The Community Roundtable

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

  • About Us
    • Our Values
    • Our Team
    • Our Clients
      • Client Success Stories
    • Community Leadership Awards
      • Community Leadership Awards 2024
      • Community Leadership Awards 2023
      • Community Leadership Awards 2022
      • Community Leadership Awards 2021
  • Services
    • Benchmarking and Audits
      • Community Performance Benchmark
      • Community Readiness Audits
      • Community ROI Calculator
      • The Community Score
    • Models and Frameworks
      • Community Maturity Model™
      • Community Engagement Framework™
      • Community Skills Framework™
      • Community Technology Framework™
      • The Social Executive
  • Research
    • The State of Community Management
      • SOCM 2024
      • SOCM 2023
      • SOCM 2022
      • SOCM 2021
      • SOCM 2020
    • Community Careers and Compensation
    • The Community Manager Handbook
      • 2022 Edition
      • 2015 Edition
    • The Social Executive
    • Special Reports
    • Case Studies
  • Events
    • Connect
      • Connect 2024
      • Connect 2023
      • Connect 2022
    • Community Technology Summit
    • Professional Development
    • Resource Bundles
    • Upcoming Events
    • Community Manager Appreciation Day
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2025
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2024
  • I’m looking for…
    • Community Engagement Resources
    • Executive Support Resources
    • Community Reporting Resources
    • Platform and Technology Resources
    • Community Strategy Resources
    • Community Programming Resources
    • Community Career Resources
    • Something Else
      • Vendor Resource Center
      • Community FAQs
      • Community Management Podcasts
        • Community Conversations
        • Lessons From The NEW Community Manager Handbook
      • Community 101
        • Community Management Glossary
        • Community Management FAQs
      • Case Studies
      • Community Webinars
  • Community
    • The Network
      • Member Login
      • Join The Network
      • Roundtable Call Library
    • The Library
      • Subscriber Login
      • Subscribe to The Library
  • Blog

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:

  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!

Jerry Canaday on Applying Community Management Principles to Non-Traditional Community Roles

June 16, 2015 By Jim Storer

Our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” is back!

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:

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

We pick up where we left off with episode #27, featuring Jerry Canaday, Solution Architect – Internal Systems at MasterCard. Podcast highlights include:

  • Applying community management principles to non-traditional community roles
  • The intersection of the future of the intranet and mobile, and community management.
  • How community management has a natural analog in professional sports

 

https://www.communityroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/TheCRPodcast_JerryCanaday_Final.mp3

Download this podcast.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

Know someone we should have a conversation with? Let us know!

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

https://media.blubrry.com/608862/communityroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/TheCRPodcast_JerryCanaday_Final.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Friday roundup: A peek inside internal communities and some great reads

March 6, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Sometimes, the theme for the week is planned – other times, you see it emerge. Looking back at this week, we have been spending a lot of time thinking about internal communities, intranets and ESNs.

PeeringRachel shared some thoughts earlier this week on the J. Boye blog. In a post entitled “Want a Social Intranet? Have a Plan!” she noted the critical need for roadmaps to give structure and plans to expanding your internal community. The benefits of a social community, getting people to share, work out loud and communicate differently are huge, she notes, but getting people to change behavior needs more than just the opportunity to do so – it needs a plan to help them through the process.

On our own blog, we took a look at another busy month inside our own community, TheCR Network. Hillary shared some of the great roundtable calls of the past month – including member-inspired calls on employee advocacy, the future of the Intranet and platform migrations. Want full access to what was said? It all comes with membership in TheCR Network.

And as we continue to highlight the report, infographic and brand new eBook on our Community Manager Salary Survey research, Shannon looked at the best ways for community professionals  to network.

What we’re reading this week:

Want a Social Intranet? Have a Plan!: The benefits of getting people to work out loud, share what they know and ask questions publicly is huge – in cost savings to the organization and in the innovation that springs from that – but getting people to change behavior can be very challenging and it certainly won’t happen if you don’t create the programming, support and incentives for them to do so.

More Collaboration Equals More Value: Collaboration is hard. It’s messy. And it seems to be time consuming. Some believe that you get much more done when you don’t collaborate. But what is it you get done? One manager told me that he didn’t have time to collaborate. My reply was: “So, you don’t have time to do it right, but you do have time to do it wrong?”

How the Future of Work Leads to the Future of Organisations: The Möbius strip and the Klein bottle – its three-dimensional equivalent – have only one side. The inside is the outside. This metaphor is extraordinarily apt for organisations today, where the inside and the outside need to be one. The internal values and culture must be identical to those manifested outside, the social networks externally must be merged with the internal ones, it should become irrelevant where work is performed as the formal boundaries of organisations dissolve.

Designing Good Policy for Online Platforms and Communities: Designing good policy is hard work! And the ones you hear about — the ones that make the news — are just the tip of the iceberg. If you find yourself faced with that “we need a policy for this” moment, here’s a few best practices when it comes to designing policy for online communities and platforms.

Online Community and Culture Wars: What Do We Know?:  “As noble as we wish we are, we’re not — given the choice, people hang out with people like them,” says Koster. “Given a limited population, over time, not only will we [form] groups that are like us, but the larger group will exterminate the other one,” he says. “In simulations, that’s what happens: They literally commit genocide, they literally chase everyone else out of the room. It’s a distasteful fact about human nature, and if our definition about who we are is rigid, then you’re going to have that conflict.”

Why Branded Communities Wither Away, plus 5 Ways to Prevent Digital Death: You can find hundreds of press releases from delighted brands announcing the launch of their online community. Almost all of them vanished from the internet within 18 months. So why do we keep building them?

 

New community and social media jobs this week:

Global Community and Social Media Manager – EY, New York, NY

Community Manager, Cameo – Vimeo, New York, NY

Community Manager, Socialmedia.org – Gaspedal, Chicago, IL

Social Media Senior Manager – Taco Bell, Irvine, CA

Community Manager – Healthsparq, Portland, OR

Community Manager – RallyPoint, Watertown, MA

Multicultural Community Manager – Allstate, Northbrook, IL

Social Media Community Manager – Dropbox, San Francisco, CA

Content and Community Manager – Expa, San Francisco, CA

Director of Content and Communications – Lavastorm Analytics, Boston, MA

Community Manager – National Marketing – Kaplan Test Prep, New York, NY

Director of Global Media – Citi, Long Island City, NY

Content and Community Manager – Flatiron School, New York, NY

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: February 2015 Wrap-Up

March 6, 2015 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at the Community Roundtable

For such a short month February was full of programming inside TheCR Network. I’ve highlighted just three of six member virtual sessions we hosted. What is particularly notable about the three programs below is that all of them were directly in response to projects that members are currently working on, and the agendas were developed in collaboration with members to ensure the outputs were aligned with their needs. These are great examples of the way we co-create with members of TheCR Network.

  • Building an Employee Advocacy Program (Roundtable): We discovered a number of our members were rolling out an employee advocacy program in 2015 and collaborated with them to develop an agenda for a virtual panel discussion with other members and guests who had experience launching and running similar programs at other organizations.
  • Navigating a Platform Migration (Roundtable): Thanks to a few generous members we had a very informative call on the topic of platform migration from a practitioner perspective. A number of participants had recently finished or were in the middle of a platform migration and the lessons learned where fresh and relevant. The feedback we heard was that the advice shared was invaluable for those about to embark on a migration effort.
  • The Future of the Intranet (Roundtable): One of our members is currently digging in to what the future of the intranet looks like for his large, financial company. He facilitated a big thinking meeting of the minds for members to discuss questions like:
    • Is the Future Intranet 100% community focused?  Why or why not?
    • Who will reign in the future? Big behemoth technologies that do a lot of things or more focused solutions that are not as robust but do everything that they do well?
    • How does mobile play into the Future Intranet?

If you are interested in learning more about what it’s like to be a member of TheCR Network check out this extensive overview which shares our general programming opportunities and resources made available to members.

Want to access our programming for the benefit of your community work? Reach out and ask us about membership.

—–

Did you know that TheCR Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in TheCR Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

 

Community best practices

Resources for the people who build online communities.

ABOUT US
Our Values
Our Team
Our Clients
Careers

RESOURCES
Vendor Resource Center
Podcasts 
Community 101
Case Studies
Webinars

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Benchmarking and Audits
Models and Frameworks
Research
Professional Development

QUICK LINKS
Blog
Newsletter
About The Network
About The Library
About The Academy

LOGIN
The Network
The Library
The Academy

Contact
Support
Partnership
Inquiries
Subscribe to
Our Newsletter