L&D's Role in a Purpose Driven Workplace

This post is inspired by last week's #ihrchat on Twitter hosted by Dr. Tanvi Gautam and supported by Team #ihrchat. The chat was full of insights and learning, as always. Flood of tweets poured in with inputs and suggestions on this thought-provoking topic - Reinventing HR for a Purpose Driven Workplace (PDW). And the trigger for this post was the question: How will learning & development shift in a PDW ?

I have been writing about the shifts required by L&D to meet the connected and collaborative knowledge economy for some time now. Here are links to some of the earlier posts:

1. L&D's New Hatrack
2. Re-imagining Work and Learning in a Networked World
3. The Changing Face of Work and Workplace Learning 
4. L&D's Role in the VUCA World 
5. Role of Community Management in Workplace Learning Today 

One of the running themes across these posts have been about organizational change and how L&D will deal with the trends and shifts impacting us today. The diagram below illustrates the key trends:

The new generation of the workforce, today's employees, want much more from work than just a pay check. And we have to acknowledge and respect that. They are focused on the three qualities of work defined by Daniel Pink in Drive: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. They want to work for organizations with a Purpose. They want to know the Why  and not only the What or the How. Simon Sinek expresses this brilliantly in his popular TED talk: How Great Leaders Inspire Action:

But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by "why" I don't mean "to make a profit." That's a result. It's always a result. By "why," I mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?

Employees today want to be part of a community where the work and the workplace will be an extension of themselves, their passion and vision. One of the criteria today's workforce look for is a vision large enough to inspire participation. I am reminded of Abhijit Bhaduri's post on Talent Communities in relation to this post. Talent usually congregates around a purpose and talent also acts like a magnet for other talented, passionate individuals. An organization with a defined purpose and vision is thus likely to become a community growing around a domain. Take the Linux community for example. Take organizations like Google, Apple or Zappos. They have a defined vision that drives everything they do and every decision they take giving employees something bigger than themselves to strive toward as well as a sense of pride in belonging. Aaron Hurst in his latest book, The Purpose Economy, says:

Like the information economy, which has driven innovation and economic growth until now, Hurst argues that our new economic era is driven by connecting people to their purpose, “It’s an economy where value lies in establishing purpose for employees and customers—through serving needs greater than their own, enabling personal growth and building community.” (Italics mine - http://purposeeconomy.com/welcome/)

Assuming we have such Purpose Driven Workplaces (PDW) what would be L&D role here? What would be the defining characteristics of such an L&D? What would they do differently?

Re-thinking L&D in a Purpose Driven Workplace?

So far, the role of L&D has been to define programs and training based on past data - identified skills gaps, best practices and established processes, explicit knowledge residing in experts or documented processes. Individuals are selected or nominated to attend "requisite" training and get back to work and be efficient. The training hours per individual seemed like a good enough matrix. We know how obsolete and redundant that matrix is in today's context. And it is definitely obsolete in the context of a PDW. 

Words like creativity, imagination, vision, persistence, etc., come up when we mention purpose. It is evident that a purpose driven workplace with passionate and engaged employees will require an entirely different breed of L&D. To start with, L&D needs to be integrated with business. Passionate, purpose-driven individuals do not need hand-holding and a checklist of training thrust at them to develop skills they require. They do not need stringent monitoring and managing. They take ownership of their learning and work because they don't perceive these as distinct from each other or from themselves. They are working because they believe in what they do and are proud to be a part of something bigger then themselves. For them, work becomes learning. Such a workplace will require L&D who not only understands business imperatives but will also be community builders and facilitators, connectors and enablers. 

IMHO, a PDW is: 
"A community of engaged and passionate individuals working and collaborating towards a common cause, stretching themselves to achieve what often may seem impossible, viewing failures as learning and using the possibilities of a networked organization to the fullest."

A PDW cannot operate in a wholly hierarchical, command and control manner. The more I think, I feel that a PDW has to have the characteristics of a social business. A social business that operates on the principles of trust, self-organization, autonomy to solve problems and collaboration forms an ideal basis for a purpose driven organization. In such an organization, L&D needs to become community managers and connectors. The need is not to train people but to facilitate connection between the right individuals, and enabling the network that exist in all organizations. The presence of an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) can be a benefit in a PDW. L&D's task would be to:

1. Help the organization to use the platform to listen to different inputs - from business, from front-line employees and from customers
2. Help people build communities around projects, domains and areas of interest
3. Foster 21st Century skills that will help them to optimally participate in the network
4. Surface diverse thoughts and ideas being shared; curate relevant content
5. Build community management skills in others 

In summary, L&D role will shift from:

• Designing training programs to facilitating communities 
• Developing skills based on past analysis to fostering 21st Century skills 
• Measuring number of training hours per employee to evaluating community engagement

P.S.: The diagram below captures the skills people in a purpose driven workforce will need:

L&D's New Hatrack

This article appeared in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills Magazine, January 2015

Our professional, personal, and private lives are being heavily impacted by a world that has become Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (a.k.a. VUCA). Sahana Chattopadhyay looks at this changing world -- and defines the new roles required by L&D departments everywhere. 

The future of work is going to be radically different from what we have experienced so far. An increasingly global and uber connected workforce, globally distributed organizations, dispersed expertise, ubiquitous connectivity powered by the affordances of social, local and mobile (SoLoMo) and the economy of individuals are giving rise to completely different working and learning behaviors. Today’s users with their mobile devices, anytime anywhere access to the internet, and connected to their networks via social platforms operate under completely different paradigms. In the light of these transformations and disruptions, It is glaringly evident that L&D departments can no longer function the way they used to, at least not if they want to be relevant and be a business partner to the organizations.

The onus lies on L&D to gauge the impact of these shifts on workplace learning, leverage technology and herald the change. This calls for the acquisition of new skills and roles in the team to meet the changing needs of a demographically diverse workforce.

I have briefly described some of the skills that are going to be critical in the coming years. 

Know how to build one's PLN

Workplace challenges are increasingly going to be unique requiring skills like analysis, problem solving, learning agility, adaptability, pattern sensing and exception handling; therefore, instilling the skills of “learning how to learn” is of paramount importance. This necessitates individuals to practice Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and build their Personal Learning Networks (PLN). To enable the workforce acquire these skills, the L&D team must "walk the talk". Since not all L&D members possibly use social media to drive their own professional development, acquiring the skills of PKM will require some time and effort. While most people today use multiple social tools, using these specifically to enhance and support continuous learning and professional development may not come naturally. Conscious effort must be made to build one’s PLN and transfer the skills to the workforce.

Be conversant in today's technological and demographic landscape

Today, L&D is faced with the challenge and the opportunity to empower a workforce spanning five generations and working in a ubiquitously connected environment. The affordances of social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) have to be factored into all the aspects of learning ecosystem design. Workers will use mobile devices including wearables to learn at the point of need, access their network and communities of practices to solve challenges, share user-generated content in response to the community needs or just to share their learning. Social media and open resources like MOOCs will foster an era of self-driven learners who know what they need, where to find it and take their pick. The learners will come with a consumer mindset--valuing what they need and not what is thrust on them. L&D will have to ensure that we have the requisite skills to facilitate this move or risk becoming redundant. 

Manage/facilitate communities and networks

Learning in the workplace will increasingly take place in communities – these could be Communities of Interest, Communities of Practice (CoP), or even communities formed out of project groups. Some will be temporary like those of people coming together for projects; some will be long term like CoPs where workers from across the organization come together to evolve their domain, learn from each other and add to the knowledge pool. While people may still come together to share and learn as they often do without L&D intervention, support from L&D in this area will not only make it more efficient and bridge silos but will also benefit the organization by providing a platform for the capture of the organizational hive mind. This is directly tied to the skills of community management and facilitation of virtual collaboration.

The role of community management will be one of the most crucial because of the global nature of organizations and dispersed teams working across time zones and continents. Communities of professionals collaborating and cooperating to learn together will be on the rise. Content will be continuously co-created and co-owned by the community members (much like the evolution of Wikipedia). Each member will bring their expertise to bear and share their knowledge and experiences. Learning will happen through conversations and participation. What will emerge is a network of diverse and connected workers skilled at PKM learning together to develop skills they can apply to their work. L&D will have to don the hat of community managers to make this transition seamless.

Most organizations today recognize the needs of a distributed workforce and are investing in enterprise collaboration platforms to support their formal learning endeavors with more informal and collaborative sharing. However, this requires community managers who can facilitate activities on the platform. L&D has to don multiple hats to enable this transformation. 

The hat of a Change Agent

Just because an enterprise collaboration platform is in place doesn’t mean that everyone will take to it like a duck to water. The natural adoption curve will set in with some being early adopters and others trailing behind. However, the enthusiasm of even the early adopters will rapidly wane if the platform doesn’t offer engaging content and meaningful conversations. This requires well thought out change-management plans.

Change management includes onboarding users onto the platform, enabling them to use it with ease and supporting them throughout. Onboarding typically covers conducting training, socializing the platform and defining different ways of contribution. Defining clear guidelines and directives go a long way towards user adoption like telling them exactly how they can contribute and collaborate. The table below summarizes some of the ways that users can contribute.

L&D has to make two things very simple -- the act of making the shift and the reason behind the shift. As community managers, we have to remove all obstacles from the path of change.

The hat of a Trainer

All new platforms – no matter how intuitive they seem – require onboarding. This can be in the form of simple how-to documents, screencasts, videos, webex sessions, and any other form that works. What is important to remember is that designing and creating these training materials is not enough. They must reach the users. This could mean creating a Training/Help Center on the platform that can be a one-stop shop for users. Reaching out to users proactively to find out if they need help makes adoption easier.

The hat of a Content Curator

Good content is one of the key factors behind why people choose to visit, stay and engage on an enterprise platform. The content can be in the form of short capsules of learning, curated articles, links to interesting resources, discussions on the forum, blogs and micro-content from other users. It is the job of the community manager to ensure that the content is appropriately tagged and curated and thus findable. To be a trustworthy and respected content curator, it is important to know the interests, needs and passions of the community. This requires constant engagement with the community. It also means enlisting the help of community ambassadors who are likely to be experts regarding the interests of that community.

The hat of a Connector

Collaboration platforms are all about connections--between content and people, between expertise and challenges, between skill-sets and projects, between people and people. As community managers, it is important to set in place a system that enables “findability” and accessibility. This could mean anything from inculcating practices like tagging for “searchability”, helping users to fill out their profiles, to manually connecting the nodes. Since community managers have a bird's eye view of their community, they are often best placed to spot a need and a corresponding solution--be it for a certain expertise, content or skillset. The role of a connector is crucial in creating business value for the organization and is a skill all community managers need to hone.

The hat of a Consultant

This is perhaps the most frequently donned hat and covers a gamut of skills including needs analysis, solution designing, influencing, and negotiating. Typically in an organization, a single community of all employees will not be an effective means of collaboration. They will split into teams and groups driven by many factors from functional areas and interests to roles and projects. These teams will form their own communities with their specific and unique goals and requirements. It's L&D’s role to help the teams articulate their objectives and enable them to design their community experience in a manner that supports their objectives.

The diagram below is an example of a learning ecosystem that L&D teams may be required to create and manage – where the online and the offline world come together. 

As the churn continues around us, L&D must gear up to transform themselves and workplace learning to tackle the future of work.  

Role of Community Management in Workplace Learning Today

When I read Rachel Happe’s (@rhappe) post, The Emerging Career Path of Community Professionals, I was reminded of my older posts on community management and the skills required. I wrote about the tenets of community management based on my experience. In this post, I want to highlight the importance of community management as a discipline that can enable organizations to take on the challenges and complexities of the future of work.

Organizations investing in enterprise social platforms (IMHO, more and more organizations are doing it and will continue to do so) require community managers who can facilitate activities on the platform. This requires anyone playing the role to wear multiple hats. In my post, I want to explore some of the "hats" a community manager needs to wear to execute her role. The premise of this post is that when an organization makes a conscious effort to bring in social collaboration and support their formal learning endeavors with more informal and collaborative sharing, it usually begins with the introduction of an enterprise collaboration platform. This shift calls for some intense community management and community building, and the post focuses on the different roles a community manager needs to play during this time.

The hat of a Change Agent

Just because an enterprise collaboration platform is in place doesn’t mean that everyone will take to it like duck takes to water. The natural adoption curve will set with some being early adopters and others trailing behind. However, the enthusiasm of the even the early adopters will rapidly wane if the platform doesn’t offer engaging content and meaningful conversations. This of course is easier said than done and requires well thought out change management plans.

As shown in the diagram, change management includes onboarding users onto the platform, enabling them to use it with ease and supporting them throughout. Onboarding typically covers conducting training, socializing the platform and defining different ways of contribution. Defining clear guidelines and directives go a long way toward user adoption. The table below summarizes some of the ways that users can contribute.

As change agents, we have to make two things very simple for them -- the act of making the shift and the reason behind the shift. As community managers, we have to remove obstacles from the path of change. We have to be obsessed with making the shift to the new collaboration platform easy.

There will be umpteenth obstacles beyond the control of a community manager ranging from the constraints posed by the platform itself to enterprise security policies that impact how users access the platform. Moreover, the steps needed to be taken to make the shift have to be crystal clear including what the expected outcome will be. Dan and Chip Heath says in Switch, "What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity." Ambiguity will doom any change effort.

The hat of a Trainer

All new platforms-- no matter how intuitive it may seem--require some training as mentioned above. This can be in the form of simple how-to documents, screencasts, videos, webex sessions, and any other form that works. What is important to remember perhaps is that designing and creating these training materials is not enough. We need to ensure they reach the users. This could mean creating a Training/Help Center on the platform that can be a one-stop shop for users. Reaching out to users proactively to find out if they need help makes adoption easier. Mapping the training to typical use cases is also important. Providing generic, platform related information is not too useful. Instead, the training material needs to focus on what are the typical ways users are likely to interact on the platform and why would they need to do so. Shaping the guidelines, screencasts and videos around these use cases can help onboard users quickly to the platform.

The hat of a Content Curator

Good content is one of the key pull factors behind why people would choose to engage on the platform. As people begin to access the platform, they expect to see meaningful content – these could be short capsules of learning, curated articles, links to interesting resources, discussions on the forum, blogs and micro-content from other users, and so on. It is the job of the community manager to ensure that the content is appropriately tagged and curated and thus findable. Each platform will have its own functionalities and features that allow a community manager to curate and aggregate. However, to be a trustworthy and respected content curator, it is important to know the interests, needs and passions of the community. This requires constant engagement with the community, listening to the community and having an eye for detail. It also means enlisting the help of community ambassadors who are likely to be experts regarding the interests of that community.

The bottom line is to never launch an empty platform. It must be populated with meaningful content prior to launch.

Here are some practical tips to make a community engaging for its users.

The hat of a Connector

Collaboration platforms are all about connections--between content and people, between expertise and need, between skill-sets and projects, between people and people. As community managers, it is important to set in place a system that enables findability and accessibility. This could mean anything from inculcating practices like tagging for searchability, helping users to fill out their profiles for findabilty, to manually connecting the nodes. Since community managers have a bird's eye view of their community, they are often best placed to spot a need and a corresponding solution--be it for a certain expertise, content or skillset. The role of a connector is crucial in creating business value for the organization and is a skill all community managers need to hone.

The hat of a Brand Ambassador 

Needless to say, we need to be cheerleaders for our community. There is no replacement for enthusiasm and passion. Marketing the platform--albeit subtly--is one of the tasks of a community manager. Telling stories of successful use cases, collecting examples of how collaboration is positively impacting workflow, business and innovation and narrating these stories-- all help in branding the community as well as in getting the skeptics on-board. It is important to find the evangelists and believers and encourage them to share their stories.

The hat of a Consultant

This is perhaps the most frequently donned hat and covers a gamut of skills including needs analysis, solution designing, influencing, facilitating, and negotiating. This calls for a post by itself but I will touch upon the key points here. Typically, in an organization/enterprise, a single community of all employees will not be an effective means of collaboration. They will split into teams and groups driven by many factors from functional areas and interests to roles and projects. These teams will form their own communities with their specific and unique goals and objectives. It's our job to help the teams articulate their objectives and enable them to design their community experience in a manner that supports their objectives. It also entails sharing best practices around collaboration--where collaboration implies fruitful comings together to achieve common objectives.  

50 Posts and Articles that Made Me Think in 2011

Inspired by Jane Hart’s Top 100 Articles of 2011, I thought I should put down at least the top 50 that has made me reflect and ponder in the past one year, has changed the way I do things and shaped quite a bit of my work-life decisions. Not all the posts have been written in 2011, but since I either stumbled across them in 2011 or read them with greater appreciation this year, I thought it fair to include these in the list. In the past one year, I have made a career shift or should I say expanded my work portfolio (and I have described the move here), and these posts and articles have been instrumental in helping me make sense of the move and impart some value to the work I do.

I have divided them across five categories for easy reference. From the categories, you will be able to see what has influenced me the most in the past one year. At times, I have also had difficulty in “slotting” an article under a specific category. Many of the articles span groups and are interlinked. I have listed them in some sort of reading order or the way they made sense to me…

Social Business

1. The future is podular by Dave Gray
2. Putting Enterprise 2.0 into Context by Andrew McAfee
3. Factories: the original social businesses by Anne Marie McEwan
4. The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business: The Early Adoption Phase by Dion Hinchcliffe
5. Moving Beyond Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement by Dion Hinchcliffe
6. Seven Lessons Learned on Social Business by Dion Hinchcliffe
7. Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions by Riitta Raesmaa
8. From social intranets to collaboration ecosystems by Fred Cavazza
9. What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ? by Bertrand Duperrin
10. How Digital Business Will Evolve in 2012: 6 Big Ideas by Dion Hinchcliffe
11. Why social business is different - Part 1: Reusing stored collaboration by Dion Hinchcliffe
12. Social networks are becoming your personal operating system by Brian Solis
13. Five Emergent Strategies for Improving Social Business Performance by Dion Hinchcliffe
14. Open Work: Using Social Software To Make Our Work Visible Again by Dion Hinchcliffe
15. Why E2.0 and Social Business Initiatives Are Likely to Remain Difficult by Jon Husband

Community Management

1. Community Management: The Strategic New IT-Enabled Business Capability by Dion Hinchcliffe
2. Community management: The 'essential' capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts by Dion Hinchcliffe
3. How to Build an Online Community by Vanessa DiMauro
4. 11 Social Media Yodas Define Community Management “Passion”by Baochi Nguyen
5. Who's To Blame For A Failed Community? by Claire Flanagan
6. Social Software Is Not Enough by Rachel Happe
7. Community Managers are Human Experience (HX) Professionals by Rachel Happe
8. Top 15 Ways to Kills an Online Community -- Again by Vanessa DiMauro
9. Community Managers’ Reading List: 27 Books fromQuiip
10. Why You Need to Foster Community at Work by Shawn Murphy

Content Strategy and Curation

1. Capitalizing On Curation: Why The New Curators Are Beating The Old by Drew Neisser
2. Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future? by Rohit Bhargava
3. Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web by  Karyn Campbell
4. Are curators the missing thing in enterprise 2.0 approaches? by Bertrand Duperrin
5. The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators by Robert Scoble
6. Curation in the Enterprise: Actionable information by JP Rangaswami
7. Curation and the enterprise: part 2 by JP Rangaswami
8. Curation and amplification will become much more sophisticated in 2012 by Vadim Lavrusik
9. The Future Of Journalism – By Ross Dawson
10. ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web  by Nick Bilton

Complexity and the changing face of 21^st C Workplace

1. Moving Beyond “Work as Usual” in a Complex World by Thierry de Baillon
2. Why Is Knowledge Sharing Important? A Matter of Survival by Luis Suarez
3. Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part I: Pattern Recognition by Venessa Miemis
4. Connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets by Gordon Ross
5. Diversity, complexity, chaos and working smarter by Harold Jarche
6. The Satir Change Model by Steven M. Smith
7. Connecting Agile Business with Social Business by Dion Hinchcliffe
8. Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity? by Julie Hunt
9. The Collapse of Complex Business Models by Clay Shirky
10. The connected company by Dave Gray

Workplace Learning

1. Social Learning and Exception Handling
2. Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson
3. The Five Failures of Workplace Learning Professionals by Will Thalheimer
4. Social Learning is NOT a new training trend by Jane Hart
5. Jobs, work and technology by Harold Jarche

There are plenty more but in the interest of keeping the list manageable, I have limited it to 50 articles. I have not included posts around learning and instructional design or elearning —still my first love—and will add a separate post with the links to resources I have found useful.

Content Curation: One More Role for an Enterprise Community Manager

Faced with the tsunami of information, we are all floundering to find our way to content that actually matters. From setting up filters--both of the automated and human variety--to trying to make sense of what we find, we are in a fix, so to speak. Hence, we see the rise of content curators as a breed who will help us to make sense of this world of worldwideweb that has suddenly gone amuck.

The scene within an enterprise is not much different. The lifespan of enterprises are declining rapidly. And the only way an enterprise can survive is by being on the cutting edge of their field, by being adaptive and by making the right decisions quickly. This requires a quick access to the hive mind of the enterprise and an ability to connect the dots to make sense of the underlying pattern.
We are all striving for a world where we find exactly what we need, the conversation we want to be a part of and the content that helps us make that breakthrough decision. Arnold Waldstein puts it elegantly:

I’m dreaming hard for a conversational-based reality online. I want to parse my world by conversations, by topic, by trusted connections daily.

How does this tie in with the role of a community manager, you may ask!
Very closely, I would say. An enterprise that has adopted a social business platform and is trying to shape a path for a conversation-based reality, content creation and consumption, and communication via the platform will see a proliferation of content that could range from sales decks to discussion threads on the appropriate technology stack to use on a specific project. This is the proverbial organizational hive mind but someone has to enable the enterprise to make sense of this stream, separate the wheat from the chaff, and connect the dots to reveal the key patterns below. Only then can this knowledge flow become a part of the decision-making process and enable users to take the right decision quickly.


What role can an enterprise community manager play?
In this case, the community manager's role would be akin to that of a museum curator. Curators at museums lay out the best pieces in a manner that:

1. Catch the viewers attention
2. Tells a narrative that makes sense to the viewer (e.g., one would not hang a Picasso painting next to seals from Mohenjo Daro)
3. Gives a sense of the bigger scheme of things
4. Makes it easy for viewers to "jump" to the sections that interest them
5. Have enough metadata for viewers to understand the context 

Similarly, the enterprise community manager (or anyone who is playing the role) needs to help community members do one or more of the following:

1. Find what users need on the platform without getting lost in a maze of content
2. Surface useful and interesting content that the user may not have had prior knowledge of 
3. Contribute with ease and know where to place the content they are producing 

Deconstructing each point one by one...

Find what users need on the platform without getting lost in the maze
This will entail a blend of manual and automated work. The automated bit will take care of the filtering and aggregation, but the curation work needs to be done by a human being. J.P. Rangaswami, in his blog The Confused of Calcutta, describes it thus:

When a human curates, she does three things. She selects something (or things) from a larger group. She organises those selections cohesively. And she arranges to present those things in such a way that people find it easy to engage with those things.

This in the context of a social business platform like Jive requires--among other things--consistent tagging, proper aggregation, enabling quick search options, providing guided navigations for frequently accessed pieces, and grouping of similar groups and content in an appropriate manner. Some of these can be achieved via the user interface design and the use of pre-built widgets that allow community managers to pull in content defined with specific tags and categories. This can be made as general or as granular depending on the community's need. The platform allows community managers and group administrators to insert widgets within their groups to facilitate aggregation of specific content type for easy consumption. This can be compared to a museum curator displaying the best pieces and ensuring that sufficient light falls on the pieces so that viewers can spot them with ease. However, the making sense bit still needs to be done manually.


Surface useful and interesting content
This entails listening to the community, being aware of the needs and drivers, and keeping a keen watch on the different contributions and conversations taking place on the platform. One needs to develop a nose for useful content just like an experienced editor develops a sense for what could be breaking news. This skill cannot be automated and requires constant engagement with the community to develop. By surfacing hidden gems, community managers enable users to make those serendipitous discoveries that could lead to breakthrough innovations, more engaged participation and a sense of commitment to the community. The greater the benefit users derive from their membership to the community, the higher will be their involvement and engagement.
One of the ways to surface content of interest can be via newsletters. However, there is a risk here. In a bid to target the entire enterprise via one newsletter, one runs the risk of making the newsletter too generic and thus of no use to anyone. Having a specific target audience in mind enables effective curation. A good curator will seek, sense, synthesise and then share in a manner that adds value to a specific user group. Curation is not just a collection of links and resources--it is a synthesis that reveals the pattern behind the links and list of resources.  And by revealing the patterns, a curator can help an organisation make breakthrough finds.
The key here is to remember that each content piece is a social object around which conversations will evolve, further content will be generated and ideas surface.


Contribute with ease
The idea of a social business platform is to facilitate participation and conversation. This implies making it completely friction-less and free-form. However, that is not all. It also implies enabling users to know exactly where on the platform can they "place" their contribution. Any confusion here can dramatically reduce contribution. Simple guidelines and a few do's and don'ts are good to start with. The community manager needs to reach out a helping hand and move the content piece to the right container if need be. This kind of hygiene check goes a long way in keeping the platform user-friendly and the content findable. 

Related articles

• Finding the Information You Need Quickly, Reliably and Cost-Effectively (mktg2bizexecs.wordpress.com)
• The Missing Half Of A Social Enterprise (cloudave.com)
• Good Advice for Content Curators (billives.typepad.com)

The Seventh Hat of a Community Manager: UX Design

"Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away", said Steve Krug in his classic Don't Make Me Think! This is an excellent thumb rule for designers--and as I got into my role of a community manager--I learned the value of this rule for community managers as well. I have recently blogged about The Six Hats of a Community Manager, and here is the seventh one.

Does a community manager need to become an UX expert?

This doesn't of course mean that we become UX designers by virtue of being community managers. That might be stretching it too far. After all, UX designers come with years of experience, expertise in a specific area, and knowledge of their subjects. Nevertheless, a community manager needs to understand the basic tenets of good usability.

An online community hosted using a social platform is as much about usability as it is about collaboration and communication. A confusing interface, a sub-optimal navigation and a search that doesn't yield the expected results--are all surefire ways of losing and alienating potential community members. I will elaborate on this theme in the post.

Just as we are attracted to well-designed localities where it is easy to locate and reach the frequently accessed places like the grocery store, the pharmacy, schools and parks, the bus depot and the railway station, similarly an online community needs to offer the same comforting and pleasant user experience to keep members coming back. Shaping the user experience will also depend on the kinds of users the community targets. Oftentimes, an out-of-the-box implementation of the platform one is going to use to host the community may not work. It needs customisation to meet the requirements of the business and the users.

What does a community manager has to do with this? Isn't that the designers' and the developers' job?

The designers and the developers will help to "design" and customize the platform; the vision and the requirements need to come from the community manager. S/he is the one who knows what the long- term goal of the community is going to be.

A community manager's tasks start long before the community is born. It starts from the time an organisation decides to move towards a more social way of doing business. It starts long before s/he is designated the community manager. Anyone who is going to be responsible for the launch and ultimate use of the platform, i.e., a potential community manager, needs to think about shaping user experience. Launching a platform and expecting users to participate and start contributing is wishful thinking just as assuming users will keep coming back to a platform with poor usability is.

This can mean sitting with the web design team, figuring out what the original platform offers and what are the tweaks required to make it user-friendly for the organisation. It is important to delineate all possible use cases and user types and explore how they are likely to interact with the platform.

It is important also to remeber that all employees of an organization are not going to form one large, massive group. They will segregate and form smaller communities around functional areas, roles, projects, perhaps locations and regional offices, capability areas, and even hobbies and interests. Any user of the platform will most likely be part of at least more than one smaller community. And given that an organization's social platform is going to be their knowledge sharing and collaboration hub, it is important to identify the key actions a user will perform on the platform. S/he will consume content and also contribute; participate and sometimes lurk; sometimes search and, at times, browse. Keeping in mind this gamut of actions a user is likely to take, it is crucial to shape the user experience to be as seamless as possible.

It is useful to pinpoint what are at least the top five actions a user is likey to perform, and here is a suggestive list: 

1. Find and participate in communities relevant to them
2. Find specific content at the point of need
3. Locate experts at the point of need
4. Participate in different forums
5. Follow other users 

If the navigation and the design of the platform makes it difficult for them to do any one or more of the tasks mentioned--we are going to "drain their reservoir of goodwill" and they are unlikely to become loyal community members.

Make the first experience memorable

The first page a user typically lands on is the site's Home Page. Make this a pleasant, non-head-scratching experience. Some thumb rules to consider with respect to the Home Page (based on my experience and may differ from community to community) in no particular order:

1. The Home page should clearly tell the users what are the key actions they can take on the platform and make them easy to perform.

2. Whatever is clickable should look clickable.

3. The search box must be prominent, and it is best to avoid putting any search criteria like, "use only lower case". This adds a layer of friction.

4. The navigation bar must absolutely be self explanatory; the users should not have to think what clicking on any of those links/tabs/buttons will do. It is best to use convention even if it seems boring.

5. The fonts and color scheme need to take into consideration users of varying ages.

6. The Home button needs to pop out; it is the North Star for the users.

7. There needs to be a clear sense of hierarchy so that users know what are the key actions to take as opposed to "good to do" stuff.

8. Provide visual cues to help users navigate.

9. Have clear directives for first time users. This can be something as simple as a prominent "First time users" link leading to a video or screen cast on how to navigate around the platform.

10. Allow users to provide feedback easily, perhaps via an easily accessible feedback link from the Home page. This tells users we are open to listening to them and are willing to improve.

It's time to wrap up this post. Community management goes beyond curating content, welcoming users and facilitating discussions. It is also about enabling frictionless access to collaboration for members of your community. Frictionless can be achieved in multiple ways--by making the environment welcoming, by guiding members to the right groups and content, by enabling easy access to the collaboration platform and making the site design intuitive and easily navigable.

I would love to hear your views on this. How important is it for community managers to grasp the basics of usability?