Claire Flanagan provides an extremely useful and comprehensive set of advice in her post, Community Advocates Part Two: What Motivates Them? How Can You Reward Them? I will not repeat the details here and encourage you to read it in full. I just want to offer a few headlines and share one of my own related experiences.
I really like the way Claire segments the different types of advocates, First, there are connectors who “are well networked and can help amplify your brand, providing necessary Word of Mouth through to their network.” Then there are critics who “can provide important insights on what’s working or what’s not working or be a source of innovative ideas.” Of course they are useful to extent they are not pushing their own agenda. The third group is the creators who can help develop important community content or answer community questions. Finally, there are collectors who can help keep the community content organized by providing necessary tags, ranking content or moderating community content.
Claire goes on the write with specific detail about how to match rewards to each type. Now I am not going to reveal her wisdom so you will have to read what she wrote. I found it useful.
I want to write instead briefly about an underlying concept, offering people a sense of engagement in what directly affects their life. In too many traditional top-down organizations where managers make decisions and offer direction while the workers carry out orders, there is a disengagement with the work place. This is not the right ground for a community, at least a community to support the organization.
I did some work for a property casualty insurance company in the early 90s that was in dire straights. It was losing money. The field did not trust the home office and the home office did not trust the field. The only engaged community was the rumor mill that occurred at the water cooler and on email. That was the main source of energy. The people felt they had some control here and rumors spread around the enterprise in nanoseconds. Everyone stayed engaged and current with the rumor mill and frequently contributed content.
One symptom of the disconnection was the IT system that “supported” the underwriters. It was a transaction recording system developed by IT so the home office people could keep track of what was happening in the field. The underwriters saw no value in using it and avoided it whenever possible. They tended to not be careful or complete when they did use the system. Home office often operated on bad data.
The firm decided that big changes were needed or this business might close. One of the changes was to instill a sense of underwriting discipline and a careful underwriting process. They engaged some of their best underwriters to conceive the process and developed an IT system to align with the new process. They asked many people in the field for feedback on the process and made adjustments.
They also asked the field about what type of IT system would help those in the field and what features would be useful. This approach was new, as the people had never been asked this question. It generated a lot of excitement and hope. News of the new approach spread quickly through the rumor mill and the new IT system got a lot of good press. There began to be a stronger sense of community within the underwriters toward their work and turning the company around. They began to be a sense of community between the home office and the underwriters in the flied who finally felt they were being listened to.
Underwriters really wanted to do a good job and desired access to best practices in areas they were not familiar with and access to experts in those areas. They wanted this information aligned with the steps in the new underwriting process. They wanted to get the information they needed to make intelligent underwriting decisions. They did not want an automated system telling then what to do. The IT developers and senior management listened and these positive developments continued to spread through the rumor mill. Underwriters used the new system and they contributed their experiences into the “shared learnings” database for others to benefit from their experiences.
Champions emerged to articulate and promote the benefits of the new way of working. But most importantly almost everyone became champions in their own ways. The four advocate types that Claire covered emerged. Underwriters were able to find the right people to talk with on their current issues. Then they were able to contribute back their learnings into the system. The underwriting community turned from being disconnected and simply worrying about their job to actively wanting the company to succeed by everyone working together.
It worked and the company did turn around. The ingredients for this success were there all along. The people just needed to feel engaged, connected and part of a community with a shared focus for the good of the organization.
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