Workplace Mental Health: Employee Communities

What Are Examples of Workplace Communities?

The dictionary definition of a community is the people living in one area or considered a unit because of their common interests, social group, or nationality. *

Your employees are already part of a community because they share an employer. You can take it deeper, making employee communities more meaningful, and the options are limitless because ‘common interests’ could mean anything.

Tips on How to Create Employee Communities

Because the concept of an employee community and the amount you could create could be endless, you need to have a strategy in place, so it doesn't become unmanageable. 

Here are our seven tips for getting it right:

1. Ask Your Employees What They Want

The very first place you should start when creating employee communities is with your people. Run a survey to find out what kind of communities they’re interested in and use the information to get things off the ground.

2. Explore What’s Involved

As we’ve seen, you could create a workplace community for many different interests. Don’t go all in to begin with. Start small, maybe even with a more niche interest, to learn the best way to run them: do they need to meet weekly or monthly, facilitated or employee-led?

Each group may work differently, but if you get the blueprint right, you can roll it out on a wider scale, making tweaks when necessary.

3. Consider Remote Employees

To be inclusive of remote workers, your employee communities ought to meet up virtually, but this won’t work for every group. You must also consider that some people may feel more comfortable in a face-to-face or even a more one-to-one setting, especially if it’s a menopause community.

If running a workplace community remotely, set up a channel in your internal communications tool, put aside some time in the community members’ calendars, and encourage them to share in the chat what they’d like to use the session to discuss. If a few people want to talk about the same thing, encourage them to create their own chat group so that everyone gets the chance to share.

4. Nurture Community Champions

Office communities need to be championed, especially when employee-run. People are busy, the meetups aren’t mandatory, and if members consistently decline to meet due to other demands, it will lose momentum.

Ask for one or two employees from each community to take the lead and encourage the members to continue to meet regularly.

5. Bring in the Experts

Workplace communities are a fantastic way to create a sense of belonging and an opportunity to educate. An impactful way to show employees that you're one hundred per cent behind the workplace community initiative is to allocate funding.

For example, a menopause community could have a menopause expert or counsellor join to share insights and answer questions. The same goes for a parent community group.

6. Create Learning Materials

If funds don’t stretch to external facilitators, you can still create or signpost to external and internal learning materials. You can also call upon community members to help educate their colleagues across the business.

7. Review and Evolve

Nothing stays the same. Ways of working evolve, interests change. Those once part of a Working Parents group may have children who fly the nest. Virtual meetups may prove challenging, where face-to-face ones thrive.

Regularly review how your employee communities are going, what needs to change, and whether new groups are required to meet all needs and nurture that sense of belonging.