Beyond the Buzzwords: How HR Can Start Building Internal Communities

The word “community” gets thrown around a lot these days. But it's not always used correctly. A community is more than a distribution list. A community is a group of people gathered around a shared interest, and most importantly, a thriving community is a group of people gathered around a shared interest who are moving in a strategic direction. For too long, we've set up communities of practice or enterprise resource groups (ERGs) that we call communities, but that only function as distribution lists for a one-way exchange of information. In this session, you'll learn how to build communities inside your organization: whether it's empowered ERGs, groups of innovators, groups of learners or any other community interest. It's enormously important that HR can support creating communities (in particular, virtual communities) in the workplace, and we'll demystify how to do that and show you compelling examples to aspire to.

Learning Objectives:

• Analyze examples of thriving communities inside large and small organizations from many different industries and see how those communities represent a competitive advantage for those organizations.
• Walk through the steps required to build a community, from conceptualization to recruitment of members to supporting engagement. You'll have a step-by-step guide that you can use again and again in the future.
• Understand the value proposition for why communities are important and how you can effectively communicate that value to your business partners and leaders.
• Begin taking actions toward improving the quality of the communities you are already part of in your workplace.