Business impact and emotional value with Katie McCauley

Hi, it's Sophia and you're going to listen to my conversation with Katie McColon. Katie is really one of these people who are just naturally amazing at explaining what internal community building is all about. She spends a lot of her time connecting community builders and it's just generally a great ambassador for this field of work. In all chat, we started by looking at the role of community support teams that where she would ace it in the business, how can they prove the business values of their activities, educate stakeholders around them, etc. And then we moved on to the role of the community leader and the emotional value that members and community leaders can get from these communities that they're part of. So I've loved our time together and I really hope you will too. Enjoy. Thank you so much for being here. I'm really looking forward to this. I literally have pen and paper ready. I know I will take some notes. But let's start with you. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your own community story, your relationships with community building, how you started, what it looked like throughout your careers and which communities you've worked for. Sure, I'm excited to dive in. So I have worked in community building and some former fashion for the last decade or so. I like to say that my overarching career mission is I build community for people who are more than their jobs that has looked like a combination of internal community for employees at companies or building community for folks who are part of a community that they share a professional goal, professional interest. And the common thing that I've seen there is that people are more than their jobs and I think community can keep humanity inside of that work. So the way that I entered community building, I was actually laid off from startup 10 years ago and I was desperately quickly searching for my next role because I was a very broke young 20 something and I stumbled upon a role with a community manager title and it awoke this purpose in me that I can use my soft skills for strategic business goals. I didn't realize that until I was a couple years into the role, but I didn't even know that this role existed. So just to walk you through my experience to kind of orient everyone about where I've worked, the first community role, I was a community manager, an online community manager for a company called Noonday Collection. I'm based in the United States and Austin, Texas to kind of give you an orientation there. So Noonday Collection is a US based company that is a fashion and lifestyle brand that partners with artisans around the world and underserved communities. They make handmade goods and their business model is that they have a community of consultants that earn a flat rate commission to be able to sell those products. If you're a US based listener, you might be familiar with the model of network marketing or direct sales. This company is actually like challenging that and not building the network marketing pyramid scheme and just building a community of passionate women who love fair trade, jewelry and being able to provide a marketplace. So I was the community manager for this 2000 member community of sales reps, essentially. It was this interesting combination of internal and external community building. They were contractor to 99 employees. So there was a goal of making sure that they had the tools they needed to do their job well. But the special sauce of retaining them was making sure that they felt connected to each other and the mission. Fast forward a few years into my career, I joined Google where I was on the culture technology team. It was an engineering team that built all of the tools that Googleers, Google employees, used to do their job. But I was on a team of seven where we ran community programming for internal community at Google. What does that look like? When you are an employee at Google, you are part of a 200,000 person employee community. Working at a company like Google or Meta or just Microsoft, you are sort of like a sample of society that so many people. And so we see similar behavior and patterns showing up internally. People are going to be building community talking about things, wanting to connect whether you build the tools to support it or not. And Google found out the hard way that they needed a team to support this. So I was on the team that not only built an enforced community guidelines, community policy, but we eventually were able to prove the business value that supporting grassroots community builders, these volunteer moderators, was the most powerful strategy that we could tackle because you're putting the empowerment in the hands of the most passionate community builders and letting them be the ones to build community. Now I'm at Oyster where I am the internal communications specialist. I manage not only internal communications and internal comms, but also internal community building. It's an interesting challenge because we have been a high growth startup for the last few years. And now we are entering this sort of more stable growth pattern where now we're looking back at how we've grown so quickly and how do we implement rituals, grassroots communities, you know, recognition. And so I'm taking all of this historical experience for building internal community for existing communities and implementing it kind of for the first time at a company that has sort of been building the plain vault. We're flying it. And Oyster just really briefly, we're an HR software company to put it simply where you're able to find higher and retain talent around the world without having to create an entity. So, you know, making sure that you're in compliance and you can do payroll benefits and allows you to have access to talent anywhere where they are a full time employee. Yeah. And then just really briefly, the other two communities that I have worked for that are more external. I worked for CMX, which if you are part of the traditional online community space, not quite as focused on internal community, you may be familiar with CMX. It's a brand where you can connect with other online community builders and other community professionals. I helped launch and scale their global meetup program now called CMX Connect. And then I also worked for the Riveter, which at the time was a female forward startup company. I led the Austin location co-working space and then I also helped them launch an online community for America's working women. Yeah, and that's my long-winded recap of my career. Great. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I like to say in a nutshell, but there's a lot to put in that in that nutshell. So thanks for going through all of them. And so I actually, as you were going through it, I couldn't help but notice how in your role that in terms of supporting internal communities, you've been either in the sales department, in like an engineering and technology department at Google and then in an internal comes department at Oyster. So that's really interesting. And actually, I think it's a common experience with a lot of internal community builders. Yes. What did you, like if you were creating your own company, like where would you put the community building, how was your feel of going through different departments and the pros and cons? I think now in this point in my career, 10 years into it, I think I would have a different answer, you know, my first couple years. And I'd have another answer six years into this and then now 10 years into it. My answer now is I would sit my role as close to the decision makers as possible. Because I think so many listeners are probably relate to the challenge of proving the business value of community. Maybe maybe I haven't decided if it's more difficult to prove the business value of community when you sit externally facing versus internally facing, usually internally facing you also take on a bit of comms support. For example, like I help our chiefs of staffs with multiple chiefs of staff at Oyster. I help them craft messaging. And so I'm directly supporting how we message business decisions, business updates. And so there is a clear business value to that. And so I've been able to see getting close to decision makers really helps make my job easier and it shows the value in it. I think whenever I was earlier in my career, my preference is just put me under a manager that understands what I do. I think there was so much of my time that I spent educating my direct manager about what is community. Why does it matter? Why does it matter that I'm engaging in a Facebook group for multiple hours a day? Like I think that now we are in an interesting time where COVID change things, things moved virtually, a balance of asynchronous and community is now a go to market strategy for people who do external facing, right? And so there's a lot more familiar. around community, but I think the biggest challenge was educating my superiors about what community is, why it's valuable, how it supports specific OKRs, and then now I'm seeing the payoff of that. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's really good. I think there are two piece in what you said that I found really useful, you know, to go and apply is one demonstrating the business value because you said it in your motto, your building community for people were more than their job, but people and actually that means sometimes we shy away from talking business, but actually we do need to be able to articulate it to a business value and that's a huge skill in itself, but we need to dedicate and commit to developing this. So it's less about where you sit, but your ability to talk business. And then the second part that I loved is this element of just wanting to work for the person who understands it. So whether that's the situation or not, it's all about actually finding these people who understand it and then hold on to them, leverage them, use their network and use them as amplifiers. -Clificators. -Yes. -Something. -Yes. -So yeah, I have these two ideas of not being afraid of talking business and using the people to understand. -I'm so glad that you mirrored that back to me because I forget until I get into these conversations. I forget that I lean so heavily. I feel like I've beat myself over the head so many times around prove the business value. Make sure you're showing how this supports an okay art. I've done that for so long because there was a period in the earlier part, like the first half of my career where like I struggled to get buy-in and have understanding. And I had a manager at Google, Carter Gibson, who created this team at Google. So he's, in my opinion, one of the folks sort of starting and leading how to do this differently at big companies. I definitely find him on LinkedIn and follow his content. He was so good about this. And he's such a self-starter and self-initiator in this that he spotted the necessity for this and let our team that way. And so I was able to learn from someone who figured out how to communicate this to decision-makers, director levels at Google to show how our community programs would support specific OPRs. Now that I know, I can't unknow it. So I just want to make sure that people listening know that I started from a very people-heavy people-forward people first approach. And that's still at my core. But whenever I talk about it now, internally at my employer, wherever I bat, I now lead with the business value. So I can stay people some drug. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I talked about like doing this in whatever employer, whatever situation you're in. And we've gone through your journey with communities. And so I now wanted to try and use the variety of the experience that you had to look at what are the main challenges for internal community building. So what did you see? You had very different size companies as well. What did you see as a common thread in the kind of the break walls that communities, community leaders were facing? And then what kind of options and solutions did you find that worked? Great question. I think the first big obvious challenge is, how do I put this in one sentence? The balance of the company or the internal community builder, being the one to provide the value, create the content, create the program, balancing that with allowing the community to be the ones creating the value, creating the content, creating the connection. It's such an interesting dance because you have to model not just the behavior, but you have to model what's possible for the community, for them to take their first step, take their first contribution or make their first contribution. And so I think a challenge that I saw was a desire for a strategy that was very production heavy, creating content, creating programs, like just churning out a lot of things to provide a community. And a challenge was educating that we need to leave room for space, for breathing room to allow the community to initiate those things on their own. An example would be like, I'm not a parent, but I've been around tons of kids in my life, a lot of friends have kids. And there's the concept of like you need to give kids room to play and pretend and be creative and explore rather than breathing down their neck. And I think communities, not to compare communities like their children, but I think anyone needs space and room and the opportunity to discover and create an ideate what they would like to do, what feels good for them. I cannot be everything to everyone and no one expects me to be as an internal community builder. I'm not going to have every relatable experience, every interest that your community will have. And so baking in space and margin for the community to have opportunities to lead, to suggest ways to connect, to suggest grassroots opportunities for community is so important. And I think that can quickly get crowded out. Yeah. And so it's a bit of a push and pull on the content, on the creation. I know I think Anamaya also calls it sometimes like endurance versus emergence. So control versus emergence in the community. And kind of thinking, okay, where do I sit on that spectrum as a community leader? What is needed? Because it also evolves in the life of the community. You know that in the first few months, you'll be doing more to create the space, to role model. And then it's very intentional in when you step back and when you start creating opportunities. So yeah. And yeah. So if you think of throughout your experience of one community or one community builder or one company that was particularly good at finding this balance, what comes to mind? The first one that comes to mind is Google. And you know, I loved my time at Google. I would not say I drank the Kool-Aid. I loved Google. But I want to preface that I don't think Google is the North Star for everything even though they were a big, you know, a fainting company. And they have paved the way for a lot of software reuse and whatnot. One thing that they did get really right, I credit Carter and the rest of the team that I worked with as being the ones to figure this out was putting the empowerment in the hands of these volunteer community builders. One program that I focused much of my time on when I was at Google was leading a community of around 2000 people. And inside this community, we're all of our volunteer moderators. Inside of this community, we're all of our volunteer moderators. And each of these moderators led a Google group, a Google chat community, a speaker series, a meetup program, where, you know, they might be a product manager or an executive assistant, just they have some sort of role at Google. But what they're doing when they're community building, it's completely outside of their job. You know, I'm a lot climber in San Francisco or I lead the expectant new mom's community or I lead the community of people who want to pivot into product management. So it could be completely non-work related or it could be related to their professional goals, but not their exact job at Google. And so what I did was I fostered community amongst these professional or volunteer moderators where we create an environment where they could lean on each other of like, hey, this threat in my community is getting out of control. And I don't know how to navigate it or rein it back in. Or I'm seeing that my community is falling a little stagnant. And I know I'm not required to make sure it's active, but I really want to nurture it. Like can someone like bounce ideas off with me? So they had connection with each other and they were helping each other solve problems. But then from a programmatic standpoint, I was also making sure that, you know, the communities were following community guidelines that if there was, you know, something from the internal comms department or the HR business partner standpoint, if we needed to communicate a message to these communities, I was partnering with them. So there was very like business value centric things. But we gave these volunteer community builders the space and empowerment to build out a vision for their own communities. Yeah. How did this work as well in terms of what did you observe in terms of skill building and confidence? So what was the impact for them on that more personal development point of view? Yes. It varied to be totally honest at varied. There were some communities where The person who was technically the moderator was very hands-off. And that's something that I will call out as, you know, at the size of Google, when you have that many communities, you just have to be prepared that there's going to be a variety of avatars, right? It's almost like a bell curve, right? You're going to have the very lightly invested community builder who just owns the community space and jumps in every once in a while, but really lets the community builder. And then you go along the spectrum, that you go along along the curve, and then you have the most, you know, evangelist, ambassador, like I want to like, you know, just spread the good news of this community and they're so invested. They find opportunities to spread awareness about that community. They're sending me ideas and asking for permission and I'm pretty hands off, you know, like I really let them run. And so it was a big spectrum. And it from what I found, it kind of followed the predictability of like, you know, 10% of your moderators are that passionate, you know, 60% of them are like somewhere in between, you know, it fluctuates based on the amount of time they have to put in at any given moment. And then, you know, the remaining are sort of that more let the community self run in terms of the what I heard in terms of personal fulfillment. I heard a lot of anecdotal feedback of like, I didn't know I was good at this. I didn't know I was good at this. And that's something that I see as a theme outside of myself working Google when I have conversations with people who are interested in pivoting into community building or with people leaders who do a bit of internal community building in their role. Maybe some of our listeners are this they have a different title, but they're starting to put their foot in the side of the work. People are way more natural at building community and connecting folks than they realize because it really comes down to seeing people understanding what they need and allowing the room for them to contribute. And I think people who are empathetic and who understand this and hold fast to that truth and protect that space of allowing others to contribute, they'll find that they're much more of a natural community builder than they realize. Yeah, I think I really, really relate to this because so I've been working as a full time job on internal community building only for less than two years. And I had that moment of, oh, this is actually a natural fit, which I didn't know going into it. And then I was surprised by it, but when I look back, I realize, oh, yeah, but wait a minute. I was the one organizing lunch and lunch. I was the one leading the volunteer group. Maybe it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise, but I hadn't connected the dot until I started working in the fence. So for anybody who is listening and finding that that's what they end up often, this is the way they do that current work. Maybe there's an opening there. Yeah. And something that I imagine just based on the examples you gave, there's a level of informality that I imagine that you bring to those things. And to learn the best ones, they're not stuffy. We all sort of acknowledge, we have Zoom fatigue and whatnot. But if you're able to make a lunch and learn, a ritual that people look forward to because they know that there is an informality to it, yes, we're going to learn something. But we're here to connect. I imagine that when you were doing that when it was not part of your role, there wasn't a huge formality to it because you were doing it because you wanted to. And so when it becomes part of your role, being able to retain a little bit of that spirit of informality is a way to make it easier. I think it's natural to slip into like, OK, I'm running this program. You know, I have this goal for it. And so like we can treat it with a lot of delicateness. But I think if we unbutton our top button about it, people relax a bit more and want to join it. Yeah, and this is a really good advice to keep actually out of this little digression into the community leader role and all of the different approach, like keeping a level of the informality. So talking about community leader and each community being its own mini world and working differently from the one next to it, etc. Which community do you feel the most emotionally attached to and can we dive into one example specifically that is really close to your heart? Yes, I would say that the one that I most emotionally attached to is the first community that I led, which was Moon Day collection. You know, I'm a woman and when I started there, I was in my early 20s and they really welcomed me into their community. I was pretty green in terms of I hadn't done this specific role before, but I am an internet native. I'm a child of the internet. I grew up on the internet. So it was very natural for me to, you know, be in the Facebook group, the private Facebook group every day. I hosted a community centric podcast. I helped plan our annual conference and our meetups and whatnot. They were distributed around the US, but I was able to plan ways for them to connect in person. I know that came very naturally for my soft skills, but most of the women in the community were in there like, I would say 30 to 45 age range and a lot of them were married, a lot of them had children. And so in terms of relatability, they were in a different stage in life than I was. And that shouldn't matter and it really doesn't, especially if you're leaning into your role, but I noticed that as I built relationships with them, we developed this vibe of like they were like all my big sisters. And that came over time and it was still appropriate. It wasn't like a, you know, they were crossing a boundary with my personal life or anything. But in terms of like their engagement with me, I just felt like I had a 2000 member community of big sisters and they leaned on me to get them what they needed and to help them connect and they would make memes about me like how I was like, I think my favorite meme that they made was they put my face on Yoda from Star Wars. Like so young she is so why she is because they, they really leaned into the fact that I was younger than them and I helped make them feel cool because they were in a different stage of life than I was. So after I left Noonday collection, I was there for about four years, that community got became so close, I witnessed these women walk each other through real life stuff. So something that naturally grew grass root style out of this community was the idea of. So it's I'm realizing that that that term has different meaning now, but the term love bomb love bomb has a different meaning if you're into like psychology and whatnot, but the idea was sometimes you would witness a woman in the community going through a really rough time. Or some women who would get diagnosed with cancer or go through divorce or just another hard life event, some of the women would spot it and they would create a private Facebook event where this woman would not be a part of and they would sort of crowd fund and rally around like, okay, we're going to love bomb her with, you know, here's these funds so you know you can, you know, Uber eats all your meals to your chemo appointments or, you know, woman walking through divorce and like rebuilding her life they would like just it was almost this like community care. Intention and they invited me to be a part of it every time and there was the technicality of you have to do that separate from work and whatnot. There was no expectation, but they developed such strong relationships where they really came alongside each other and saw each other as people first people who were more than their jobs. I'm going to get choked at talking about that, but that's like really really comes from me I was able to see so early in my community building career how to see members of my community as people first people with stories people with names people with challenges who are navigating real life hard stuff and entering the community with all of that on their mind. And so years later after I after I left new day collection there's an off shoot Facebook group called you know new day ambassadors off topic and there's like maybe a hundred people in there so it's just maybe a subset of the community but I'm the only former employee or current employee I'm not like there's no current employees in there but I'm the only former employee that's a part of this off topic off shoot sub community where if you look in this Facebook group. It is it's like the group chat that most women have of you know like i'm going on a trip and I have no idea what to wear like help me pick an outfit to my kid is having super bad behavioral problems at school and I don't know what to do versus like i'm dating again for the first time at 40 what the heck. Like anything that you can imagine and it's not at all related to new day it's just women walking alongside each other in real life and that started because they were sales reps for a company that they stumbled into so that's the one that I most emotionally attached to and it's because they welcomed me into their fold yeah I think it shows if really brings me back to a conversation earlier of business and people and how actually communities is a total win win because for this. because for these women. the community was created for them to get the business tools to achieve their sales and to just make that company work and generate revenue. But when you look at what they got out of it, it's 100% like people, country and the relationships and the friendships even. So it's a really good example of this link again between the two. Absolutely. And I will say that not every community needs to turn into that, that was such a special case. And before it got to that level of this off topic community where they're like, you know, community care, helping a woman through chemo, even before it got to that level, there was a special sauce, you know, a special spirit of the community that really differentiated the business from its competitors because you could join any other community as a sales consultant and make a commission and sell the products. But the selling point for this company was, we have a community of women that will actually be your literal friend. Yeah. And it's this translating to a corporate world where, you know, we're talking about permanent employees because there's this really famous statistics and I can't remember the specific, but you know, if you have a friend that worked at work, you're ex-time more likely to stay at work. And you're not always lucky to find this friend in your direct team or even on your site, but these communities where you gather from day one, a shared interest or shared problem or shared wish of learning something, you tend to find for sure your friends into these groups. So it translates very well to the corporate traditional corporate world as well. Totally, totally. And I think that launches us into another topic we were going to talk about if I could just go right into it, you know, what I'd like to explore at Oyster now. So to give a little bit more context around Oyster, I forgot to mention this, but we are a fully remote, fully distributed, fully asynchronous company. So we have like over 500 employees and over 50 countries. What that's thinking? 500 employees and over 50 countries. That means we have employees in every time zone. And so I'm navigating some new challenges as a long time community builder who's been building internal community for a while. I'm navigating some unique and interesting and new challenges for myself. And I think a lesson in that is there's always something to be learned no matter how long you've been doing this. So when you're navigating a challenge or confusing situation, it's likely because of the community in front of you, you know, bless them, but the community in front of you, not the community builder. So just want to give people permission there. So at Oyster, we use the phrase follow the sun. Our workplace, our community employees follows the sun and their own local area. You know, there's not an expectation that you are at your desk from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. It differs from team to team about what level of overlap you should have with your team members based on your role and whatnot. But as long as you're getting your work done and as long as you're fulfilling that commitment to being available to your co-workers and your your stakeholders, there's a lot of trust to allow employees to balance their work with their life, to be able to go to that doctor's appointment. Tomorrow, I have a hair appointment. No, it's today. Today, I have a hair appointment at 2 p.m. and I logged on a little bit early so I could go to my hair appointment and take the rest of the day off. So I mentioned that to say not only there's specific and unique challenges to community building, but I think that level of trust with your distributed remote employees, if that is your format at your company, that level of trust and freedom goes a long way with the sentiment of people wanting to be part of the community and not just an employee who clocks in and clocks out. Something that we do really well at Oyster is on the front end when people join the company. I'm not surprised that we do this well because we were such a high growth company for the last two and a half years. We scaled to over 500 employees in like two years. That was before my time. I cannot even imagine how chaotic that felt. It was really important to get not only onboarding the onboarding program, but getting them plugged into the community. What you were saying earlier, which sparked this for me. The statistic around, if you have one friend at work, you're infinitely more likely to feel more engaged and retain at work. My first friend at Oyster was my onboarding buddy who had been at the company for a year and a half, two years. So he's an OG in Oyster years. His name is Rob. He works in a completely different part of the company. And I don't know if we ever would have met but Oyster engineered a format to where he and I were able to meet. And now he is like my virtual buddy. He introduced me to his virtual buddies that kind of like, they have their own grassroots community, group DM and whatnot. And they all dropped a social hang on my calendar like, hey, Rob said I should meet you. And the fact that I didn't have to lift a finger in my first few weeks just to meet people, I was like, Oyster is doing something right. I'll pause there, but I have some ideas on where we can grow next. But I know I've just been talking for so long. Now I love this idea of the communities or gaining access to a round of community as you join a company. I'm trying to work on how we want to support a culture of community building outside of just learning communities, which I work directly on in our whole company. I literally call the project, find your people. It's not even for me. It's from one of the members of the community and work with. But it's really the idea of how can we make it easy for people to join and find their people because that will mean that they will understand our culture really quickly, that they will be able to feel welcome and feel safe really quickly because we don't feel psychologically safe. In a 60,000 people group, we feel safe into subgroups that are at a size or brain can manage, but that obviously impact all of their experience. So yeah, so I love this idea of it's actually about enabling people to find their friends, the people that want to work with, collaborate with, bump head with, as them say as well often. So I was going to say that I know that you didn't necessarily ask for my advice around that, but something that it sparked in me is the gift of working at a startup, oysters still startup, is we sort of lean into the idea of building in public still, and I know that that might vary at certain companies. Maybe you have a very corporate environment where you work, maybe you are at a startup, but regardless, I think leaning into telling your community that that's what you want to do is a really powerful strategy, and I don't think it's pulling back the curtain too much. I think saying, hey, something that we really want to get right and do is helping our new joiners plug in quickly. Just so you know, we're going to be working on this and we welcome ideas and like, you know, put some structure around it, but that's what I plan to do with some of my ideas at oyster around creating rituals and creating recognition and whatnot. When I'm ready to let our community know that that's something I'll be focusing on, you know, in a more formal way, letting them know that will be on purpose and intentional, not just to build in public, but also so people can participate because again, no one expects me to be everything to everyone, and I want them to help build what will be serving them. So I was literally writing a little bit of, okay, how can we get moving on this morning, and I wrote, working out loud, but it sounds like we need to connect to see, okay, how should we do that? Exactly. So we've got a little bit of time left, and I have one question that I think we've circled around maybe a little bit because we've talked about oyster scaling up and what that means for people being able to find their people, to find communities, and so what in your vision, what are the next steps for oyster in terms of internal community building? Yes. My two big next steps that I'm really excited about, I kind of mentioned it when I was talking a moment ago, I'm really going to be looking at rituals and recognition. I love alliteration, that was on accident, but rituals. So what does that mean for community? I imagine some of our listeners like no and love this idea, especially if you're like a learning designer. Rituals I find, and my experience, make it easy and predictable for folks to know where and when they can plug in and contribute. I think that something that can go wrong when building community, I've alluded to like, you know, formality and like putting a lot of like structure around something, and I think that that issue, that challenge can crowd out the ability to easily contribute. People just want to be able to like see a thread that is like an easy light levity question and chime in, or like maybe there's a Friday photo ritual that everyone has. And like they know like, oh, you know, I walk to my favorite crafty shop every Friday morning and like that's part of my ritual in my personal life, but like I want to share that in the community. And so rituals inherently make it easy and predictable for people to contribute. I think that whenever it's a little bit sporadic, the ability to contribute, people don't know where to look and they don't know when to expect the opportunity to participate. Something an oyster that we've done for a long time and our CEO, Tony, is our biggest advocate for it is we have a channel dedicated to saying good morning. And there is something, I know, right? There's something beautiful about the ritual of especially as a company who follows the sun. There's something beautiful about having that baked into welcoming and saying hello to everyone. Because I've seen the signal that rituals are valuable at oyster, I'm really excited to dig in of like, where are the obvious gaps where we could have a ritual that we can implement. The rituals that can involve oysters, taking that and running with it. It doesn't have to be me. And then the other thing that I'm excited to explore is recognition. I am a believer in the balance of intrinsic and extrinsic, right? We talk about it with motivation, but I also think with recognition, you know, we have a employee like points and cash benefit called Thanksgiving. And gets it every month, it's I think like $75, you can spend it towards anything, you know, a massage, your light bill, whatever it is. And so everyone's, you know, we use think spend to recognize employees, but that's extrinsic. You don't have to have a hard dollar cost and recognizing employees. So I'm exploring how we're recognizing employees and our all hands, you know, on a big scale, but I'm also going to be exploring like, how can we recognize employees with opportunities to connect and participate or having access to certain leaders of the company, having access and co-learning opportunities. I want to really inject the spirit of community and connection in the ways that we recognize and elevate oysters for their contributions, but not just performance, not just performance related to their job, but also to their contribution to the culture of oyster because culture powers our company specifically because we are distributed in remote. We need to be rewarding cultural contribution, not just performance. Yeah. So rituals, recognition and with rituals making it easy and predictable so that anybody can jump on board. So I remember this. Yes. The two hours of your alliteration. Yeah, I feel like I need to find a third hour. Yes. Reward, but that's reword and recognition already. Great. So yes. Yes. Just about to close this. I have one final question about we touched just at the end on the culture and enabling and empowering people to participate, to join contribute to communities from your plans at oyster. Where did some of the inspiration come from? So if we go back to your previous experiences, which company was really good at this and how, what did they have in place that made them good at empowering employees to build communities? Yeah. I will say that something that I, a place that I really learned from in terms of the holistic toolkit of a community builder is CMX. One of my still longstanding mentors and friends, I met at CMX. Her name is Carrie Melissa Jones. She was the COO at CMX. And you might hear that and wonder like, interesting and operations person, person having, you know, so much knowledge around community building, but she really understood the importance of that framework of rituals and rewards and like the nuance of that. And you know, when I look back, we had a Facebook group that anyone could join, but it was a closed Facebook group of thousands of members. We had a learning course that had cohorts. We had meetup programs and everything that I just described around rituals and recognition and elevating members and to leadership, you know, opportunities. CMX did that really, really well. And I also just have to plug Carrie, Carrie Melissa Jones. She has continued to build opportunities for community builders like us to learn. She has her own community building cohorts now. She's just a really great follow on LinkedIn. I'm also partial. She came to Austin and stayed with me because she spoke itself around this specific topic. I just learned so much from her and she, in addition to Carter, my manager at Google, I think Carrie was actually the original foundation of teaching me how to communicate the value of people in terms that decision makers at businesses can understand so you can protect the humanity and spirit of a community. Great. I love this as almost like final words of protecting humanity and the spirit of community. Yes. This is probably the backbone of a lot of the work around community building. So I think in one of the other episodes this season, there's a whole discussion around well, company is the community. And I think I recognize some of these threads as well in what you're trying to build at oyster. Really excited to see and learn more about it. Hopefully you'll be working out loud and sharing your progress as well on LinkedIn and will be able to see how this is going for oyster. Thank you so much Katie to be here. It was great to learn from you and to be able to connect the dots between all of the different setups and the different types of communities you worked with. And there's definitely a quite a few things that help you with me as well. One, the first one coming to mind is like not being afraid of talking business. So if we can all go and work on articulating the community benefits in business works and needs. I will say it's super important to me as a North Star. I'm not perfect at it. So I'm here. Yeah, I'm here for any listener that is like that sounds so intimidating. Sliding to my DMs, add me on LinkedIn and we'll talk about it. Sophie, this was such a great chat. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. And that was it for today. So I hope that you really enjoyed this conversation and that you could learn from our guest. And if you are as well a community builder or if you are just launching one in your company or if you work with companies to help them build internal communities, let us know. We'd love to hear from you, to learn from you and to share your stories with others. So you'll find a link to our form to reach out in the episode notes and we're looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for listening. So being here and we'll see you soon on Mapping Ties. Have a great day.