digital Manager of Communities for Prudential International Insurance.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Join us as we chat with Julie about how community works in heavily regulated industries, building successful communities of practice at a global organization and why you can’t moderate stupid. 

Conversations with Community Managers - Julie Blutstein

Community Skills in Internal vs. External Communities

By

In The State of Community Management, our comparison of internal and external communities described them as “similar, but different.” That holds true for internal and external community professionals as well. Our research finds that, when you focus on active members, the engagement profile of internal and external communities isn’t that different — they have similar percentages of lurkers/listeners, contributors, creators, and collaborators. And when you look at the skills internal and external community professionals value, they rank the skill families in the same order: strategic, engagement, content, business and technical.

But look below the surface, and things start to change.

While promoting good behaviors, facilitating connections and selling the benefits of community are seen as highly-valued in internal communities, data and member support skills play a much more powerful role in external communities. And looking at the most-valued skills role by role, more marked differences emerge. For example, skills like executive coaching, consulting, and training development and delivery score much higher for internal community managers and strategists than external ones.

Conversely, skills such as response and escalation, and moderation played higher in external community managers’ skill sets. In the end, though, these different approaches are judged very similarly.

Top 10 highest-valued skills by Community Type:

Internal Community

  • Community Strategy Development
  • Community Advocacy And Promotion
  • Promoting Productive Behaviors
  • Facilitating Connections
  • Selling, Influencing And Evangelizing
  • Measurement, Benchmarking And Reporting
  • Communication Planning
  • Listening And Analyzing
  • Member Advocacy
  • Consulting

External Communities

  • Community Strategy Development
  • Listening And Analyzing
  • Community Advocacy And Promotion
  • Measurement, Benchmarking, And Reporting
  • Data Collection And Analysis
  • Evaluating Engagement Techniques
  • Empathy And Member Support
  • Communication And Planning
  • Writing
  • Member Advocacy

The general themes of performance evaluation may be the same in each use case — but achieving success on these measures requires different strategies, skills and approaches from internal and external community professionals, and the specific data the define “success” varies.

Explore the Community Skills Framework:

community manager skills community manager skills
community manager skills Community Skills Engagement

Shirlin Hsu, BCG

By

podcastWelcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” featuring Shirlin Hsu, Global Communities Strategy and Enablement Manager at BCG.

Join TheCR’s founder and principal, Jim Storer and director of marketing, Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about a variety of community topics, including:

  1. What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
  2. What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?Shirlin_Tradingcard_Front
  3. How can you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #43 features Shirlin Hsu, Global Communities Strategy and Enablement Manager at BCG. Join us as we chat about how to drive adoption in internal communities, tips for running an advocacy program, and how to set your members up to succeed when interacting with your community.

Check out episode #43 featuring Shirlin Hsu here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

available on itunes—-

Did you know you can subscribe to “Conversations with Community Managers” iTunes? You can!