Category Archives: Tech

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.

—

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.

Management and Operations Tips to Help You Avoid A Disastrous Holiday

Customer Service, Tech, , ,

So yes, I also felt a need to write about that Away article. The thing is, I have two sets of issues with what I read.

1) From an operations standpoint, a lot if this pain was avoidable
2) From a management standpoint, managing like this is cruel and unsustainable

I hope that the following tips can turn an unfortunate story and experience for these employees into something practical for those of you who have a good heart and want to avoid these situations.

Operations

I’ve run Operations teams in some form for over ten years now. It’s a little bit art, but it’s a lot science. And with a physical product, operations are incredibly important to get right. If you are selling a physical product that is likely to be a common Christmas gift, good planning is essential. I worked at the (partially) eCommerce site ZOZI for several years and successfully shepherded us through the holidays despite the massive influx in orders.

What I read in this article is a complete ineptitude in holiday planning for a physical brand…which is probably tied into the second part, because if you don’t care about your employees then you’re less likely to spend time planning for them.

The tips here are simple:

  • Plan
    • Understand your sales projections, estimated support volume per sale, support capability per staff member, etc.
    • If you’re retail, plan for a holiday influx. You will have one.
    • Staff should be allowed to have vacations, so you should plan how to handle vacation schedules early.
    • You should offer in advance, not at the last minute, vacation trade-offs for folks who truly are okay working during the holidays.
    • You should do your best to balance out people’s days off so you can have continuous coverage.
  • Invest
    • Not delivering Christmas gifts on time can be a death sentence for your brand, so you should over-invest during this period.
    • If your projections suggest you won’t have enough people, hire more early (full time or temp).
    • If you’re in a pinch, get all hands on deck to help with support.
  • Prep
    • You should address any quality issues with your product well in advance of the holiday and implement a code freeze (or in this case product freeze) far before so you don’t introduce any potential issues.
    • You should decimate any backlogs well before the holiday influx.
    • You should set expectations with your customers about holiday responsiveness.

Management

That said, the more important issue here is a complete lack of understanding of what makes a good manager. Managers are there to help their employees do their best work…and employees do their best work when they feel it is rewarding, challenging, and appreciated. Nobody does their best work when being yelled at, or if they do then it results in much quicker burnout. Every tactic on display in these Slack threads shows a fundamental misunderstanding, but here are a few tips that might help.

  • Your staff are both valuable asset and PEOPLE. Don’t treat them like gears in a machine.
  • Your on-the-ground managers are going to best know how to implement and deliver your directives. This “all communication should be public” thing is naive. Talk to your lieutenants to figure out the right approach, and let them deliver.
  • Don’t ever couch a punishment as professional development. It’s insulting and undermines any trust in you to actually help them develop.
  • Yelling at people in public only makes them feel worse. These people clearly felt dedication to the company, so any performance conversation would have been motivating to them. Doing it in public just shamed them and showed a lack of appreciation of their hard work.
  • If you’re going to get hands-on, ask how you can help, don’t threaten to take away the project. Get your hands dirty doing the same work as your team. People appreciate leaders that get in and help, but not when they do it as an exasperated, demeaning punishment.
  • When you are shitty to employees you lose them, have a harder time getting new ones, suffer from abrupt and rough departures, and maybe even get an article like this written about you.

I don’t like dunking on other teams, but I found the situations highlighted in this article pretty offensive…and sadly, I’ve seen versions of this in the real world. Life is too short to be a jerk. Build work memories you’re proud of.

How you can avoid a community revolt like the one Reddit just experienced

Community, Tech, ,

These days I hesitate to dive in and criticize companies for their community-building missteps. Building community is hard, and we all fail at some point or another.

However, I can’t resist being about the 3023rd person to weigh in on the
Reddit protest that occurred this weekend. Much of the analysis so far, while fine, has suggested a single action (the firing of Victoria Taylor) caused the event. Instead, it seems clear to me that this was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. There are much deeper problems over at Reddit, and I think it’s worth analyzing them because we could all learn from their mistakes. Here are my thoughts on what went wrong and how they could have avoided a blowup.

A single point-of-contact for community is a dumb move. (It’s also a common one.)

Having a single point of contact for a community means that you are one step from failure. If that person leaves, or is let go, or acts like a jerk, or does any number of things, your community is immediately in danger.

If you’re at a company with multiple community employees, make sure they all engage with the community on some level. Certainly some will have much more interaction than others, but being a recognized face is important.

Unfortunately, at many companies there’s only one community hire, so this is impossible. In this situation, try to have a non-community person (maybe a marketer or product manager, or even an office manager…someone with people skills) at least occasionally interact with your community. Build a sustainable community integrated with your company. Which leads to…

You need to be part of your community.

By all accounts—including her own—CEO Ellen Pao spends very little time talking to her community on Reddit. The employee they eventually asked to step into the moderator liaison role does not seem to be very active either, and often seems to get into tiffs with users regarding moderation actions. Meanwhile, the celebrated employee that’s leaving seemed incredibly active (she even had a whole subreddit for her two cats). Being part of your community engenders trust and helps you better understand them. I suspect the backlash would be far less severe if they had been a bigger part of their community.

If you let go an employee who is crucial to any major community projects, immediately fill that void.

Part of the major frustration from the Reddit community is the fact that Victoria was the coordinator for Ask Me Anything (AMA), the Reddit Q&A series (and often was the point person for verifying celebrity identities). With her departure, many of these sessions across multiple communities were suddenly in jeopardy. Reports vary, but it sounds like Reddit didn’t step up to temporarily fill this position and ensure these AMAs proceeded successfully. In fact, it sounds like some AMA moderators learned about Victoria’s departure through AMA subjects who couldn’t get ahold of her. This is just lazy on Reddit’s part; they should have immediately had an existing employee step in to facilitate this important part of the Reddit experience.

Monetizing a community is tough. Involve them, help them understand why it’s important, and know that there is a line past which you will alienate them.

I don’t know the magic trick to monetizing a community. It’s hard to make money off of something that’s explicitly designed around quality personal interactions rather than transaction. Steps towards monetization can cause community members to get very worried and upset…sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes imagined ones.

With that in mind, you must involve them. You must help them understand. Many times, the issue is simply your community picturing a huge company with insane profits and swimming pools full of gold trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of them…when the reality is that the company is rag-tag group of passionate people struggling to become profitable so they can keep the site afloat. Communicating this and being transparent about why and how you’re looking at monetization will greatly decrease the amount of frustration the community feels.

Involving community beyond that can be tricky; if you directly ask the group if you should do x or y, they’re likely to say “no” (and then you’re in a tough place if you do it anyway). But two options are a) doing user testing (the real kind, in a room rather than deployed live to a bunch of unsuspecting community members) and b) organizing a community advisory board. Both not only help the community feel that you took their concerns into account, they also should help you make a better decisions.

Finally, you need to know that there’s a line. There’s always a line. The communication and collaboration you do with the community can push that line further, but there’s a point (whole page take-over ads, popups, advertisers who clash with community values, etc) at which the community will say “no, that’s not ok”. Traverse further at your own risk.

Ad revenue is built on large numbers of visitors. When visitors are a direct result of the work a minority of volunteers provide, that vocal minority is, and should be treated as, very important.

At a SaaS company you’re likely to try to ignore the vocal minority asking for power-user features that won’t help you sell any more licenses to average users. But with a community, that vocal minority is often the reason the community is functioning and healthy, especially when they have significant responsibilities and projects. It seems that Reddit has been taking their moderators for granted, doing a bad job communicating with them and building much-needed features.

As Drew Olanoff put it: “Moral of the story? Making bucks off of the backs of a community is possible, until they take their backs somewhere else. It’s a tightrope. Reddit fell off.” Reddit should be prioritizing moderators above almost all else aside from revenue, because without them the site will collapse. The fact that Reddit apparently promised new tools and features for moderators and then never delivered is proof that their priorities are in the wrong place. They should have dedicated developers working on tools for moderators and dedicated staff communicating regularly with moderators (and, post-crisis, they now seem to).

Every company should have a crisis plan that involves communicating immediately (even if your communication is “we can’t talk about this yet”).

Crises happen. You can’t help that. But you can have a plan. And the first part of that plan needs to be communication. When community members hear about drama from other community members, it often gets exaggerated. This is true in most contexts. When a coworker tells you that Jenny from marketing was let go, it usually includes gossip or drives you to speculate, often leading to worst-case scenarios (“I bet they’re shutting down the whole department!”). But if the company communicates quickly and honestly, much of this will be squelched.

Reddit did a terrible job of this, with very little public communication about the issue. Worse, Pao went on to talk to the press about the incident before talking to the community. (She did post a single, unimpressive comment in one of the public threads. She later complained that she was being “downvoted” so her message could not get through…despite obviously having access to the company blog and announcements subreddit.)

Letting go of an employee that’s extremely connected to your community should be done very carefully. Ideally, you should work with that employee to ensure a smooth transition. Most employees would prefer this; it reflects badly on them, too, if a community collapses after they leave, proving they didn’t build a sustainable community. Sometimes this isn’t possible. We still don’t know what happened with Victoria. Sometimes departures are not amicable, or there are legal reasons you can’t discuss them. But just like I said in one of my favorite posts for UserVoice, saying nothing is far worse than saying no. So if you can’t actually talk about the situation, just acknowledge that it exists and is important. “Hey all—we hear that you’re upset about this and hope to discuss it with you soon, but for legal reasons we can’t just yet. Stay tuned, and thanks for your concern and passion.” That simple move would have alleviated a lot of the anger.

Community is hard. People are fickle (especially on Reddit). Balancing mission and revenue is tricky. There’s no silver bullet. But there’s also no excuse for neglecting your community and then on top of that not executing a good crisis and transition plan. I hope we can all take a moment this week to review the above and make sure our own communities are not set up for failure like Reddit was.

Footnote #1: What should Reddit do next? I think Sam Houston has some great thoughts.

Footnote #2: Before anyone brings it up for me—yes, I absolutely think the misogyny that is rampant on Reddit had something to do with this. Their disdain with CEO Ellen Pao seems half rooted in legitimate frustrations, half in their disgust over her lawsuit. That is unpleasant and inexcusable, but I still think it was a minor part of the equation. The points I’ve made above are far more relevant.

Footnote #3: Thanks to Jennifer Sable Lopez, the Community Building
Stack Exchange, various articles, and everyone on the CMX community for helping me polish my opinions here.

Sharing economy lessons from Lyft, Yerdle, & more

Community, Tech,

I recently had the pleasure of attending the San Francisco Community Manager Meetup‘s panel on the sharing economy and writing the official summary post. Here’s an excerpt:

“If there are 19 other drivers posting on the forum, you think ‘Ok, I’m gonna keep driving’.” Super-users were key to helping Lyft scale. Several months into a year in which their goal was launching 70 cities, they had launched exactly one city. They were struggling to find an office space and hiring local employees to work with drivers. Forced to innovate, they thought “what if, instead of having new drivers come into the office, we just have them meet an experienced driver in a parking lot?”

“It was scary,” David admits. “But it worked.” 

Check out the full article at CMX.

What if you subtracted “women” from that question?

Life, Tech,

For most* questions, if you replace “women” with “someone” and you get a different answer, there’s something wrong. Either there’s a institutional issue you should address, or you’re being sexist.

Take the case of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was asked what advice he’d give to women who want a raise (and might be uncomfortable asking). If Nadella was not sexist, he would have two options:

1) Give the same advice he gives to men: meet with your boss, show all the good work you’ve done, and ask.  This advice probably wouldn’t be super-helpful, seeing as women make 78% as much as men, but it would have been ignorant instead of sexist.

2) Acknowledge that there are a lot institutional problems with gender and pay. Talk about how women are often called manipulative or bitchy when they are strong-willed in the workplace, but similar men are considered driven and ambitious. Talk about how that needs to change, and maybe outline some ways that someone powerful like, I don’t know, the CEO of Microsoft, could change things. This also wouldn’t be a super-helpful answer, but it would be honest and definitely not sexist.

By telling women “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along”, Nadella is being sexist.

You might argue that he doesn’t know about the huge wage gap between men and women. Maybe that’s the case (disappointing if so). But again:  if he thinks women get the same opportunities as men, why would he give them a different answer than he would give men?

As a straight white male, anyone I’ve ever asked for advice on getting a raise has told me to ask. You can find plenty of this advice on the web. You’re generally supposed to gather examples of your great work, do some basic research, and then ask. “It never hurts to ask”, “you’ll never get what you don’t ask for”, etc – this is the stuff I’ve heard many times.

Why didn’t Nadella give this advice? Because he treats women differently. And that’s sexist. Period, full stop.

Let’s hope this is a wake-up call for him. I know it’s a wake-up call to me and many consumers that to not buy any Microsoft products. In the meantime, I’d recommend women avoid applying  to work at Microsoft, unless you want to cross your fingers for your “good karma” to somehow net you a raise.

*I will admit that “My water just broke, what should I do?” should have a different response when coming from a man.