Employee engagement in external communities
Last fall (2019), I had the honor of speaking at CR Connect in Boston. The topic was employee engagement in external communities, and it was about how we worked with internal subject matter experts (SMEs) in the community. Here are some of the talking points from my slides (a PDF copy is linked at the end).
We had to figure out how to keep employees engaged, especially when many [merged company] employees were already quite engaged – so how do we not lose their participation while trying to do all of this work? On top of that, how do we make sure that they are able to provide input AND feel like we’re listening and taking action on their suggestions? How do we make them feel like they are a Valued Voice?
There were a lot of merger activities going on and therefore we’d be competing with all of that activity and noise. We had to find a way to strategically get input, but not overwhelm people with requests. We approached keeping employees engaged in the following ways:
•Working group – keep our most active users involved and informed, while giving us valuable feedback from those who use the community most. Our supporters are important because they help drive solutions in the community. We recruited from both legacy companies so we’d have a balance of viewpoints and best practices
•Keeping regular communication going and AMPLIFY our efforts – we tried to use several vehicles to keep everyone up to date without creating too much noise amidst 12 different workstreams ongoing at the same time. And it is two-way communication, where we try to update users on where their suggestions stand.
•We didn’t just tell employees what we were doing…we tried to include the why so they knew our decisions aren’t just arbitrary – we put some thought into the impact on all of our users. But if we don’t have people providing answers, the community becomes less useful to everyone.
•Our new engagement program is still in the works, but we’ve already implemented step one in giving out quarterly recognition awards for contributions in the community. We also incorporated some of [merged company]'s best practices when it came to our gamification strategy and recognizing employee contributions in the community (as HP and Microsoft do as well).
We shared resources where employees can get updates any time, track open issues, or submit a new issue.
We’re recording office hours and training sessions so we can reuse the content.
As employees expressed interest, we invited them to join the Working Group – and found some enthusiastic contributors who have given us new insights into what is useful to our Support team. And they’ve added considerably to our backlog. ;)
As I dug into the data, I was hoping that our traffic and activity wouldn’t dip too much, as it tends to do after a major change. And we’d had THREE (upgrade, redesign, and migration). With a lot more employees and external users (and double the content overnight), one would hope that activity would increase. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to see that marked solutions have increased anywhere from 2-4x from what they were in early July (looking at weekly data). I’ll need to continue to watch the data to confirm, but the initial results are promising.