The concept of community has become a hot topic among online recruiters, and with good reason. Virtual communities are online communication platforms with roots. Ironically, they use the power of the Internet to leap over physical and other barriers to establish a sense of place in the ether. At the best communities, this place enables people who share a common interest, value or background to come together and talk, interact, share personal and other information and forge relationships.
At Yahoo!GeoCities, for example, 3.4 million people have organized themselves into neighborhoods that reflect a shared geography, hobby, profession or interest. The site uses the lure of free e-mail and home page to attract its members, but it's the members themselves who provide the mutual respect, support and loyalty that make the space a community. They establish and maintain the relationships.
Certainly there is an almost infinite range of possible subjects around which people can assemble. A quick survey of most of today's virtual communities, however, indicates that one of the most obvious is conspicuously missing. They are communities based on a common employer. Evidently, most people do not feel that the shared experience of working together provides a bond worth celebrating or enriching, at least in cyberspace.
That shouldn't be a surprise. For almost a decade we've been telling people that they are on their own. Career management is now a personal responsibility. Employers can no longer be counted on to oversee or underwrite individual development, advancement or the gold watch. And millions of Americans have taken that message to heart. They've changed home teams; their allegiance is no longer to Big Blue or Ma Bell, but to a loose web of affiliations that stretches across friends, colleagues and neighbors.
Communities have filled the vacuum and replaced the sense of home that employers used to provide. The loyalty, however imperfect, that formerly tied workers to their employers has now shifted to those persons with whom one has a relationship. Today -- in a seller's market erected on the twin pillars of demographic constraints and a strong endless economic expansion -- peers count more than where a paycheck is cut.
Yet it was that allegiance to one's employer that under-girded retention and moderated the demands on recruiting even in the most robust of markets. In the vernacular of web-speak, loyalty was the enterprise's "sticky content," the stuff that attracted and held workers in a particular place. Now, it's relationships carried on via e-mail and online chats.
So what's an employer to do? The answer to that question is construction. Organizations have to build their own communities for their employees. Consultants have begun to describe such initiatives as vertical business portals, but I prefer to call them internal neighborhoods. They are private, gated communities, established by employers for their workers.
Like commercial communities, these internal neighborhoods are designed to support, inform, educate, entertain and promote interaction among members. In this case, however, those members are employees. The idea is simple, keep workers from looking at what's available elsewhere by giving them everything they need and want right "at home." The logic is sound: traffic to job sites is highest during the business day as people look for another job on their current employer's dime. So, if an employer can create a place online that is an attractive destination in its own right, people are less likely to wander into those other sites the employer would consider less desirable neighborhoods in cyberspace.
The content of an internal neighborhood is unique to the organization it supports. Each workforce has its own set of needs and interests, which the employer must not presume to know. Indeed, establishing a virtual community is really an exercise in market research. It requires focus groups, surveys, "consumer" advisory groups and any other mechanism that can be devised to ferret out the hot buttons of employees. Because addressing those hot buttons in an original and engaging way is the definition of "sticky content" at an internal community.
Conceptually, at lest, such content might include information and resources to help people do their jobs, have fun and manage their lives. For example, why should employees have to leave the organization's own web site to send a package by UPS? UPS comes to them (or, at least, to the organization's facility) to pick up and deliver packages every day, yet on the Internet, we force employees to "travel" outside the organization -- to the UPS site -- to schedule that pick-up or track a delivery. Why not keep the employee "in the neighborhood" for those tasks by establishing a UPS "office" right on the organization's own site?
Similarly, organizations can provide schedules of local entertainment (why force employees to read the local newspaper where they might look at the employment section while they're checking on the theatre times for Episode One?), run contests and keep everyone informed about where and when the company softball team will be playing. They can also provide information to help people deal with their responsibilities at home. For example, they might have a local pediatrician write a weekly column about child care, a social worker discuss elder care, a teacher provide suggestions for help with homework and a CPA talk about tax tips.
Can they find similar support elsewhere? Of course, but that's not the point. By providing it on-site and online, employers can create a focal point of activity where workers "bump into one another," get help and share ideas. That's the real definition of a community, a place where people to live their lives.
