Are you ready to meet a true pioneer who transforms connections into thriving ecosystems, illuminating the path to collaboration, innovation, and sustainable growth in the modern era?
Ilker Akansel is a seasoned community strategist with many years of experience helping organisations unlock business value through strategic community building. He has held prominent roles at Google, Cisco and London 2012 Olympic Games, and as the founder of ilkerakansel.com, he specialises in creating tailored community strategies, from initial awareness to execution and maturity measurement.
Ilker is also a co-founder of TalentLed, which is the World’s first endeavour that is fully devoted in talent communities, and has been a keynote speaker and trainer at international events, including the likes of CMX Summit, Community Rebellion Conference and Community-Led World. His work focuses on fostering collaboration, innovation, and sustainable growth through strong, well-structured communities​​.
How do you personally define 'community,' and what pivotal experiences or insights in your career have shaped your passion and commitment to building strong, impactful communities, Ilker?
Always a great question to start with, as it’s often the first question that springs into people’s minds. Let me start with what the community isn’t as far as we, the ‘community builders’ are concerned: it’s not society, neighbourhood, apartment complex, or - the biggest misconception of all - a social media following or audience.
Community, as we know it, is a group of people that gather around a certain concept, idea, brand, product or service, in a virtual or physical setting, that are connected with a shared connection, and a collective urge to connect with, care and support each other. The latter in particular separates communities from - particularly social media - audiences, which are set up around a central brand or persona projecting a one-to-many connection.
Community, as we know it, is a group of people that gather around a certain concept, idea, brand, product or service, in a virtual or physical setting, that are connected with a shared connection, and a collective urge to connect with, care and support each other.
With such fundamental characteristics, it’s no surprise that communities have been around since the dawn of humanity. However, it’s only recently that ‘community building’ has become a separate industry and discipline in its own right, and of course the Internet that we have seen developing in our lifetime, and the ‘virtual’ communities that formed around it, has served this awareness quite well.
Similarly, there’s no formal ‘community building’ education - we community professionals usually pivot into the profession purely by chance and coincidence, but I feel that’s on the surface - looking back, pretty much every community professional has had some community experience that has been seminal in what they do today.
My first such experience was a purely coincidental excursion into top-level sports and volunteering through the London Olympic Games in 2012. I had the opportunity to lead a team that in turn led Olympic volunteers that provided transport services for the Games, and seeing volunteers come from all over the World just for the experience was a great manifestation of the power of volunteerism and communities.
That experience became a full-on professional career when I (re)joined Google in 2018 to lead their developer communities in Turkey, Central Asia and the Caucasus - a region of ten countries and a community of 50K members across - and that’s where I learned how important communities of ‘practice’ are for specialist professionals such as developers. As I broadened my understanding of community building, I became aware about and fascinated by the power that communities can bring to any group of people and any organisation, and unearthing that potential became my professional mission.
You have forecasted the trend of remote working and digital nomadism back in 2001. How do you see communities evolving in the future of work, especially with the rise of remote and hybrid teams?
I fondly remember the moment I saw the scene on ‘Back to the Future Part II’ when Marty McFly time-travels to see his future self being fired at a remote meeting with his boss. You might think that it’s not that much of a big deal today, but it was total fantasy stuff in 1989 when this was filmed! I was a kid when I first saw that movie, but things turned to an ‘aha’ moment when I saw it again as an adult, at a time that coincided with the time I was doing my Masters degree in International Business.
I fondly remember the moment I saw the scene on ‘Back to the Future Part II’ when Marty McFly time-travels to see his future self being fired at a remote meeting with his boss.
I see my education at UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology - now part of University of Manchester) as the fortunate break to build on that, as it introduced me to organisational theory and models of management. I quickly became fascinated with mechanisms of performance management, control and surveillance in the workplace and, building also on my undergraduate degree in information systems, I developed a good few thoughts on how this could happen in a future where the Internet could enable people to work remotely, just like the one on the film, turning that into my Master’s thesis. The novelty was that this was back in 2001 - long before IP telephony let alone video calls, and social media - even Google was a startup only a couple of years old!
Most of us now know the rest of the story - especially after Tim Ferriss’ seminal book ‘Four Hour Working Week’ (2007) and how things turned out with connectivity, smartphones, apps and ultimately the pandemic, we’re now at a stage where remote work is, by and large, not the dismissal matter of early 2000s any more and is pretty much here to stay. Now what, then?
There’s now much more clarity and evidence on how communities can be of substantial service in this day and age of technology and ubiquitous connectivity. Communities, once a big effort to take part in as you had to make a physical effort to participate, are now massively accessible from all corners of the World. That brings a paradigm shift - communities used to choose us - think of communities of place related to where you’re born or where you live - but now we have the luxury and flexibility to choose our own communities.
That in turn brings another paradigm shift, particularly when it comes to remote work - in the old times, the ‘community member’ had to work hard to acclimatise to the rhythm of the community by participating, contributing etc. however, with the power vested by the choice above tells that now both sides have to make an effort, with the community also required to be designed ‘intentionally’ to make sure that it offers the value the member would be seeking.
Combine that with the apparent collapse of everything that a ‘work environment’ and ‘physical teams’ used to offer in terms of collaboration, personal development, socialisation…in the prehistoric days with the arrival of the new ways of remote, asynchronous, distributed, self-managed, assignments-instead-of-hours working style, and the need to design and deploy contemporary, purposeful and intentional communities as denominators becomes very apparent.
I personally think that a community layer is now essential in any employment experience, as I firmly believe that today’s and tomorrow’s talent will fiercely resist any calls to return to the old days (as it’s not just a physical stepback but a conceptual one as well, undoing all the work towards abolishing yesteryear’s time-based contribution and control mechanism) and the new and here-to-stay working ways such as asynchronous and remote work can only be conducted effectively with a community understanding in mind. Remote work goes against a lot of things we innately feel and exercise as humans, so we are to embrace and structure communities in such a way that it makes this kind of working, simply, possible and doable.
I personally think that a community layer is now essential in any employment experience, as I firmly believe that today’s and tomorrow’s talent will fiercely resist any calls to return to the old days and the new and here-to-stay working ways such as asynchronous and remote work can only be conducted effectively with a community understanding in mind.
And, to answer your question after all this, how should communities evolve? Communities are adaptable structures that have an instinct to fill social needs and gaps anyway, therefore they will show the right way to connect remote work and teams if they are set up intentionally to listen and evolve just to do that. The biggest fallacy in community building is to design and force-feed a community along the lines of assumptions; instead, the organisations of today and tomorrow must incorporate a community strategy understanding and deploy a process to ‘understand’ what their workforce really needs, and build a community after that instead of before!
The biggest fallacy in community building is to design and force-feed a community along the lines of assumptions; instead, the organisations of today and tomorrow must incorporate a community strategy understanding and deploy a process to ‘understand’ what their workforce really needs, and build a community after that instead of before!
How can companies leverage communities to foster stronger communication and collaboration across distributed teams?
I believe that this starts with acknowledging that community is a key concept in communication and collaboration. A lot of organisations completely omit, or try to separate, the concept of community from the rest of the organisational activities, where the opposite is true - community is practically defined as a group of people connected with a) a sense of belonging and b) a commitment to care for each other (thank you Fabian Pfortmüller for that definition) so it’s about a shared identity and relationships.
Organisations - and individuals - wrongly think that work is just, well, work, and that this world ceases to exist when people clock off. However, what we do professionally is much more meaningful than we think; organisations are obliged to create an employment ‘experience’, connected to their employer ‘brand’, and also acknowledge that this experience also shapes a shared ‘identity’ amongst workers, who also form ‘relationships’ with other people in the workplace.
And this all happens, ideally, along the professional directions that the employees have set for themselves, and this is where the importance of community comes in. Even at this day and age, over two hundred and fifty years since the start of industrialism, I still think that these are very poorly managed and ‘expectations’ from both sides are still misunderstood or ignored.
When put together right, a community is a safe place, a safe structure within which the members find the courage to express what they want at that moment and the future. That is also the case for the right vibe and frequency of communication and collaboration - again these are fundamental for any group of people working together, however they break down so frequently in modern organisations that it angers us.
Community is a wonderful, safe setting where members can express their preferences on communication and collaboration - we can note an increased awareness on different kinds of expectations, especially on things such as synchronous and asynchronous communication, after the pandemic - and also ask for more information or support on what they are doing. It is this sincerity that has been chronically lacking in modern organisations as they have been inherently designed as competitive, unsafe, almost theatrical places where people had to hide their identities and hesitated to ask for things they needed to perform in case these conversations were seen as weaknesses or incompetencies. The answer? Create a community!
One of the major challenges within organisations is siloed teams. How can community-driven initiatives break down these silos and enhance cross-functional collaboration, leading to innovation?
Once again, the basic need for success remains as communication, and this is the biggest drawback of siloed organisations. Silos were initially thought to be performance and focus enhancements for organisations, however things such as performance evaluation concerns turned these into disadvantageous structures that eventually hinder an organisation’s overall success.
There have been a number of conceptual and cultural efforts to eliminate silos, but these produced mixed results - a number of novel flat-structured organisations, especially in the world of technology, did blossom for a while, but as their success grew they had to resort to becoming a more traditional, tiered and eventually siloed organisation as the collective professional culture is not there, and there is little progress when decision making structures are distributed. This is the reason why there aren’t many successful DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organisations) which were thought to be the future of corporate structures until recently, as the decision making structures suffer.
So, what to do? Once again, the answer lies in community. Recently, organisations - and their siloes - realised well that community-led approaches in traditional business functions such as product development, sales, marketing and support have become key competitive advantages - the not-so-surprise is that they always were, but they were packaged differently! Involving a ‘community’ of customers in these processes is not new at all - Apple was a pioneer in involving community in support as of the early 80s, while General Motors’ Saturn Cars brand delivered masterclasses in treating their customers as a community in the 80s and 90s.
What happens is that the community - and the understanding of community - often plays a lot bigger role than supporting an intended silo; there are many examples of communities starting as a customer acquisition effort, but ending up as an extension of product development cycle as a source of feedback, and even a recipient of future product suggestions. A great example of this is the fabled LEGO toy company repurposing their communities of customers (and adult customers to boot!) into a product-generation machine through the IDEAS platform.
So this tells an interesting story - organisations that embrace community as a concept usually see it fill all the cracks between their corporate functions and eventually silos, and if they position them right it’s also a great opportunity to connect them (as opposed to ‘breaking’ them, which leads to the same great conclusion). This can be felt in virtually all areas of the organisation - an organisation that sees customers, partners, developers…as a community invariably starts to treat their employees and internal stakeholders as a community as well!
How do you believe the combination of online and in-person experiences can enhance the effectiveness of community engagement and collaboration, especially in fostering deeper connections and driving impactful results?
Experience is the key word in community - as David Spinks says, communities are made-up structures, empty ‘containers’ which people decide to come and join, and experience - or promise of an experience - will make that decision worthwhile.
I was unfortunate and fortunate enough to be involved in communities at the time when the pandemic hit - this time was a scramble to adapt pretty much everything we knew about community building, and events was one of these things. Many community events were traditionally run in-person, and there was much confusion on how an experience could be translated into, or rebuilt for, the online World.
I remember reading an interesting article by BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones about the timing of the pandemic technology-wise, and what would have happened if it struck fifteen years before in 2005. It would have been a very different story, as there was virtually nowhere near as many infrastructure, tools and platforms to communicate online as we did back in 2020 and things would have been ten times more difficult than they already were - so, in that aspect, the pandemic was timed, well, perfectly.
My thought is that this is the same for communities - there were a number of attempts to instigate an online dimension to community experiences, but these were somewhat limited to forums and other platforms that served specific purposes. The pandemic meant that people had to work hard to invent a value proposition for online experiences for communities, and even with the pandemic now hopefully in history books and in-person events back in the agenda, these propositions have changed the perception of community events permanently.
Even with the ‘online events fatigue’ that understandably came about towards the end of the times of the pandemic, today’s community experience landscape remains decidedly hybrid. One of the side-effects of a heavy concentration on online processes - through pandemic or not - of recent times in terms of business processes, and social life and connections, is about asynchronous conversation and also learning and consumption of resources, meaning that people are now keener to participate in communities in an ‘on-demand’ fashion. There is now a palpable expectation of a hybrid delivery for events and community experiences; many people wish to have the option of ‘online participation to’ or ‘receiving the recording of’ an event or experience, which was uncommon just a few years before.Â
There is now a palpable expectation of a hybrid delivery for events and community experiences; many people wish to have the option of ‘online participation to’ or ‘receiving the recording of’ an event or experience, which was uncommon just a few years before.
This flies in the face of traditional experience design, however it’s not entirely unreasonable; audience, and therefore community base, is massively widened - which has been a limiting factor for many global communities - and is also a great opportunity to increase inclusivity in speaking and participation, as voices that could have otherwise not been heard could contribute to events. On the other hand, in-person events remain as the most intense and exclusive way of delivering an experience for those who participate in person, and that will never change with technology.
So, what to do? It’s important to understand that demand for both types of experiences will remain, and that they will have different effects and bring different advantages to the community in question. Every community will demand a different mix - technical communities such as communities of developers and researchers may prefer more online events, while communities of salespeople, marketers and ultimately customers may wish for more opportunities to get closer to the people behind the product or service.
Same goes for employees or other stakeholders of an organisation - it’s quick to assume that members of a fully remote organisation may never wish to come together in person and would prefer to get together online exclusively, but this may not be the case and there could be demand from these members of the workplace community to come together in curated experiences. Key to strike the right balance is to listen to this particular community, as it’s important that the balance and frequency is as they wish, and not some top-down mandate from leadership.
You’ve worked with businesses to develop strategies that align community goals with business outcomes. How can a strong community culture act as a catalyst for sustainable growth, especially for companies navigating disruptive technologies?
It’s not exactly a secret these days that disruptive organisations and startups have understood and positioned communities in such a way that they have created massive, sustainable growth and other commercial advantages from them, and without really compromising on the value that these communities continued to provide to their members - and that is the key, in a way.
It’s not enough just to have a strong understanding and ‘buy-in’ of the concept of community in an organisation; there has to be a certain respect for the independence and peculiar mechanics of a community, which should always be regarded as a separate, independent structure. Organisations must realise that the concept of a ‘community’ in an organisation is one of balance - one now infamous saying in the community industry is community builders ‘represent the community to the company, and the company to the community’ and the organisations that understand this balance open the door to an infinite amount of growth and support from the community that they support.
On that particular token, one thing that the organisations can do - and they’re mostly designed to do this pretty well - to establish community in such a way is to internalise and ‘standardise’ their approach to building communities. It’s likely that organisations will harbour and support more than one community; for disruptive organisations - say, a Software-as-a-Service provider focused on contemporary focus areas such as Artificial Intelligence - it’s very common to see a community of users/customers, another for product champions/ambassadors, yet one other for those creating customised version of the products, one other for developers using the platform adjacent to Developer Relations…
The key advantage that few realise here would be to create a common understanding, culture and administration of all these communities across the organisation, however big or small they are. You could call this approach a ‘community centre of excellence’ or a ‘community management office’ similar to a project management office (PMO). And we’re not talking about tens of people occupying a purpose designed office here; just a set of standardised approaches in analysing and dissecting the ‘community at hand’, strategising them and and connecting them to business functions and, even better, with the other communities that are within the domain of the organisation.
This latter is a ‘hidden gem’, as many organisations don’t realise that the customer journeys - or in one of my areas of expertise, talent journeys - would span across the different communities across; it only takes a moment for a user to become an ambassador, for an ambassador to become a content creator and, as we’ve seen many times, a power user to become a subcontractor or an employee of an organisation. If these are mapped well across the organisation, we’re talking about the emergence and existence of very strong growth flywheels in many internal and external functions of the organisation, well supported by these communities.
In your consultancy, you emphasise the importance of community KPIs. What are some key metrics companies should track to assess the success of their community initiatives, and how do these metrics align with broader business goals?
The concept of KPIs remains a hotly debated topic in the world of community building. Now, community being a relatively new focus area, many community KPIs that are used today have been lifted wholesale from adjacent fields such as marketing or social media, such as the number of active users in a certain period, or number of posts or replies within the community platform.
Trouble is that a community's Return on Investment (ROI) is always medium to long term, and these flashpoint (also called, in context, ‘vanity’) metrics are usually not adequate in measuring the value that the community is in the process of generating, or has generated already.
There’s also a different dimension of this tendency, as many of the organisational leaders and decision makers of today are accustomed to evaluate these kinds of metrics, and it’s often a struggle to get them to understand a community’s value generation journey, and adequate metrics to show the progress on that journey, which more often than not are much more comprehensive and thorough.
So, what to do? Community pros have the unenviable task of standing their ground on measuring the community value, and somehow tying these to business goals. My favourite perspective to lean on in this situation belongs to a renowned community guru, Jono Bacon - who rightfully ties the community metrics to storytelling.
Jono argues that the ‘right’ metrics to measure the success of a community is the ‘minimum set of indicators’ that are sufficient to convey the community’s ‘story’. Unlike - and perhaps, like - many professionals, community professionals have to be excellent storytellers as community is about a journey, and that journey must be articulated well as the KPIs become the progress markers of that particular journey which, unlike many marketing indicators, is about the members and not the organisation that harbours or supports the community.
Perhaps against their reason of existence, organisations must remember that a community exists primarily to enable members to connect with and help each other, bound by a sense of belonging to something they have in common, which is also something that they deem to be important for themselves. It’s less about ‘how many customers we have sold to or how many we have reached’ but it’s more about things like ‘how many of our community members our product/service/community has been of use to help them progress in the journey they set out to do’.Â
Community metrics should tell a story. It's not about how many customers you reached, but how your community helped members progress on their journey.
And, however unlikely it may sound, if the organisation invests in and supports the community for the time that is required, it eventually becomes a great way to impact ‘commercial growth’ in the most positive, and most importantly sustainable way possible, as whatever the organisation supplies becomes the catalyst for this support, care and personal growth, and the community becomes an unstoppable flywheel, eventually becoming this ‘hidden gem’ of growth.
Finally, as for favourite KPIs, since they’re tied to the community story the sky’s the creative limit - and as far as I’m concerned that's great! My favourite community KPI belongs to a developer community and it’s called ‘Time to Hello World’; ‘Hello World’ is a saying in the software development world, where having a few words (usually ‘Hello World!’) displayed on screen was the smallest, and usually the introductory piece, of code anyone would learn in a new language.
Within the context of this KPI, ‘Hello World’ is now used to measure the time it takes a new developer to grasp the language/platform etc. and create a functional piece of code, therefore showing how intuitive, quick and supportive the language/platform/documentation/even how helpful the community that this developer would have possibly joined in the process has been helpful!!! All in one single KPI. Magic!
Remote communities are thriving, but engagement can be a challenge. What are some strategies or tools you recommend to sustain long-term engagement in remote or dispersed communities?
Yes remote communities are thriving, and engagement is the number one challenge in virtually any community. And, remote communities have one additional, important drawback to deal with: physical distance.
Management science has long discussed the fabled concept of ‘co-location’ when collaborating, co-innovating and making decisions - and this is the backbone of the ‘argument’ of today’s ‘return to office’ mandate. There are many discussions and hot takes on this, but it will not surprise you to hear that I do think and argue that there are wonderful ways of ensuring that these do happen in remote, dispersed communities, teams and organisations in the highest and most efficient way possible.
Without going too much down rabbit holes or passionately picking this side, it’s obvious to any human being that going against the nature and flow of a person, or group of people in our case, will certainly be counterproductive in many dimensions - and that is pretty much the same in terms of the ‘choice’ this particular community has made to stay remote in this day and age.
Recognising and respecting this choice is a fundamental stance for any leadership mechanism of today, and I feel that this is the place to start and base the engagement strategy. Long have groups of professional workers been ‘infantilised’ where organisations they work with or at claimed to ‘know what’s best’ for performance, and made the ‘decisions’ to set the scene accordingly. This has to change, and the first step atop adopting this stance is to, well, listen.
You may have heard about the term ‘community-led’ that refers to a process - product creation, growth, even recruitment - where a community is given the opportunity to lead the process, with the organisation observing and moving along the outputs and suggestions of said community. I think that great engagement in a remote community starts with this - with the intent to ‘listen’ and find out what would make that community tick and engage.
Once again, we see a barrage of errors committed by organisations, community leaders, or even community professionals themselves here - it’s too easy to assume that certain strategies and tactics of engagement would be useful for a certain remote community since they worked at another one - could not be further than the truth! One thing that the community industry has made clear is that community is about ‘things that don’t scale’ and every community will be markedly different, and so will be the requirements and expectations of their members from the community as a whole.
Managing engagement - or lack thereof - is much less about the community being ‘remote’ or ‘dispersed’ but is much more about the community’s designers not having listened to the members as required. Yes, communities - remote or not - must be positioned so that they produce sustained value to the overall organisation or community - this is what we ensure as consultants - but it all starts with the member. You can use all the fancy platforms, tools, immersive technologies, event strategies, engagement tactics…but if the community is designed on assumptions rather than member expectations, the engagement is going to fizz out regardless.
Once this is ensured, then you can concentrate on making up for the lack of proximity that remote communities inherently have; so it’s less about the tools and platforms and more about the right way of thinking, powered by a healthy dose of listening to the community members; donning this perspective will actually show you the right way to set the strategy, select the platform, construct conversations and set the rhythm of engagement that is right for the particular community.
Communities are often breeding grounds for creativity and innovation. Can you share an example from your career where a community you managed sparked significant innovation for a company?
Well, not exactly a community that I had managed, but there’s quite a sombre example that I usually cite on this, purely to demonstrate the power of collaboration and community, and probably one of the most striking and impactful community stories of our times.
On 6th of February 2023, southeastern Turkey and surrounding regions were rocked by a series of devastating earthquakes. While no stranger to big earthquakes, nothing could have prepared us to the extent of the damage and the loss of and impact to lives in the region. It was the worst disaster in terms of magnitude in the country’s history, and it has been estimated that 15 million people were affected directly or indirectly.
Something extraordinary happened right in the hours that followed - shocked by the sheer size and impact of the disaster, a group of software developers got together on an online platform to brainstorm ideas on how they can help the people affected and rescue teams on the ground who were trying to reach the people - those needing urgent help in particular.
This community very quickly snowballed to an unbelievable 23 thousand volunteer developers, who got to work to collectively code intermediary interfaces and platforms to help connect those affected with the rescue teams, aid providers and people from other parts of the country who wanted to assist and donate. Lawyers, social media specialists, coordinators, designers, community professionals…people virtually from all adjacent business functions joined the community, and started to do whatever they could at speed to turn the components into complete, functioning, scalable platforms.Â
What would have taken even the biggest software companies in the World weeks or months to build was incredibly coded and deployed within a matter of hours, and all of us who got involved in whatever capacity knew that what was put together in these days has helped save lives. That sense of collective community, collaboration, urgency and intentionality is something that I will never forget in my lifetime.
With the pace of disruptive technologies, what role do you think community plays in helping organisations adapt and stay resilient in times of rapid change?
This is a wonderful question as it’s the exact facet of community building that I’m currently focused on. So, communities can be positioned to do a lot of things, including advocacy and support (check out CMX’s SPACES model for a great perspective) but there is one area that they serve exceptionally well: research and learning.
A community is a perfect setting for a new, novel, disruptive technology or concept to be discussed and brought forward - a lot of people forget, or do not know, that the technology behind the prominent technological infrastructures of our times was indeed a collaborative, community effort; a network aimed at connecting researchers turned into the Internet of today, and many critical functions still maintained and developed by a community of volunteers (made public by the recent bugs).
Well that’s a story started in the 70s and 80s - fast forward to today, and as many reading this would expect, we are well and truly in a time when Artificial Intelligence, while being also quite an old and established concept itself, has shifted gears massively, followed by other disruptive, novel technologies such as Quantum computing at its heels.
The speed at which these are developing, changing and being implemented is immense, and no one has a comprehensive idea where these are heading to, as well as how to solve the issues - ethics and sustainability come to mind - that they create along the way effectively. This is where community building can come in.
There are many ways of utilising communities, wrapped around these or other new and novel platforms, technologies, concepts…in such a way that all these facets and concerns that are brought by these technologies can be discussed while assisting the progress of said technologies to no end. Many companies at the cutting edge of their industries have realised the power of bringing researchers - inside and outside of their organisation - together in intentional communities, as they serve a number of things: they act as the premier ‘watering hole’ first, where the highest level of conversations in a certain topic can be found, which feeds and motivates the researchers and technical experts second, turning the community into a place that indirectly helps with the career progression of these experts.
Finally, disruptive companies can turn communities into wonderful extensions of their employer brands and social stances - it’s no secret that communities - especially ‘talent’ communities are great sources of discovery for candidates regarding what the company is working on, and the challenges they are tackling - which there would be many as a disrupting spearheader of an organisation - as well as an outlet on treatment of and support provided to employees and other stakeholders alike. Today’s workforce puts a lot of emphasis on values, meaning and care, and a great employer brand supported by such communities is a great way of reaching out to and attracting the best talent.
What would take the biggest software companies weeks to build was coded and deployed by a community of 23,000 developers in hours during Turkey's earthquake disaster in 2023.
You mention the importance of executive buy-in for successful community projects. What advice would you give to community managers trying to secure leadership support for their initiatives?
Community building as a separate discipline is a relatively new thing, and that comes with a sizeable challenge and that is awareness on what it is and what it can do, closely followed by the acquisition of executive buy-in. Fortunately and unfortunately, much of our work as community professionals is preceded by a process to build that awareness and ensure this buy-in.
Quickly expanding on that - many would understand why I would call it ‘unfortunate’, as awareness and buy-in are adjacent mountains to climb, even before a single action can be taken on building or enhancing a community. A community’s appetite for intensive investment, time and resource wise, and usual mid to long-term returns make it the perfect scapegoat when company performance goes sour and executives start to look for short-term savings, therefore ensuring executive buy-in, and unwavering support, is key.
Let’s get to the ‘fortunate’ bit then; unlike, say, ‘better-known’ business functions like marketing and sales, where decision makers would have had some exposure professionally or perhaps have learned about at school, community building is a carte-blanche, a puzzle, an enigmatic concept for many, and that could turn into an advantage in the hands of a discerning community builder.
I suggest this particular discerning community professional embrace this void of community understanding, make a plan to turn that into an ability to construct a narrative and understanding of community, and perfectly place and curate it right in the middle of the corporate value chain, so that it constitutes an integral part of it. A corporate decision maker would be an absolute fool not to consider a value proposition where the community provides a good part of it, and not to back the effort at all costs, effectively creating the elusive ‘buy-in’ in the most sustainable way across the community’s lifecycle.
Now, that’s easier said than done - today’s community manager is then to become a bit of a ‘generalist’ these days and don a bevy of strategy creation, storytelling and - dare I say it - selling skills on top of the quasi-superhuman ones that they are in possession of that they do to build and lead communities. I realise that embarking on a journey to gather these might be a bit scary for some - especially early in the community career - but, thankfully, we community professionals are a bunch that practise what we preach by welcoming and supporting new members of our communities of community builders in the most selfless way possible - so, never ever hesitate to ask us help you on that journey!
Sustainability is a growing focus for many businesses. How can companies integrate sustainability into their community strategies, and what role do you see communities playing in promoting long-term sustainable practices?
Sustainability is indeed a growing focus for businesses, and I see ‘growing’ as a key operative verb on that. The concept of sustainability is still going through a bumpy, long road in organisations and societies; there’s no doubt on its importance, and the urgency of its internalisation and widespread adoption in virtually everything that we do; however, the adoption on the ground has been different.
It’s not surprising to see that there are lots of definitions, verbs, sayings, attributions around the misunderstanding and misuse of sustainability concepts: greenwashing, greenhushing, ESG fatigue, greenlash…which actually stems on many organisations still not seeing sustainability as a genuine concern or organisational goal, and pretending to do so when it’s convenient within the narrative of the moment.
There are a number of roles that communities can play in this situation: some of the biggest community-led impacts around the World have stemmed from focused ‘communities of action’ where members decide to take action towards a collective goal. Community is a massively powerful tool to build movement and create pressure on organisations or administrations to meet - and, in view of the urgency of the situation, up - their commitments on sustainability. These can be orchestrated by international non-profits or similar; or, even better, by the organisations themselves by creating and supporting independent communities of ‘accountability’, comprised of members, customers, advisors…which could work both as an independent ‘auditor’ of efforts and an idea-sharing and generation platform on sustainability.
Community is a powerful tool to build movements and create accountability for organizations to meet and exceed sustainability commitments.
On the token of sustainability being a new concept, another great use of communities in this field is to bring together the sustainability leaders, experts and operators of an organisation together with their peers in other organisations and local and global stakeholders to exchange ideas and collaborate on courses of action. This has proven to be super effective in growing the confidence of sustainability champions inside organisations, and increasing the level and effectiveness of collaboration with important stakeholders such as regulators and lawmakers, which are also feeling the pressure of the challenge to address the urgent sustainability issues, with an added responsibility of finding a reasonable medium in light of business, profitability and prosperity concerns.
How do you envision embedding community-building into a workation strategy, and what unique opportunities do you see for fostering collaboration, innovation, and growth when teams come together in these immersive, remote settings?
Ah, the wonderful concept of workations - it shouldn’t come as a surprise, to you who’s reading this, that I see workations as an essential component of a successful remote community of employees. I see workations as these important cornerstones, and alignment and adjustment points, of a remote working experience as a whole, and I’ve always argued that community building constitutes an essential part of that particular experience.
The end of the pandemic has shown that - perhaps bar the staunchest fan of asynchronous, full remote work - getting together in person at some point is something that will always be appreciated in remote work experiences, and this is where the great work of community starts.
Designing impactful, unique workation experiences is a big undertaking already - that’s where specialist organisations such as Driftawave excel. However, in my view, workation doesn’t ‘end’ when the experience concludes; the success of the workation experience must continue - by way of human nature and connection lifecycle - as people tend to seek a continuation of the conversations that were started at an intentional gathering such as workation.
It’s important to see an event such as a workation as a multidimensional thing - it’s easy to assume that this particular outing is designed as just a gathering of workers to talk about specific, predetermined work topics with a set of team-building experiences and social dimension thrown in, but anyone who has been at workations or similar would concur that it is much more than that. Workations are concentrated experiences where ‘intentional serendipities’, for lack of a better expression, occur, and where participants are well predisposed to over-deliver value, care and support to each other and the team as a whole. Sounds like something that we already know well, right?
Workations are concentrated experiences where ‘intentional serendipities’, for lack of a better expression, occur, and where participants are well predisposed to over-deliver value, care and support to each other and the team as a whole.
When you look at workations from this community lens, many things start to fall into place. Community management can basically be viewed as an ‘encouragement exercise’ for these kinds of collaborative conversations to flourish and continue, and therefore adapting a community mindset whilst viewing and designing workations could add sizeable value to the whole thing.
So, two quick suggestions here: first is to treat a workation as a ‘conversation and community starter’. It’s a common pitfall to perceive and design workations as a standalone event, a box to be ticked as far as the remote structure’s proceedings are concerned; but I see that as a big opportunity missed. Structure the event not only as a special occasion to accelerate conversations around specific business tasks, issues or opportunities but as a set of sparks to continue permanent avenues of conversations on these, and an opportunity for participants to show their interest in ‘care’ and ‘being cared for’ as far as members of the remote team, and you’ve got the start of a wonderful community.
As you may have already guessed, designing the experience and conversations in such a way is just half of the task at hand. Many organisers and leaders miss - or make a half-hearted attempt to tackle - the latter part of the task; a community environment for the conversations started at the event to continue. Obviously, at this day and age and considering the remote nature of the team, this will take the shape of an online community platform, and designing and curating the conversations to take the shape of a perfect segue of the conversations that took place in person, and to lead them in line with the aims of the team or group that gathered in the first place, is the secret ingredient.
And, the newer, contemporary technologies and platforms of our times are just coming to their own these days: after a few false starts, we are seeing immersive online connectivity experiences getting much better, and there are many new collaborative experiences that can now be offered these days that, just like Rory’s article I mentioned before, did not exist just a few years ago, fostering collaboration or even co-innovation even in the most distributed of settings.
One example that comes to my mind is the fabled 5G connectivity that is a project in progress in many countries; not many people know that one of the advantages of 5G is near-zero latency in connectivity, and that is practically ‘music to the ears’ of remote musicians, or medical professionals, who’d benefit from such an advantage when they get together to co-create, train or co-innovate!
It’s important to remind ourselves here that technical prowess is just one part of this equation: as above, if you are not in possession of an understanding and skills on community management within your organising team already, best way to ensure that secret ingredient to appear in your remote team leadership and workation strategy is rather obvious: work with specialists - a la Driftawave - who are well conversant with this intersection. As per Margaret Wheatley’s famous words ‘whatever the question, community is the answer’ - and I can assure you that it is the answer to the question of how to ensure long-term, sustained, collaborative value and growth out of workations!
Ready to Build Transformative Communities?
Ilker Akansel and Driftawave are joining forces to revolutionize how organizations approach community building, workations, and the future of work. With Ilker's unparalleled expertise in strategic community building and Driftawave's innovative solutions for team collaboration and growth, we’re here to help you unlock your organization’s full potential.
Comments