Communities of Practice: Why it's time to invest in your people now

It’s that time of the economic cycle again: companies are tightening their belts and laying people off - sometimes too many of them! - as their earnings miss forecasts. If you still have a job, this means that your team is going to be expected to absorb some of the work that the departed did - to accomplish a miracle turnaround with fewer people and more pressure. 

It’s a huge challenge. It’s one that many will fail. And that’s going to lead to more problems around delivering value, retaining your people, recruitment freezes and cost optimisation. Investing in their people and encouraging Communities of Practice is the last thing that most companies will want to consider.

Here’s 4 reasons why they’re wrong - and what you can do about it:

1. Hey, where is everybody?

When mass layoffs happen, it has a significant impact on culture. Experienced managers expect an additional 50% impact on the team to leave after a layoff - and these are usually the people you’re counting on to hold everything together. After all, your best performers are likely the people with the strongest prospects in the market

None of this is surprising. As a rule of thumb, after you lay off X% of people, you get an additional half attrition. Lay off 10%: expect another 5% to quit. Lay off 50%... not unreasonable to expect another 25% to quit.

Calling back people you just fired rarely works.

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 7, 2022

What you can do: Layoffs may be unavoidable - bad things do occasionally happen to good companies. Give the people who remain a reason to stay by creating stronger bonds within the team and across a supportive community. 

2. Recruitment 

Hiring well is a great opportunity - it’s also hard to do, time consuming, and expensive. You’re asking people to take time away from other crucial activities to screen and interview candidates… and if you’re lucky enough to actually hire one of them, they then also need to be onboarded. (More on that below.) And if you rely on recruiters to help out, the costs can be significant (US$240k) above and beyond salary & benefits.

What you can do:  Communities can be a strong attractor - especially if you run the occasional event where external people are welcomed in to learn from or alongside your teams. Make sure that you give them a reason to attend beyond pizza, either by bringing in external speakers or highlighting the talent that you have. As a bonus, this can be a real opportunity for your people to develop further - and it strengthens communication internally, too!

3. Dead Wood

Neil Vass recently shared his argument for ensuring that people in his teams get consistent training:

“You got hired because you have the skills we need now. But I’m confident that those are not the skills we’ll need from you  2 - 3 years from now.  How are we going to get that?”

“If you have dead wood in your company it got there one of two ways. You either hired dead wood OR you hired live wood AND KILLED IT!” - ⁦@cliffhazell⁩

⁦@oredev⁩ #oredev2022 pic.twitter.com/jsfEXjwKnk

— Martin Mazur 🟡 @ Øredev (@m_mazur) November 10, 2022

What you can do:  Training can be expensive, and it can get stagnant quickly if not actively used. You can unlock & amplify the value already inside your organisation by pairing people up, creating study groups, and by pooling Learning & Development budgets to work across multiple people and teams. Communities are a natural place to use as a hub for these types of initiatives.

4. Time to Value

Ask any Product Manager - or any senior manager who is waiting for results from a Product Development team - what their biggest issue is, and it won’t take long for people to complain about how long it takes to get anything done. It’s often ‘fixed’ by reducing scope, scrapping discovery, or just building what the CEO wants. Of course, this absolutely can work - on occasion - it just won’t do so on a regular basis. 

There are a number of common root causes that cause this issue:

• Poor collaboration & prioritisation across teams

• Lack of clear direction

• Missing communication about issues, challenges & complexity

These issues can cause cultural issues that lead to further attrition - someone who worked at Deliveroo in their hypergrowth era explained to me recently:

“When I had real problems, I had nowhere to go to sort things out. So people like me ended up leaving. Having more of a community would have made me stick around longer and work things out.”

This gets exacerbated when new joiners come in - they don’t have context, and it can take them months to get up to speed. One of Dave Snowden’s Principles for managing knowledge is that “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”  When there’s significant amounts of turnover, the institutional knowledge that walks out the door is lost forever.

What you can do:  Communities can help retention - but they also power the informal bonds that are crucial to any company’s success. Good formal processes are required to allow any organisation to grow and prosper, but they grow stale and strangle velocity unless there’s an equally good set of shadow relationships.  

Someone recently told me about how their Product Community of Practice helped members avoid mistakes and deliver things faster by combining resources - two Product Managers learned that their apps needed to be consolidated, but neither previously knew that the other had even existed!  Because of the size of the organisation, knowledge silos built up that would have prevented this without the informal chat that came out of the community.  This is even more of a problem when people work remotely, across multiple office locations, or in a hybrid model - the chances for serendipity need to be manufactured, not await a random chat in the kitchen.

Need some help?

It takes a significant commitment to get a healthy Community of Practice running - it takes time, effort, and good practices. If you’d like to learn more, or get some help to build or supercharge, get in touch:

More about my approach to Communities.

More resources:

• Emily Webber’s Building Successful Communities of Practice

• Petra Wille’s guide to starting a CoP