Thread by @DavidSpinks

THREAD

Remote companies are still *struggling* to build belonging without the serendipity and proximity of the office.

I thought I'd share some proven community-building techniques you can use to meaningfully connect your remote team members... 🧵

FOCUS ON SUBIDENTITIES

It's tempting to try to connect all of your employees at once.

But your company is made up of MANY subidentities based on their:

- roles
- locations
- hobbies
- seniority
- length of employment
- ethnicity

Try creating experiences for specific groups.

EMPOWER EMPLOYEES TO SELF ORGANIZE

Distributing control is the only way to scale community.

Encourage and fund your employees to create experiences for each other. Give them a playbook to make it easy.

You'll end up with experiences you never would have thought of yourself.

CREATE SPACES FOR VULNERABILITY

Getting to know each other on a deep, personal level remotely is really hard.

Vulnerability is the solution.

Host safe spaces to talk about sensitive topics like burnout, mental health, and DEI where people can be open and honest.

CREATE NOVEL EXPERIENCES

Your employees are exhausted by standard Zoom conversations.

In an office, relationships form when people aren't "working". They're just having fun.

Host games, challenges, trivia, contests... things that break the mold of a video call.

HIRE A DEDICATED INTERNAL COMMUNITY PRO

This is hard work that takes a lot of planning, organization, and experience.

Don't leave it to chance. Put a professional in charge.

The potential impact it can have on employee retention and engagement is enormous.

BALANCE SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS ENGAGEMENT

Great communities have both.

You can bring "play" to slack by creating channels around non-work related passions.

A few we have at @bevyhq / @cmx:
#petsandplants
#kidsofbevy
#bookclub
#music
#movies-and-tv
#thegreatoutdoors

INVEST IN DEI

Yes it's the right thing to do.

But it's also just a smart thing to do for your business.

Bringing unique voices and backgrounds will make your community more interesting, create new learning opportunities, and create positive vibes for everyone involved.

MAKE 1-1 INTRODUCTIONS

1-1 conversations are the atomic units of community.

Facilitate enough quality 1-1 conversations within your team, and a very healthy community will start to form.

You can use tools like @donut and @orbiit_ai that automatically makes introductions.

PROMOTE SHARED LEARNING

Too often, in all communities but especially in companies, the conversation centers entirely on Q&A.

But great conversations come from people sharing their learnings with others.

We use a #linksandlearnings channel for this at @BevyHQ /@CMX

VALIDATE COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTIONS

You probably do a lot to celebrate new sales but do you celebrate when a team member makes a great contribution to your community?

Call them out publicly and consider surprising and delighting them with perks & bonuses to reinforce the behavior.

TELL EMPLOYEES HOW TO ENGAGE

Slack's extremely overwhelming if not used properly.

Email is a black hole.

All great community builders give very specific instructions for how to successfully participate in the community.

If you don't have an internal comms guide, make one.

REMEMBER THESE KEYS FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING

1. It's a continuous experiment, keep testing until something clicks
2. Be consistent, show up at the same time every day/week/month
3. Don't fear the crickets
4. Keep your energy high and positive
5. Default to transparency

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this thread, follow me @davidspinks for more threads on community-driven business.

And if you want to go *much* deeper into proven community psychology and techniques, pick up my new book, The Business of Belonging 👇

cmxhub.com/book