EP042 - How to build workplace communities with Todd Nilson and Ilker Akansel of TalentLed
About the episode
This episode focuses on how to build workplace communities to boost employee engagement, and loyalty, and reduce churn. We dive deep into the nuances of building a professional community with Todd Nilson and Ilker Akansel, co-founders of TalendLed.
About the guests
Todd Nilson co-founded TalentLed, a consultancy helping organizations create talent communities. He is also the founder of Clocktower Advisors, where I help organizations build thriving online communities and digital workplaces. His specialties are digital strategy, online community management, remote work collaboration, and marketing. He works with startups through Fortune 100 companies globally. He is a longtime tabletop gamer, including RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. He has graduated from Penn State BA, Duquesne University MA, and University of Kentucky PhD (abd). He is Based proudly in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, USA. He trained as a dancer in tap, jazz, modern, and ballet! Yes, really! He is also a Rotarian who lives by the 4-Way Test.
Connect with Todd on LinkedIn.
Ilker Akansel is the co-founder of TalentLed. He is a community strategy consultant with a two-pronged specialism, with communities of developers and tech and traditional brands, startups, and innovation being the first, talent, future of work, digital nomadism, and remote work being the second. He supports the former of these specialisms through his consultancy, ilkerakansel.com, and does the same for the latter through his founding partnership at TalentLed Community Consultancy. He has previously led developer communities for Google, innovation projects for Cisco, and volunteered for the 2012 London Olympic Games. With over 13 years of experience in Europe, he is well-versed in the cultural, professional, and community-related challenges and opportunities across the EMEA region in particular. He lives in Istanbul, Turkey.
Connect with Ilker on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Today we will discuss the community aspect of workplaces, why we should build communities as workplaces, why workplaces need communities, and What is a community anyway? To discuss, I have Ilker Akansel and Todd Nilson. So hi guys. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, Peter. It's great to be here. We're really honored to be guests on the show and looking forward to the conversation here today.
Appreciate your time. So again, introduce where are you coming from? How did you end up working remotely? And also how did you end up building communities online?
Todd, you want to go first? Sure, of course. I have been working with Ilker for several years now. He and I are partners in a joint venture company called TalentLed which is about building Communities of talent for organizations online, and I'm sure we're going to get into that a little bit. I'm something of a serial entrepreneur. I've been running my own community consultancy since 2015 called Clocktower Advisors. And working as a community strategist for organizations of all shapes and sizes. That's a little more of a general consultancy than what talent led is. And also recently started up another company with the collaboration of others like Ilker called the Community Consultants Collective for those who are in the community profession who are freelancers or independent business owners like ourselves. I wear a lot of hats. I'm based in Wisconsin in the United States on the shores of Lake Michigan, where I get to take lovely walks in the mornings on the beach with my wife. So over to you. Yes, that's absolutely beautiful here. It is beautiful when Todd is sharing pictures just we're all brimming with envy about the nature and everything just around there. My name is Ilker Akansel. I'm based in Istanbul, Turkey. We don't have a too bad Let's say shores and sea and the maritime environment over here ourselves with the Bosphorus and of course, with all the seas surrounding this beautiful city. So I'm originally from here, but I work internationally and just like Todd, I wear many hats. I work for myself under Ilker Akansel dot com providing community strategy consultancy. But Todd and I have a shared interest in trying to redefine, of course just work and its relations with community and what community can actually bring. That's why we've been working on talentled for some time. My relationship with remote work has been quite an interesting journey. I graduated from university in the year 2000, which is a common joke. A lot of people, when I say to people, I graduated in the year 2000, people just ask me 2000 and what? They probably just forget that there was a year called 2000 just really my age there. I did a degree in a master's degree in international business at the university of Manchester. And for a number of reasons, I chose a thesis on workplace surveillance and remote work. In 2001 it was unheard of. It was nobody was thinking about it. All they knew was the scenes from Back to the Future when Marty McFly gets fired through a fax or through a screen or whatever, which today, very interestingly, is all real. And that's how things started. And I've been working remotely just like Todd for many years on and off since on contract basis since 2008 and proper remote works since 2011, including a very interesting remote work experience for the London Olympic Games in 2012. Yeah I was based in Manchester, which was one of the co host cities of the event. So we didn't have an office for some time. We just eventually ended up in the venue. So I have a very interesting relationship with remote work. And of course this was all accelerated by the wonderful book of Tim Ferris, which I'm a big fan of. In 2007. Todd and I we share you know the thoughts about or We try to take a stab at the future of work so to speak. I know this is a very overused statement But we believe that there's been a massive shift especially after the pandemic and we've been Talking and thinking about it for some time now, and that's how we came up to this collaboration to redefine talent management or talent leadership, so to speak, through the use of communities, which could be very relevant to what we're going to talk about today.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the reason why I wanted to talk with you and I wanted to talk about this topic is that... I feel that we Lost track and lost the real cause why we are working together. So I think most of the workplaces nowadays maybe that's a little bit of a grim picture, but most of the workplaces are focusing on HR, resources, resource management, Excel spreadsheets, finances, operations, and stuff like that, which is not just a little bit boring, but also there is no human element. And one of the key aspects I think of remote work, and this is why it is so super popular right now, is that there is a human element behind remote work today, and the human element in the workplace. Because the workplace is an organization like it or not is the community aspect. And I think it's super important to discuss how we can build communities as workplaces or for workplaces or within workplaces. So let's kick the topic in the gut with a question. How would you define, what is a community?
It's a much maligned term, isn't it? So everybody thinks they have this idea of what a community is. Is it the neighborhood you live in? Is it your family? Is it the country you live in? Is it your Facebook friends? And as you ask everyone, each person has a little bit of a different definition around what they think makes it up. When Ilker and I, because of our frame of reference as community professionals start thinking and talking about communities, we're usually referring to something where there's a little more cohesion than just this big indistinct aggregate of all different sorts of people. Your social media is not a community. A social media platform is not a community. Even a community platform is not a community. It's the people who are coming together for some kind of shared purpose. It might be because they share a health condition. It might be because they're trying to change their profession for the better. It might be because they are passionate about some cause. It might be that they're members of a company in a workplace and probably they have something else in common within that space too. Maybe they are working mothers. Maybe they are Asian Americans in the workplace. Maybe they are all firefighters on the side. We don't know what those things are, but there's usually something that's bringing them together. And in particular in online spaces there's some place they return to on a regular basis to share ideas, inspiration, support with each other so that they can grow. I have a very specific talking point that I usually cover around this and Ilker's going to smile when he hears me say this. The early German term for community is Gemeinschaft, and I'm gonna mispronounce it because I'm not a native German speaker. But if you go back to Tönnies, who's the original guy talking about in sociological terms, what is a community? There's Gemeinschaft and there's Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft is bigger than your family unit but it's smaller than the state or society overall, it's this group that has some shared values that are bringing them together and Gesellschaft is much more thinking, but you can think of it a little bit more like your Facebook or TikTok, like it's a kind of an open space. There's low trust in other people in the space. It's very transactional in the way that it's set up. So I'll pause there. Ilker, I don't know, you may want to add to that definition, but I think it's very important to have a bit of a level set understanding of what we're going to be talking about here today.
Indeed it is. Todd that was a wonderful explanation is sometimes it's very difficult for us to define community as well. When I used to be a project management trainer that was another stab that was very difficult. I used to get in front of people who led projects for 20, 30, 40 years. And I would just ask them, what is a project? Can you define? And it's very difficult sometimes to define something that is so Encompassing so simple and it's so fundamental to what you do because you're just dealing with it like with all the mechanisms around it all the time. Basically I'm going to pilfer because I really like his work from Fabian Fortmiller, who's a thought leader in the community space about the definition of the community. And he just puts that there's two different distinct characteristics of a community, which is basically is a shared, elevated identity, so to speak. That is above the members that everybody can relate to. And there is a sense of care between the members, which I believe that's what separates from a community from an audience or similar structures. So that could also be tied up to employees, perhaps, but we can come to that later. Basically, the main characteristics, and I do agree with them. And I'm going to add another thought leader, Todd Nilson's intentionality work to it, because this is something I'm quite big about. And I'm going to be talking about it later in the year in some events. There should be an intention, a direction, an intensity of movement there within the community towards whether it's some goals for the members or the goals for the sponsoring organization, they may not be exclusively linked to each other, but there must be this sort of movement, this sort of let's say Torque in an engine, so to speak that sort of intensity must also exist in the community. So we are talking about journeys from A to B, which again this could be linked to the talent journey or an employee's journey within an organization or somebody who's linked to the organization. But these are the things that pertain to a community. And I believe that it's very important for people to understand that community is something very specific in terms of character. And just. For the benefit of people, maybe they would like to know more in future. We are actually talking about, because Todd just very lightly touched upon that. We believe that there are five types, five general types of communities. Communities of place, which is where it all originated, which is where you're born. In the old times before the online world, that was older age. We're talking about communities of interests. Of course communities of hobbies or whatever. Communities of practice, again especially for the listeners of this particular podcast, this could be the most relevant because we're talking about professional communities here. Communities of action values that you are, you believe in things like, I don't know environment, sustainability and all sorts of other things. And of course, communities of circumstance, things that happen to people. So it just, in general I wanted to get this definition and this sort of frame outright. It's a general classification of communities in our business, and it's also it also should be noted that the communities can be also hybrid community. So it could be a community of place in a community of circumstance at the same time. But I think it's important for Todd and I to frame the definition as to what communities first so that people can have an image or an understanding of the community in their mind before probably juxtaposing on future of work and other things that we're going to discuss.
I loved all the typology that you had. Thanks for sharing. It's super helpful. One thing that I think I would love to add is the organic element of a community and an intentional community. If you're talking about like circumstances, for example, so if you have a health condition, shall we say you're probably will be able to find your own community of similar circumstances, people. You can also do, so if you are a, I don't know I have a Honda car, whatever, I probably can find fellow Honda enthusiasts communities on the internet, right? And these are usually. Maybe there, there is one person who started the community, but it's growing organically because based on the values, based on the interest based on the circumstances or even the location, like local community, that's also like organic but to me the professional community, or Communities of practice, as you said, to me, it's, yes, it's organic in a way that we are all working at the same workplace, right? But in order to build the community within that workplace, you have to have some sort of like an intention because sometimes the values are not precisely known or open or transparent within the workplace. And sometimes, and sorry, but sometimes people just want to paycheck and don't want to mingle with the co workers. And they spend their community allocated time or energy on organic communities. So how can you have intention or build a little bit more intentional community or can workplaces define communities and build communities organically?
So organizations can't afford not to have some intention in building their communities. They need to be planned and cultivated and nurtured over time. You're absolutely right. If we, if you look back at the history of online communities many of them are, I'll call them wild grown. They have organically sprung into being in the earliest days when, you know, getting on the internet meant listening to a whining modem dial up on a phone line and get joining a bulletin board or getting into an AOL chat room or joining a discussion forum even back then that, those things grew up wild and they were also wild, uncontrolled places to be and they, and those continue to be, if you look at anything like happening even today on Reddit I think that's a good example, even though that's even more under control than a lot of online communities were back years and years ago, but for companies if they're going to host a platform where people could come together and have these kinds of conversations, whether it's your employees getting together in a slack channel or a discord or you've got something that's a little bit more of a social media like experience, and there are many platforms that provide those things. There's money involved. With setting those spaces, there's securities concerns. There need to be policies or rules of the road around that and the intentional cultivation of community requires some planning and understanding of not only what it means to have a secure hosted space. For these kinds of experiences, but also how are you going to actively engage people's attention and keep it in those spaces and companies can't afford to get that wrong. And to your point you quite rightly said there are some people that just want to collect a paycheck. That's no longer a good option for organizations to have employees that feel that way there's been a lot of research by the Gallup organization over many years where people who don't feel any sense of connection or friendship with their fellow employees are far more likely to be flight risks for an organization. This is an even bigger danger now that we have a remote employment environment where people are connected mainly through the Internet. I've never met Ilker face to face, but we're great friends. And I feel like I know him like a brother for all the time. We've known each other. So that necessity of creating strong ties, and I'm using that term sociologically, if you think about like Dunbar's number, Robin Dunbar, the sociologist talks about, you can know maybe about 250 people as strong ties. That's your village or your community, if you want to think of it in those terms. We need to make sure that people feel that connection, that they feel like their manager gets them. That they've got the psychological safety to express themselves in these environment. And if we're not, if organizations are not creating those conditions, if they feel like they can just spin up a community and I'll just do a little meme here that one does not simply spin up an online community. I'll use my game of thrones reference here, it's going to fall flat. It's going to go very sour for them.
That's so cool. This is something that we've been discussing for some time now. We're trying to see the forest and not the trees. When we're actually trying to approach a group of people and certainly thinking a little bit more as to why people congregate in a community or they feel that they belong and they would like to stay within a community, whether it's related to a workplace or not is quite fascinating. And it's always important. It's always worth a think. It's great that we started talking from intentionality straight on. This was something that was coined by Todd some time ago, but then we started building on it in terms of thoughts and also in the methodology of what we do together anyway. But one thing that I can perhaps recommend the listeners is a methodology that I came across almost by accident when I was researching something else about motivations of community members some time ago in a master course that I had actually delivered. So in the nineties two researchers named Clary and Snyder, they try to understand why would anyone volunteer for anything? At the end of the day, we voluntarily well, more often than not, we voluntarily join communities and we voluntarily contributes to them. We in the business link volunteerism and community very closely. Of course, there are paid communities. There are some exceptions to that, but at the end of the day, you would like to want to be in a community. And so it's important to understand what would actually motivate people to stay in an organization that they don't necessarily get monetary benefit out of. Clary and Snyder came up with with a structure called with an explanation of framework called volunteer functions inventory, which is also which can also be found as VFI as the initials as the acronyms, as of course in the U S ecosystem, the equity, the acronyms are very well favored. So the VFI actually says that there are six main functions, so to speak, or motivators for anyone to volunteer or anything, of course, after the nineties, this was expanded. The more functions were added. But in the original research, these six were understanding, which is about learning about the world, about the skills that are often unused. Career so it does say it does what it says on the tin. It's about career investment enhancement. Values basically is to prove that is to actively get closer or to establish an environment where the values that you believe in are actually practiced just you are there because the organization actually is moving alongside the values that you believe in. Social to know to meet more people. Of course we're all social beings, so to speak as humans. Enhancements is all about growth is about learning skills that you don't have necessarily. So you join a community to actually acquire them. And this is the most fascinating of the functions of the protective. There's been something bad or you've done something wrong in your life, and you want to put it right by joining a community and then just making yourself feel better. So these are the six functions. There could be a combination of factors or these functions that actually motivate you to be and stay in an organization or a community. I personally believe that this is a good explanation as to why people would actually join a community or perhaps even at this day and age with the new generation putting a lot of emphasis on values why they would join an organization. There's a lot of material right now. There's a lot, there are lots of proofs that the current generation, or even people from previous, let's say generations, so to speak like us are now prioritizing working for organizations, working for entities that are actually in line with our values or with our motivations, so to speak, that we actually associate with ourselves as professionals right now and also in the future. This is a good explanation as to why or how you could Install intentionality in your communities, because if you structure and design the community around the values that perhaps the members are looking to achieve by being part of that particular gathering community, so to speak, then you are off a very good start.
This is where I would love to add the remote aspect, by the way. Because I'm probably not alone with this. Not sure, but back in a day when I held an actual, like in office job, that was Jesus, like 12 years ago I joined certain companies based on Where is the office? Not because of the commute, but it's a representative, if it was a representative office I would be much more comfortable there. What are the amenities within the office? What kind of people are working there? Will I mingle well with them? And so on. What kind of clients they have? I've worked in advertising, so that was important too. What kind of work they do? So all of these I wouldn't call them values more, more like preferences of an individual. All of these were organic because they had a location and when you do have a workplace with a location, some of the culture and some of the aspects of the community is built organically. I wouldn't say it just happens. Obviously, it has to be a little bit more directed than the other aspects of the other types of the communities that you described before. But there is a lot of organic aspects there. Now, when you work remotely, the company doesn't have an office, doesn't really provide any kind of amenities and stuff like that. So everything that Was organic before should be intentional and I would drop another word, keywords here should be transparent as well, because otherwise without transparency, people don't even realize what the community is all about, what they are about to join. What do you think?
100 percent, Peter. And I would say I think Ilker and I look at three levels of safety and transparency within these kinds of community organizations. At the base level, it's the technology itself. Does it seem well designed? Is there a good user experience? Is it removing friction from me doing the things that I need to do as a worker in an organization or as a remote worker? Can I connect easily with other people? Are there ways for me to choose how to work? Because our motivations are driven by meaningful choices rather than being forced or shoehorned into a set of choices. The second level is the transparency of the organization. Why are you setting up this space? What's in it for the company? And that needs to be explicitly said it needs to be laid out so that the organization is being clear about, like, how is my information going to be used if I'm sharing information in the network here? In what ways is it okay for me to interact with this environment? So there needs to be some guidelines about how I interact with this community. And then third, there needs to be some effort to establish some transparency and safety between the members of that community themselves, the employees themselves. Is this a psychologically safe space for me to interact in? Can I trust that the other people that I interact with here Are of a benevolent mindset. Are they going to be accepting of me? Are they not going to attack me for my ideas? Is there a culture of sharing and collaboration and trust that's been established in the place of those three levels, technology, company in person to person all have to be there in any of those architectural setups.
And the last one is the hardest part. I see the other two as practical approaches. And if you do have the profession on how to build a community, you probably able to design a community space that is practically working so to speak, but it's not safe or it's not trusted, or it's not nurturing those values that the company is sharing either because of the approaches wrong or the company itself doesn't really know what the values are. That's where they are.
They've espoused the set of values and they're not actually living them as they need to.
Yes.
Yeah, the that actually reminds me of Patty McCord's. I don't know if you remember the name. She was the the head of HR who actually joined Netflix in the early days and they, and she was the author of the, she was actually behind the culture deck and all the other things that were, that pertain to it the maverick culture of Netflix. Of course there are things that are relevant today and there are things that are not that relevant today. But one of the things that really fascinated me for that approach, for Patty's approach was she did say that culture in an organization is basically who's brought in and who's let go. So in a way, so basically the people who are allowed in, the people who are recruits then the people who are asked to leave, which was something that Netflix was quite let's say a clear cut about, they would actually fire the people who would not really perform below a certain really high standard. And the sort of people or these actions, these choices of the organization actually determine the culture and nothing else. On building on what Todd is saying, and of course with a community approach. Especially on the remote work side of things. It could be said that an organization especially in terms of remote work is all about what is allowed in the organization, let's say championing remote work. They're talking about things like unlimited PTO, which sometimes it's done well and sometimes it's not really done well. And these sort of things what the organization decides to champion as a perspective, as action, as what is allowed to happen with between the employees and also in terms of how the employee can actually interact with the organization determines the culture, and perhaps it just determines in a way, maybe the intentionality of the community as well off employees and just encroaching on our thinking a little bit, not on the employees, but also candidates and also alumni of the organization. So it's very difficult to define a company culture with just people who are within the organization. So the people are interested in the organization also, the people most crucial, the people who have actually been through the organization are now doing something else. They all constitute part off the employee let's say communities or the employers on ecosystem and brands. So we've been talking with Todd about this at length because we're both boomerang employees of our previous employee employers definitely we believe that when you're looking at community and organizations and also remote work these are all the things that need to be factored in for a successful approach to retain the best talent.
And this is the best time to actually discuss what is talent community. Earlier in the call before we hit record we discussed what it means the whole terminology of talent communities. So please how would you define what is the difference between a community of workplace and the talent community?
This is a topic that Ilker and I have been defining because of our unique experiences, Ilker having worked in some large enterprise organizations where he was directly involved with bringing the right talent into the organization and making sure that that it was a good fit and that they all of the things we've been discussing so far, that a sense of community would develop. I came at this from 15 years as a tech recruiter based out of Chicago helping companies find places and then moving into the community world and helping companies build these intentional online experiences. I think when we're talking about talent communities, if you ask someone in human resources or recruiting or a chief people officer and you say, tell us about your talent communities that are there say, Oh we have a database of 60, 000 candidates that are there, or we've got a great pipeline of candidates where we can, we've got just in time hiring and blah, blah, blah. That's not what we mean. And...
Sorry to interrupt. Sometimes the answer is also that or we use that service provider or that thing, like TopTal or others to supply us with the database.
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And the database if you've been following our conversation so far gentle listeners when we're talking about community, that ain't it. The community itself for a talent community it's got to be reflective of the journey of someone from their earliest contact with your company or your brand through your employee experience. And beyond when your journey takes you outside of the organization again, and you are an alumni of that world. And so the part of what Ilker and I have been developing through our joint venture at Talent Led is helping organizations to plan and understand and take these concepts of online community building and apply them to the world of the talented people that they're trying to engage with. And that may mean that there, there may be more than one technology platform involved with this. In other words when you've brought someone into the orbit of a, if you're a recruiter, you've brought somebody into your orbit as a potential hire for the organization. You're not just like reaching them on LinkedIn and maybe having a chat or having a Zoom call together, but you're also then bringing them into some place in an online community environment where they can ask questions, where they can learn more about the culture of the company, where maybe they can engage in some testing or conversations with more than one more than just the recruiter to check and see if they're a good fit for the organization and then move from there into more of an employee employer relationship where they are in more of an intranet or a company social space Where they have those interactions and when they leave that company, maybe they remain part of an extra net part of the organization, but the point is that there is a digital connection throughout that journey rather than it just being a database, which is flat and lifeless.
I don't want to sell the whole concept for you, but just, I had a light bulb spark moment while you were speaking. And because most of the time I personally think as the leader of the organization, either someone as from hr regardless how much, I hate the word HR, by the way, but that's just a side note.
Can I share my definition of HR with you, please?
I was gonna say, Todd's got a wonderful definition of hr.
My apologies to anyone in the audience who's from the world. But my as a recruiter, my view of HR was always a little bit jaded as the job of HR is to keep the company from getting sued. That's its sole function.
Yes. And keeping track on the financial reporting so again, I think like the person who is leading either that department or the team leader or the founder or something like the C level and and I always want to see the benefits, right? Yeah, this all sounds really nice and very fluffy and whatever, but where can I win? And there are certain touch points during not just the hiring and letting people go and stuff and rehiring, by the way where workplaces can benefit from an approach like this, because you said that you follow these people along from the interest until the alumni . Meaning that there's a really amazing place and stage where the company can promote their employer brand, whatever it means and they also can rehire people from all their networks. Because lots of companies do that, by the way. They are hiring from their original or older or previous alumni people rehiring them for certain positions as well. Also everyone is so keen to filter people out from a cultural perspective. So is it a good culture fit to our company and whatever, if they are already within the community and the interest is filtered. Yes, they are. So it's, it saves a lot of time, saves a lot of headache and makes the whole hiring process a little bit more humane and seamless. Am I correctly getting this?
You very much are. And of course, we don't we're not here to sell any service or something. But please, listeners please take the conversation from the point of what communities can do for the talent journey within an organization. What we've done as a service is, of course, come up with a framework, but put it out to one side. Here's the situation. We always believed Todd and I we've been talking about for ages about this, and Todd has perfectly defined what a talent community is, and I will just continue with what it isn't. As we've said somewhere alongside, somewhere in this conversation that it certainly is not a database of candidates, and it shouldn't be limited to candidates. It always reminds me of Antoine de Saint Exupery the writer of the famous book, the classic Little Prince. He wrote what you tame, you are responsible forever, meaning that when somebody interacts with your organization, they want to work with you and they eventually engage with your organization and take part in your workforce and everything, your organization becomes part of them forever and their impact becomes forever part of your organization. It is as simple as that. It is an indelible track, so to speak, on both sides. And we believe that community is the best way of managing that particular process. So imagine a situation where instead of stigmatizing and basically stressing out over the whole process of Recruiting someone which is so rigid, so stressful really difficult, so to speak, and of course, in terms of employment, we're talking about things like office politics and everything, and alumni being completely ignored, the alumni groups just forming by themselves because the organization seems not to care, but we believe, Todd and I that these are fundamental cornerstones of your employer brand, especially at this day and age. People are utilizing some websites and platforms to find out about the workplace culture, about the projects, about the conditions that you treat with people with. Things like hygiene factors and other stuff that is very much known in the in the management side of science. So basically, imagine if you adopted a community approach to your candidates and instead of just keeping them out of the door and just calling them in whenever you have something useful, which never happens in practices very rarely. Instead, you just. Keep them as an enthusiastic crowds and basically invest in their future and basically help them become great candidates for your organization while helping them in your in their own journey. They'd be forever connected to your employer brands.
They're great ambassadors.
Great ambassadors. So they become ambassadors even before just being a part of your organization. As employees, imagine if you understood and shook hands with them from day one that their presence in the organization will be temporary. You're just a stopover in their journey as a talent and in their professional journey. And just tell them, look, I'm going to support you and I'm going to give you the best employee experience. Now there are departments 20 years ago, they were not in a way when I was doing my thesis, or they were just a handful. So to speak, I'm going to give you the best experience. And I'm going to make sure that you have the best journey, development journey from A to B, i. e. a community member, so to speak. The community approach is perfect for this. And most importantly, something that Todd and I are so passionate about being alumni. It's so disheartening to see when someone leaves an organization, when they say that when they communicate to HR of all people that they're leaving there's this sort of commotion going on. It's like, how can you leave us? And there's this really sad structure where It's as if you're doing something wrong, which you're not, because you're making the best decision forward for your personal life or your career or something like that. It's part of the process, imagine a situation instead of an organization, just telling you, how can you do this to us? They just sit you down and just say, Look, we are going to support this transition, this part of your journey. We are going to give you the best let's say outward journey, best sort of leaving process as possible. We're going to even support you in whatever you want to do next. We're going to put you to a crash course. If you want to start your own company in being a founding a startup, put you through a network and everything. Imagine you'd be forever grateful, you'd be so happy and you'd be telling everyone from the rooftops about your experience. I don't want to just utter company names, but I know big companies just being wary of this. I know one particular sports apparel company that the employees, just because the employer culture is so strong inside, even in their professional lives, after having worked for this company, they will not buy another brand. Therefore, it's imperative that the companies actually sit down and think about an approach to support talent as it moves across the organization. And Todd and I believe that community approach is just perfect.
I just feel that modern workplaces are so much parallel what was happening in the open source culture, by the way, in the last, I don't know, 10, 20, or even later years people are just contributing to the code for free because they believe in the value of the code. They join the core team if they want to, or they feed to the team or the team actually hiring. And they join other projects either parallel or after the project, and they continue promoting those companies that they are either worked for or contributed to because it's an open source value. So it's really interesting to see how familiar old concepts are eating themselves into new concepts that we think that they are new, but they are not really new.
Just wanted to add an example to because you part live in Italy, Peter legend has it that in the nineties, when Ferrari was about to go bankrupt before being bought by Fiat. The legend has it that the workers actually worked for months for free without getting any wages because it was a matter of National pride and it was a matter of belief for them, it was a national brand that they just you know, simply could not you know, allow to die. So they actually helped us. So if you come to that stage at this day and age in 2023 You will be forever winning because the talent will be preferring you other than instead of just other things that they could do.
Yes, totally agree. This is super interesting. And I think we should as a last question, we should discuss a little bit more about the benefits just to round it up at the end because it's, I know we discussed a lot of benefits or of why scale ups or enterprises need to build a little bit more intentional communities within their workplace. But I think just like key takeaways or key benefits that you can share. What are those best tips that you can give? Why it's worth to invest into something like this.
I think the benefits are multiple and happen at a couple of different stages in what we spell out for companies especially as they're identifying and acquiring talent for people to come into the fold of that organization, having a digital community construct where, you know, a place where you can welcome them and think of it as a virtual recruiting center if you will that's a good analogy, by the way. I tend to think in terms of architecture and neighborhoods and things like that but translated into an online space. I think from that we draw benefit from the world of entrepreneurship, where there's been plenty of study to demonstrate that the more social collisions you have within an ecosystem, within an area, the more likely it is you're going to have more startup businesses. And I think the benefits that accrue by having your candidates, people that are interested in working for, or with your company in a space where they can interact perhaps with each other, but certainly with you and with your members of your company that accrues Greater benefits because it helps people in the company realize, is this person really a cultural fit for the organization? It helps prevent missteps in hiring where maybe somebody who was initially passed over because the recruiter maybe didn't have that immediate chemistry with the candidate, but everybody else on the team did. You suddenly now realize that this is somebody who's a better hire, First. So I think that the increase in social interactions within those spaces are very powerful. When somebody is within an organization as an employee, the enablement of those individuals by growing them with training, with collaboration, with getting them involved with. Maybe more niched groups of people who are like them or have similar circumstances as them tends to develop deeper ties tends to develop loyalty towards the organization and towards its mission helps people feel more aligned and more connected to each other. And as well as beyond the potential for boomerang hires if you start looking at things in terms of cost per hire I think as you said earlier, Peter more organizations are looking at going back to some of the people that used to work for them because they missed something about the culture. They want to re engage those individuals who already know about the business, who already are believers in it and want to be involved. So those are just a couple of the very tangible benefits that you get out of establishing communities around your talent journeys.
Definitely. And of course Todd and I, we've been talking a little bit more about the specifics of the industry as well. The things like what the organizations and what the human resources recruitment departments would actually be interested in the return on investment. By the way, you may hear this word. It's important to just utter it here perhaps return on investment on communities is something that is quite big in our industry. It's about the return that you get for harbor and your community for supporting your community, so to speak. So on that token just to be a little bit more specific on what Todd's been talking about right now in terms of return on that particular investment, we believe that the community approach can bring massive benefits in things like the rate of attrition, which is the pace that the employees are actually leaving the organization, they're not replaced. This is a massive cost and a massive concern for organizations time to hire, which is one of Todd's favorite metrics, so to speak. You put up a vacancy and of course the time to hire is a major cost, a major concern for you and you want to make this as short as possible. The time that it takes for a suitable CV to hit your systems when a vacancy is published, things like just getting a good candidate. And so In light of what we've already discussed, I'm sure the industry professionals and even the non professionals of the recruitment industry, because recruitment is such a classic function is just like logistics, just everywhere around us has been in a truck at some point, regardless of the technology, people are going to get recruited into organizations. It's not going to go away, so therefore, even for the non HR professionals, these metrics or getting better at these metrics will make the most sense. And from what we've discussed, community is such a natural way in making sure that the right people appear in those metrics for them to be shortened.
And also, but I don't forget on the ROI, that if you invest in community building as a company you get lesser cost spent on recruitment or hiring. That's an external cost most of the time, or at least if it's not an external cost, then it's time, which is also money. So you can factor it into the spreadsheet anyway like referring back to the time to hire and second I think it's often misunderstood or missed but most of the companies that are hiring online are either digital or service based products. So they need customer feedback or user feedback. They invest a lot in getting those honest opinions about their products. Why not getting it from those people who are already vested some interest in the company anyway? They are probably using the product anyway, otherwise they won't be interested. So it's super helpful to, to gather that insight from them because they are your most loyal followers anyway. Great. I love it. Thank you for your time. Guys, where can people find you?
I think we're both pretty Google friendly but you can definitely find us on LinkedIn under our respective names as well as if anyone is interested in learning more about talent communities they can find us online at talentled. com. And that is our communities of talent consultancy. And we're happy to talk to anyone and everyone is interested in that particular concept.
Highly appreciate your time. Seriously. It was a wonderful conversation.
Thank you, Peter. We appreciate you.
Thanks very much, Peter. It's been a wonderful conversation from our side as well. It's great. These are we are very passionate about these things and it's great to be talking about this with you and be able to reach people who are interested in hearing more about these things.
We are in the same boat rowing to the same direction and I think it's super important to highlight what people can learn from each other.
