Rebecka Isaksson is Partner Director Content & Collaboration AI Lab Sweden AB, and was keynote speaker at CILIP Conference 2023

Throughout my career, leaders and management teams have often asked me, why should they support Communities of Practice (CoP) in their organisations, and whether CoPs create business value, or just distract employees from value creation that drive business objectives?

To be clear, the question is really "What's in it for me, as a representative for the management team?"

CoPs need to contribute to management's success and ultimately show how Community activity and engagement map to Profit and Loss scorecard items.

In order to answer this question we need to start by defining what success means. KM Institute published a blog, by Ekta Sachania , that I recommend you read if this is a topic of interest for you.

To me, the business value of CoPs lies in their ability to drive, create and maintain Engagement, among employees and across teams.

We know that companies and organisations that foster a culture of highly active and engaged work forces, report much higher productivity and greater financial success than those who don't, as reported by Gallup in their recent research: The Right Culture: Not Just About Employee Satisfaction.

Therefore, it makes sense to map CoP Activity and Engagement to Business Outcome and Value, as a measure of success.

The indicators offered by Ekta are a great starting point for defining those metrics and I would like to share some of the metrics we used within the CoPs at Microsoft Enterprise Services, along with my experiences and observations on how successful those metrics were, in driving the desired behaviours and objectives.

• Participation and engagement: a valuable metric that is easily obtained here is number of questions asked and answered and if you have implemented #VivaEngage in your organisation this is easy to track and evaluate. There are also more qualitative and nuanced data points available, tied to member votes for best answer, as well as quality assurance by Subject matter Experts.
• Knowledge sharing: a lot of the tacit knowledge sharing in CoPs lies within asking and answering specific questions but also in the content we create and share organically and the Community calls or events hosted. Important to note here is not only what we share but also how and I would recommend some basic housekeeping rules her to avoid bifurcation and improve knowledge discovery.
• Collaboration and problem solving: directly coupled with Community Q&As and knowledge sharing but to drive more intentional problem-solving activities, a CoP governance model is recommended, including formalised CoP (leadership and expertise) roles, that are responsible to identify and address business relevant problems and improvement areas, track progress and present outcomes.
• Learning and development: social/peer learning activities is a great way to foster a learning organisation, as we tend to learn as much or even more, from the people we choose to learn from. By hosting regular knowledge sharing and experience exchange calls, we can target, track and measure learning impact of knowledge shared.
• Innovation and adaptation: Leveraging CoPs to identify business (process) improvement areas and opportunities to solve common problems is a great way to evolving an organisation. Community calls and discussion fora, such as User Voice, can be connected to specific CoPs - like e.g. used by Microsoft TechCommunity to track and trace innovation.
• Network effects: networking can potentially be interpreted (by management) as a distraction rather than a productivity accelerator, so it is important that we track formal and informal networks and tie outcomes back to other metrics, such as problem solving and innovation. A correlation to "time to knowledge" or "time to answer" can be valuable but we need to consider potential disruptions and avoid randomisation of SMEs and other experts.
• Member satisfaction: to ensure desired outcomes and business value, it is key to track member's feedback on how the time they spend in CoPs help them learn and grow and contribute to their work deliverables. I would definitely recommend using quick polls or pulse surveys on a regular basis, to measure the qualitative value, as well as the quantitative.

This blog post first appeared on Linkedin