How do you build communities within your company? 🛠

Good question! I always start with the why, people come for the why more so then the what, why are you building this product then begin to build a community around advocates of that why if that makes sense. A good book I came across that explores the science of community building is The business of belonging by David Spinks

LISTEN TO THOSE YOU'RE TRYING TO REACH. ... MEET YOUR AUDIENCE WHERE THEY ARE. ... POSITION YOUR CLIENTS AS THOUGHT LEADERS. ... CO-CREATE A “SECRET LANGUAGE.” ... DEVELOP A SOCIAL MISSION. ... IDENTIFY YOUR SHARED PURPOSE. ... LET YOUR AUDIENCE BE PART OF YOUR BRAND DEVELOPMENT. https://bit.ly/3OH03xD

We provide Scribd to employees if they want it, this created a book club internally (though I am not in it!). We also have specific team building meetings which brings out interests they have within the company that they can take ownership of - this might be projects, research or otherwise.

We follow three rule on all our workspace, including but not limited to meeting, training, team-building, group chat, documents... - Be active - Be clearly - Be funny

Fostering connections among employees is essential to building community in the workplace. You can lay the groundwork for these connections by encouraging employees to interact with one another, even though this can be a difficult task because it requires employee participation.

I'm going to narrow it down to five helpful practices: - Find what teammates have in common and capitalize on it: could be location, hobbies, experience, and so on. Finding a common ground drives effortless conversation and helps build natural connections. - Encourage people to talk about their interests: often, I would work with amazing teammates and have no idea they were so cool until much later. That's why giving everyone room to shine is important. - Keep an open mind and be non-judgemental: no one will ever want to share anything or be genuine in the workplace if they know every wrong move will be scrutinized. - Find creative ways to engage people. Ideally, it's great to have events that show people in an entirely different light, like karaoke parties or acting workshops. - Promote collaboration, not competition. Don't compare teammates with each other, don't play favorites, and don't single people out. All of the above create a toxic atmosphere in the workplace. - Use communication-focused technology. I am mentioning this because I'm working on such a product myself (https://ovice.in/) but you can even use Slack chats to create internal communities.

First establish a sense of urgency. Then create a powerful guiding coalition, in which senior managers always form the core. This coalition should create a vision and broadcast it so that others are empowered to carry it out. The process moves on to planning short-term wins, consolidating improvements, and institutionalizing new approaches. This strategy has been vividly described by author John P Kotter in his article "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail". https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-...

We try to ensure that everyone feels welcome and valued in the organization. And for that, we use different community-building exercises like games, activities, and contests to instill a sense of mutual dependence and shared value among our staff members.

Good topic of conversation. It is increasingly important to have the notion that before creating a product or service it is possible to create the community. In my case I created a startup that helps makers and entrepreneurs to find their cofounders to launch a project together. Before that I created a whatsapp community with people interested in entrepreneurship. We are now 200 people and many projects have already emerged. The goal is always to grow a little more, but 200 people already filled a hall and that makes me proud.

Build a community around the industry you're in. The majority want to progress and it will be easy to keep motivated people around. Once it is established, pick an activity. More physical the better. Keep building data. That's how you keep adding value. Give a reason why people should follow you.

@serainasilja the name of the platform is called Teamfounder.co and the coolest part is actually creating the campaign. After all, everyone likes to come up with good projects. Telling the story of the project, what has already been done, the challenges and who is the ideal team are some interests that we ask. And attach images and videos to attract readers and cofounder candidates. Check out the site and all the information is there. If you need help, let me know.

We have tried to find the interests of our employees and have created few groups around the same, we currently have 3 groups online gaming, memes( the ideas have really been super for the marketing strategy), and story for the week(members sharing their story). These group have really help in creating the good rapport between the team members even when few of our members are working remotely.

Different companies have such unique ways of tackling it. It can be a Slack community, a referral program, hackathons, live events, in-person meetups, or just a good product that gets people to talk about it naturally.

Hey Seraina! Great question! I've been working in a startup and the company growth was quite impressive. Once we switched to LeSS framework, we started building cross-functional teams which decreased the communication for different roles. So, we decided to build communities and here's the structure we used: 👉 Design community — designers discussed tasks separated from their team flow, each community member presented their work that wasn't tied to their team scope. Sometimes designers hosted some huge researches or conducted presentations focused on educating other community members 👉 Product community — product managers also created their separate plan with researches, hypotheses, and stuff like that. We used to invite analysts to this meeting 👉 Fronted and Backend communities (sometimes they had combined meetings) — weekly meeting that was focused on educating its members, discussing individual results, mentoring, and setting up overall processes Here are some tips for building a strong internal community: - being a part of community should be voluntary, it's much better to engage employees to be a part of it than forcing them to attend the meeting - it is totally fine to invite an expert from outside to share the knowledge with the community. You can also bring some clients and power users - each community had a dedicated Slack channel I should also mention the most popular one — Alco community — weekly Friday meeting in the bar near the office, that was the biggest one and the most attended event for the whole company 😂 Hope it makes sense. Good luck!

Be transparent with the team. We have an all-hands meeting each month. Our CEO is good at making Mojito for all of us. We drink happily together. We use Notion and Airtable to comment and give constructive feedback async without too many meetings.

Technology has been a part of our lives ever since it was invented. So why not use them to improve relationships? Social networking is a great tool for keeping people connected, not a universal evil as many companies think. They allow you to get feedback fairly quickly, as well as build friendships. We have a chat room on Telegram.

Doing politics, I guess the best way to build community. Divide and rule. LOL LOL LOL

A lot of our employees have a personal blog. Everyone reads blogs of each other and comments. Works well.

communities are only built around a product/company if the message of the company is strong and has a greater good attached to it. the employee needs to resonate with the message of the brand and that's how a community will be built.

Interesting topic. I find that a medium to big organization (anywhere over 100?) often are marred by silos. Not knowing what other teams are doing. Traditional social media platforms for corporates don't cut the ice.