Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Communication at work



Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how communication happens at work. I'm not talking about project communication or personal interactions. I'm talking about connecting with a community at large, a community whose members you may not have interacted with (much) in real life. Given that today we have so much communication going on in our lives, finding the mind-space for yet another unofficial missive is challenging.

There are a couple of options that I've tried:

1. Writing to the group email - This seemed like an obvious choice at first - I am writing to a group email which was created explicitly for this purpose. It's a democratic forum, where every member of the group has just as much right to write into it. There are no hierarchies here. However, is it effective in reaching out? Not really. Discussions here worked about 10% of the time. Some of the failures, I chalk it down to lack of interest in the topic or perhaps, people have set up filters and don't bother to read the emails. After awhile it feels like you're spamming the rest of the group as no one responds except maybe a couple of your supporters friends.

Sometimes it happens that the topic gets off track and it's hard to get everyone back in track without sounding like an autocrat. Eventually when that happens too often, the community stops taking the forum seriously. This can be mitigated by moderation or posting guidelines but it becomes just an additional headache to monitor.

2. Brown Bag/Talks/Presentations: This one is an old trick, have a scheduled mid week 30 minutes set aside for presentations/talks. Requires a not so trivial amount of effort though in tracking down speakers, following up, ensuring at least some presence and keeping the momentum going. Still, it's probably the one I've seen most success in.

3. Guerrilla style - In any office community there are some people who are more enthusiastic, more influential, or simply more loved. Reach out to them and have them spread the message of whatever latest initiative you have up your sleeve. I have had moderate success with this, but again this gets old very quickly. Initially the influencers are happy to spread the word, but then someone or the other gets busy and you're back to square one.

4. Call for real life gatherings - In a desperate attempt to go beyond the email wall, I've tried to have a gathering of the community on a regular basis. Time and project schedules are the number one blocker in this case. Not many make it and then it seems pointless to go through all that trouble (Schedule an event - plan an agenda - find a time - book a room - invite people - rinse repeat)


5. Other forums - Since official emails seem, well official, I've toyed with the idea of using an alternative forum. Several of my colleagues have tried this too. Skype, Hall, even Twitter.
Problem : No one wants to log in to YASN (Yet Another Social Network). However this idea needs more exploring. Certainly several groups have found a lot of success with blogging, for example.


I've been looking around for ideas to help keep a community growing and together. I've been looking specifically at the successful forums - the Developers forum for example. What keeps them ticking? Are Developers naturally a loquacious lot? Or is it the excitement of building stuff that keeps them together? On other forums such as the Open Source community, it's easy to see why that works - they are working towards a common goal.

I'm wondering if that is it, if the QA community at office is somehow missing a common goal? Ideas are welcome!