Building a Creator Community in Your Workplace
June 9 • Written by Julie Dozier
This week, we are continuing the conversation started in Josh Bersin’s article, “How The Creator Market Is Totally Disrupting Corporate Training.” We think a Creator Community can offer many benefits but will be most effective if you take our recommended steps.
Platforms like TikTok are the latest vehicle for the self-expression and information sharing that has been happening since the advent of the internet. But TikTok’s unique design has made made video creation easier than ever and supercharged interaction, allowing users to build on existing content and easily add their own unique message. The platform is designed to be highly accessible and empowering for the novice creator, encouraging confident contribution instead of passive consumption.
We’d like to focus the conversation on the thing we find most interesting about the Creator Market: the incentives and behaviors that drive content creation and the strategy for building a Creator Community.
What if your learning team could better harness the knowledge and passion of all the non-training folks in your organization? What if you could multiply your team of learning designers by sharing the tools and skills needed to be a content creator? Almost everyone in your organization has some nugget of knowledge they uniquely possess that can benefit everyone else. Imagine if these people could share their knowledge easily? How would you make this work? Is this a good idea?
The first step is to talk to your potential creators.
The Creator Industry has something that the Training Industry doesn’t — a strong incentive structure in the form of cold hard cash. What incentives exist to get non-training folks more involved in content creation? Incentives or not, is the desire even there to create? Pull some non-training colleagues together and ask these questions. Learn more about their needs and motivations. Find out if they have a desire to share their knowledge with others in a new way that you could facilitate.
If you need ideas for who to invite to this conversation, consider the following types of people in your organization who may have helpful knowledge to share with others:
Long-timers with history and perspective from years of experience
Recent grads with new information and ideas
People coming from other orgs that bring a fresh perspective
Experts with deep and specific knowledge that they alone hold for their group
People who really love what they do and have contagious passion for their work
Innovators who are unafraid and always trying new things
Natural educators who love to teach the people around them
Here is our formula for a Potential Creator: Deep knowledge + A zealous message + A desire to share.
The next step is to develop a strategy.
If you see potential to expand the Creator Community at your organization, ask these questions:
What are the organization’s goals? What problems are we trying to solve?
How does our current learning strategy meet these needs? Where are the gaps?
Would building a Creator Community close any of these gaps?
What metrics are we looking to impact? How might we measure success?
Would we classify this knowledge-sharing as “training” or something else?
What might we do to build our creators’ learning design skills?
How might we run a small-scale pilot and learn from the process?
All changes should be grounded in strategy and explored using a human-centered design approach. And while we don’t recommend knee-jerk reactions to trends, we recognize the desire to share knowledge that clearly exists outside of the training team. We see a lot of potential for organizations to at least consider whether they need to be the sole creators or whether they want to evolve their ways of working in this direction.
Your turn:
We’re interested in your thoughts and experiences:
What problems are you facing that make this a potential solution?
How could you make this work at your organization?
Any experiences you can share with building a Creator Community?