Category Archives: Community

The Future of Remote Work (and why companies need to start hiring more community professionals NOW)

Community, Management, Tech, , ,

Slack just released some fascinating research on remote work in the age of COVID-19. There are some important takeaways every company should think deeply on.

People lean towards a hybrid workplace

Despite all the claims of “remote is the future”, the majority of Americans surveyed said that, post-COVID, they’d like to spend some time in the office and some time at home. Very few want to spend 5 days a week in the office, and they appreciate saving time and money working from home.

I suspect many more would have been excited about fully remote, save for one major pain point cited in the research: human connection. People are feeling less connected to their coworkers, and this seems to be one of the main things driving them to think about a hybrid workplace.

The office is not necessary – opportunities to connect as humans are

It’s clear from these results that the office as a workplace is unnecessary, but the office is an easy (if not cheap) way to drive some human connection. That said, it’s uneven, biased towards those who naturally connect with others, and frustrating for truly remote workers.

The future is much more likely about creating structured opportunities for people to connect, both online and in-person. With the focus on connection, these interactions can intentionally drive inclusivity and, frankly, spend more money on peak experiences rather than office perks that become less novel over time. (Hell, even just from a COVID-19 standpoint, safety at one big in-person event is much more doable than safety in an office open to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people every day.)

People Ops teams need to start carving out roles that focus on creating connections and belonging

In other words, they need to hire community professionals. Connection and belonging has become a big focus for People Ops teams in recent years, but it will need to be a top priority for hybrid and remote-first companies. Employee engagement is heavily affected by connection, so someone needs to be dedicated to not just building that into the day-to-day, but building intentional spaces for people to connect. This might look like:

  • Programs that connect employees over coffee
  • Career development buddies
  • Interest/hobby groups
  • Identity groups
  • Team offsites/onsites
  • Big internal summits
  • Onboarding processes geared towards building connection
  • Etc

This will certainly involve events, but won’t work if it’s simply an event planner hire. Experienced community professionals know that the logistics of the event are secondary to driving the desired human connection.

It also requires thinking through how you foster conversation and connection around touchy, emotional issues, something many tech companies are struggling with. These are community-building and moderation issues. Luckily there are a bunch of us who are very experienced at tackling these challenges and opportunities. Rather than learn these skills from scratch, People Ops should look towards the experts.

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This stuff is work. My team’s engagement score has actually improved during the pandemic, but that’s due to hours and hours of work and experimentation on the part of me and my lieutenants. If we leave these things to chance, we’re going to see this get worse.

My Community Manager Appreciation Day Challenge

Community, ,

I actually thought last Monday was Community Manager Appreciation Day, because the CMAD website hadn’t been updated since 2017. Back then they were doing all-day streams, giving out awards, and trending on Twitter.

I highlight this not to shame anyone, but to point out that this is exactly what community manager burnout looks like: going from something huge and engaging and impressive to nothing. You bust your ass, you do about 5 jobs at once, you make amazing things happen…and then you hit a wall. You don’t have the resources you need, you’re exhausted, your value gets questioned, and you stop.

That sucks, and I feel bad for the CMAD organizers because they really did so much cool stuff for several years.

So here’s my challenge to you this CMAD: take care of yourself. Don’t worry about hanging out checking out the CMAD hashtag all day or sending supportive messages to your peers. Take care of YOU.

A few ideas:

  • Schedule a legit vacation right now. Line up backup so you can be truly offline. Know that it won’t be the same as you doing it, but it’ll be ok.
  • Rejigger your schedule to make uninterrupted time for deep work.
  • Find some time for exercise, even a tiny bit. (I’m about to walk the 20m from Transbay Terminal to work instead of take a bus. It’s something.)
  • Set up your phone to limit your time on apps you don’t need, or to go to grayscale after 6p, or to pop an alarm warning you to take a break.
  • Give more responsibility to your community members. Know that it’ll be hard to let go but that they’ll do things you never expected.
  • Stop working on something. Cut your losses on your least successful project, let someone who foisted a task on you know that you’re too swamped, take a break from your Friday wrap-up post. (I did this once and the community stepped up and did it for me!)
  • Ask for help. Make sure your boss really understands how much you’re working. Ask a fellow community manager for advice, or another set of eyes. Find a coworker who believes in your mission and see if they’ll help with a big project.
  • Build time into your day – even literally 5 minutes – for mindfulness. Take a class or download an app and learn how just taking a moment to be present can make a huge difference.
  • Know that you can’t do everything, that you’re doing a great job, and that you’re not an imposter. And burnout will not help you succeed.

Good luck – I believe in you!

Why Adding Friction Could Make Your Community Healthier

Community, , , , , , , ,

Slippery warning sign

For years, designers have been talking about making things “frictionless”. And for good reason: the web was full of a lot of friction. Signup flows were labyrinthine, uploading and storing files was a hassle, and let’s not even talk about sites that didn’t work on mobile.

But in community design, friction is coming into vogue. Why? Because making it frictionless to say the first thing on your mind can often be a bad thing.

One of the biggest recent examples of this is Nextdoor‘s racial profiling problem. Nextdoor allows members of a neighborhood to create an online community where they can talk about things happening in their neighborhood, trade items, and report crime and safety issues. And that last area is where the problems arose, because people with implicit biases started posting things like concerns about “‘light-skinned black female’ walking her dog and talking on her cellphone” and following up with horrifying comments like “I don’t recognize her. Has anyone described any suspect of crime like her?”

Often, these “suspicious characters” were simply neighbors who wouldn’t have been called out if not for the color of their skin. The posts were offensive, reinforced racial stereotypes, and also made it hard for police to sort out posts talking about actual crime.

Generally, community platforms try to deal with this by having clear guidelines and taking action after an offensive post goes up. But guidelines are often easily ignored, and taking a post down doesn’t lessen the negative impact it had. The most effective way to affect biased behavior like this is to add friction to make people stop and think while they’re taking an action.

Nextdoor has done an amazing job addressing this. As soon as you mention race in a Crime & Safety post, you are required to list additional, non-racial attributes. This, they explain, creates “decision points to get people to stop and think as they’re observing people to cut down on implicit bias.” The result? Racial profiling posts have dropped by 75%.

Nextdoor crime posting

Nextdoor isn’t new to friction. They require those launching neighborhoods on the platform to recruit a certain number of members in a certain period of time, and all members must prove residence. This means many neighborhoods never get off the ground…but also means they avoid empty, inactive communities that would make their service look bad. Stack Exchange does the same thing with new sites on their networks, requiring them to amass a certain amount of activity before they’re publicly launched.

Airbnb, faced with similar racial profiling issues, is taking a number of actions including requiring hosts take a pledge promising not to be biased. You might think a pledge won’t change people’s actions, but studies have found that students required to pledge to obey their school’s honor code were less likely to cheat – even if the school didn’t have an honor code.

Discourse and Product Hunt boldly put friction at the very start of their experience. You previously couldn’t comment on Product Hunt without an invite from an existing member, and the Discourse community platform allows you to set certain achievements (number of votes, number of comments, etc) that a member must hit before they can take greater actions. Over at Reddit, we don’t allow you to create a subreddit unless your account has a minimum level of karma and is at least 30 days old.

Metafilter literally added a payment to their sign up process not in order to make money, but purely to create friction that prevented casual sign-ups. They only wanted people who were truly invested.

It’s exciting to see community design start to step away from traditional (and generally sales-based) design. Too long community professionals have labored within inflexible platforms and struggled to react to issues rather than prevent them. Once we start putting thought into where we create or remove friction, we can build communities that are more successful, productive, and civil.

Full disclosure: I consulted for Nextdoor from 2015-2016, but did not work on the project(s) listed above.

Thank you to the Social Media Clarity podcast for their great work summarizing this trend!

Trolling isn’t outlier behavior, and we can stop it

Community, , , , , ,

Large troll standing over a house

For years the picture painted of trolls was pretty straightforward: while most members of online communities are good people, there are a few horrible, unchangeable, malicious people called “trolls” who live to make everyone’s life terrible. Our job was to try to keep them out, ban them when they showed up, and sigh and accept that they were an inevitable part of any online community.

What has become clear is that we were wrong; most trolls are regular people.

Two recently released studies have shown that the majority of “troll” behavior is actually generated by normal people who have been triggered into acting negatively, usually through a combination of their own mental state (i.e. having a bad day) and social norms (e.g. seeing other people troll and get away with it).

  1. The famously toxic League of Legends found that only about 1% of their players were consistently toxic, and those produced only about 5% of the toxicity. “The vast majority was from the average person just having a bad day.”
  2. Scientists from Cornell and Stanford found that people are more likely to troll if they were in a negative mood, late at night, and if the first comment on a thread was a “troll comment”.

This is a game-changer for several reasons.

One, it means we may have been banning or punishing a large number of normal people who were just doing what they saw others doing. It’s likely that we only reinforced their negative behavior, rather than helping them adjust it.

Two, it means there’s a lot more we can do to prevent trolling. A recent experiment on Reddit found that rule posts stuck to the top of a thread increased rule following by 7.3 percentage points and increased newcomer participation by 38.1%. League of Legends found that some simple priming “reduced negative attitudes by 8.3%, verbal abuse by 6.2% and offensive language by 11%”. Some people are further down the rabbit hole of negativity, but even they may be saved. We are not helpless to decrease trolling, and continuing to act like we are is irresponsible.

(You can find my much longer post on ways to create positive online spaces here.)

Three, it means community managers are even more important in any organization that has an interactive online space. We are no longer just reactive janitors, apologizing for the mess. We can be proactive social designers. (Be sure to go seek out some behavioral psychology books and classes, folks.)

To me, this is extremely exciting. It means our online communities can become more positive, safe places. And it means that our work is far from done. Complacency happens in every industry. The community industry has finally started pushing through our complacency about ROI. Next, let’s tackle trolling.

It’s important that I note that these findings don’t mean there aren’t real, horrible people on the internet. It doesn’t mean we need to put up with harassment just because someone had a bad day. I’m not condoning bad behavior – I’m just optimistic that we can change much of it.

Troll photo courtesy of EE Shawn

The pros and cons of Slack for communities

Community, , ,

Slack logoThese days, it’s rare to hear anything but awe when community managers talk about Slack. The common consensus seems to be that Slack is the perfect community platform. This overexcitement worries me because a) it’s not and b) different communities require different types of platforms.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Slack. I think it’s a fantastic tool for company communication (especially for companies with more than one office) and it can be a good tool for community. Let’s explore the pros and cons without the rose-colored glasses on.

Pros

Synchronous Activity Drives Engagement

Usually the biggest health metric community professionals are looking at is engagement: how much are members interacting with each other? And when you put people in a space at the exact same time, engagement increases. This is the reason meetups and conferences are such powerful experiences and why it can be harder to drive engagement on asynchronous forums. The #1 reason most community professionals like Slack for community is the live chat drives significant engagement.

Many People Know How to Use It

Any time you introduce people to a community, you have to deal with the learning curve for the platform. This is why so many communities are built in Facebook Groups, despite even more significant drawbacks; everyone knows how to use Facebook. The same is quickly becoming true of Slack. Many organizations use Slack, so for many, a Slack community doesn’t involve any learning curve.

The Opportunities for Onboarding are Excellent

Getting new community members to add a profile photo, introduce themselves, or read the community guidelines can be hard. Very few people look at intro threads or sidebar guidelines. Even an email onboarding campaign has to compete with all the other emails in your inbox. Slack, on the other hand, has demonstrated how live chat bots can drastically improve onboarding uptake. This is a huge boon for community professionals.

Cons

Synchronicity Leaves Out Some Populations

If you have an international community, putting them on Slack immediately decreases the likelihood that people from different time zones will interact, because Slack is all about in the moment.

FOMO Can Drive Disengagement

Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is often a strong tool for communities. You log in to see what happened while you were gone and add your contributions. But because Slack rewards being active in the moment, it favors those who have the time, attention, and professional setting where they can sit on Slack all day. And because the synchronicity drives significant engagement, returning to “check in” once a day can be overwhelming. In order to create a truly engaged community, you need to create a shared experience. I’ve disengaged from several very interesting Slack groups simply because I can’t be on them very often and returning to catch up is an unpleasant task that doesn’t make me feel part of the group.

Lack of Scannability

On top of that, it’s much harder to scan a train-of-thought Slack discussion than it is to scan a list of distinct topics in a forum. (The new threaded replies may help some, but don’t solve the problem entirely.)  This also makes it hard to point others to useful discussions at a later time.

No SEO

For many companies, the search engine optimization benefits of their community are huge, driving new membership, deflecting potential support tickets, and even converting customers. Slack conversations don’t show up in search engine results.

Separate From Your Site

Whether for branding purposes, consistency, or simple navigation, it can be beneficial to have your community embedded into your site. Slack is a separate space.

 

Again, this is not a hit piece on Slack. Slack is a fantastic tool and can be great for some communities. But it’s dangerous for us to talk about the pros of any platform without discussing the cons. Choosing a community platform is about making the right choice for your community and company.

So, if you don’t need SEO benefits, have a relatively small group of people who are at a computer all day, able to chat, and in the same time zone, Slack could be perfect for you. If you have an international audience that can only check in online occasionally and your business needs relevant conversations to show up in search results and be easily retrievable, Slack’s probably not the right choice. Write down your must-haves and see where Slack and the many other platforms out there fit.