The company is the community with Luke Michalak

Today I am talking to Luke Michelac and we're learning how his role as community manager became a critical one for culture design as the company he was working for super awesome was dealing with social distancing during the pandemic. This isn't our usual community building lens since Luke's work was focusing on creating consistency in the way the entire organization continued to foster a sense of connection and belonging across different offices. From collaboration with IT, Finance and HR to ensure a smooth onboarding to clear celebration and recognition programs and a consistent monthly community engagement calendar, Luke shares whether community builders role looks like when the community is the whole organization. Hello, Luke. Hey. Hey, it's really great to have you here. Thanks for making time to chat with me today about one of our favorite topics, community. Yeah, of course. I'm very, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Perfect. Well, let's jump straight ahead because I know we have a lot of ground to cover and the time is precious. And we're going to start with a very easy question to tune in. A lot of listeners more about who you are and also what did this community building journey look like for you until now in a nutshell? And we're going to have you here in there. My name is Luke Michelac. I see myself as a community advocate and community builder. Professionally, I have worked community management type roles that are internal to companies and organizations. And so that's what I'm here to chat about with you today. I've sat in those types of places and have expanded into office management type things, which is an interesting idea around physical space and the people in them and how the community fits into that and how their needs are shown off for. And then as well, I've also worked in employee engagement and internal comments type things. Yeah, a little bit of everything, but it's really cool to be in this internal community space as I just find it very pro-social and empathetic and full of compassion. And I love to talk to people and I love to connect. So I'm glad to be here. And the world could use a little bit more connection and empathy. True, I think. For sure. So I know that you have this, and you mentioned it yourself, is kind of a community, obviously related to people that is very much, I don't want to say dependent, but reliant on space, on the office and the space people were in. But also, I know that you worked in companies that were distributed. So not everyone was co-located, not everyone was in the same space. So I want us to maybe go back in time to your probably first, I dare say, first role as internal community builder, super awesome. And maybe we'll go back in time and you said a bit the contacts or the scene for us. So what is super awesome? When did you join them? What type of company are they size? Why did they bring you in? Who were you reporting to? Paint a general picture for us to see the contacts in which you started building communities? Yeah, absolutely. To honestly touch on that final part of your question, I feel like community management and community building is something that's just really interesting. It's one of those professions where the more I talk to people who end up in it, they always kind of say that they fell into it and by chance. And when I look back on all of the things that I've ever done in my life, it feels like a constellation points until like a grander constellation. Although community management and community building type work is something that I didn't ever know from the get-go. Like this is what I'm going to do. It's always been very tangentially applicable to my interest in my needs. And so what really got me excited is learning how to put some theory around things in the pilot forward. But yeah, I used to be a camp counselor back in the day and I joke that a lot of community building is being an adult camp counselor. I was such a lot of feeder throughout my youth, which is very communal in many ways and where you're coming together to build something of story and sentiment and you're putting it out there for the world to consume. And I think that there's a lot of value in this coming together to build something bigger. That was then continued on into my professional career and I feel very excited and lucky, honestly, that I was able to fall into this space that I did. I moved to New York around June, July, 24, 2018. And then by October, 2018, I was connecting into the Super Awesome group. And so for to answer your question further, the Super Awesome group is a kid safe data privacy company. They focused on being kid tech and kid digital safety experts that are kind of pioneering and cutting edge and all about kid safe digital interactions online, which was a huge learning moment for me. I didn't really know anything about online kid safety, COPPA, GDPR, like these kind of data privacy laws that then informed a lot of how the industry of online spaces and how like brands connect with their audiences was set up. And so when I was coming into Super Awesome, the company was based out of London. And so was my boss that they were the chief of staff of the company. And I was hired on as a office manager, but they gave me community manager title. My primary team and collaborator was with an other office manager who was based out of London. And then we had about 150 to 200 people in the Super Awesome group at that time in North America. We had about a group of 30 or so in New York and then about 5 to 10 in both LA and then also in Chicago and then a remote population as well. And so I had always started with a community management title. And it started with kind of maintaining this internal space and the quality of the space and doing events on the space at the office and making sure that people were good. And I did a lot of internal support things as well. Very miscellaneous all over the place from marketing facilities was my formal role. And by exacts planning events paying attention to where our name came up in the news for such things. And then yeah, because there was distance between the LA and the Chicago and our remote teams as well, there was extra effort put into connecting with them and making sure they were good as well. And yeah, that's where it all started to kind of come together and strive, I guess. Just understanding that we had a common mission which was making the Internet safer for kids and we were really unified in that goal. And then from there I went off to understand who the individual people in the North America community were and who the Amia group were and how they all support each other and work together. And then how could I support them? What were the goals of the organization? And from there it just started to grow and grow and grow. That's super interesting because I admit I haven't really talked to anyone coming from that particular role of an office manager but then being so tied with everything that has to do with community and people and culture as well. So when you say at events, etc, that really caught my attention and you mentioned company goals. I'm very curious to know what were your goals in this role. So what were you aiming to achieve? What were the impacts, KPIs, things that you were looking at? And has that changed over time from the moment you were hired and joined the team to the time you left? Was there any change here? Yeah, absolutely. This I feel like is actually one of the harder aspects of community management in a way specifically because it's around verbalizing what quality looks like in the space and finding spaces in ways to validate that quality or maintain the quality or ensure that it's growing and it's shifting. We definitely were an organization that was quite into OKRs and KPI kind of thinking as being in a start of space. And at the beginning it was a lot of making sure that the on-site experience was quality for people, making sure that are a giant milestones like quarterly socials and annual off-sites, annual holiday celebrations or end-of-year parties were done that in the moments where we were facilitating conversation between the exact team and the staff that I was kind of pre-staging that space. So therefore we can have Zoom connected and we can have seats for everybody and make sure that the executive team can be heard wherever they're standing in that room. So early on initially it was a lot of internal support I would say. And then as I began to learn a little bit more about the technology and learn a little bit more about the people, then I can work more collaboratively with our culture crew, which is actually a group of individuals that were pre-selected I guess. as leads in a way, not necessarily explicit leads, but more so. Individuals who felt tied to the mission at different locations. And those were the groups that were then making sure that we showed up for milestones throughout the year. And so I worked with a lot of these helpers to make sure that, like if we had a party in New York that the LIT got something to and that the Chicago team got something as well. It was all very, we tried to do what we could to make sure that everyone had a uniform experience, although we were very separated at the beginning. And when COVID came through, it actually made things a lot easier because it pushed us all online. Once you're online, it's way easier to ensure a quality standard and programming and stuff. But we did a lot of celebration recognition moments kind of throughout the year. And in the office, we were very annoying. We had lots of instruments and wigs and costumes and things. And we put on a huge show whenever it was somebody's birthday or an anniversary and kind of creator in the office celebrating them. We looked for ways to basically make sure that this experience of highlighting people and celebrating them was continued throughout the different areas of the organization. So yeah, it was a small startup at the time that I was coming into it. And it was growing really fast. And so I did a lot of onboarding as well, which was easier when you're in the office because it says like, Hey, welcome to the company. Here's your seat. Here's all your hardware. Make sure you're good. Here's like a bundle of swag and things like that. We've got snack closet over there. I keep that refreshed. We have extra swag over here. I do that too. Please keep your hands off certain pieces of swag, particularly if you're a salesperson, dot, like chasing swag, that's internal swag. As we continue to hit these cultural milestones, we realized that we needed to put a calendar together in order to just make sure that we were hitting everything. And so that led to the creation of something called the wellness and culture calendar in turn, the organization. And then that was one of my main deliverables on what I was doing monthly. And that created moments where we needed to be more planning forward at the beginning. So we would meet quarterly and monthly to plan each month and then kind of look forward. And then we would meet a monthly event of the months to look back on how the previous month went. And then we would send around slides, emails and really in depth. Descriptors of the different types of events and programs we were doing. Eventually, we were able to scale that to be through Canva, which I loved. I found Canva to be a really easy way to sell the idea of an event to sell the idea of a program without having to verbalize too many things yet. And yeah, I just I really enjoyed that events aspect of it. And there were a lot of extra curricular kind of events, which are more fun, like above and beyond if you have the energy to do a kind of a thing. But then later on, we realized that it was a value to publish and put together a like a community events calendar, which was more business information and like really important things that everyone needed to know and participate in. And how would you know that a global gathering or an offsite or Q1 town hall is super duper of value unless you've been there for a little bit. Anyway, we could take the great culture and moments that we had. And then put them down in a repeatable format was where a lot of value was found at the beginning to maintain the quality of the space. I remember pretty early on, Tantzir, a question about like APIs. My boss was asking me to find three to five improvements that I could make throughout the office or really early on it was about finding as many people as possible to connect to and having a lot of one-on-one introductory conversations. That allowed me to really develop my breath of understanding of who is this group of 200 or so spread out throughout North America. And Amia, I got to know the North America team pretty intimately, I would say, in terms of knowing all their birthdays and knowing random talks about them as individuals and learning about their families and their jobs and the type of work that they were doing. And so it made it really easy to show up for them and to put programs together for them that I thought would be really fun. So many threads I want to pull here. So before I'm obviously I really want to zoom in into the whole like concretely your tasks. I'm very drawn to the wellness and culture calendar and the community events and all that. And we're going to go to that in a second. But I want to go back a couple of steps because you said you said a couple of things that really captured my attention. And I want to zoom in on those first. You mentioned something about the kind of like you were the gel or the glue or the catalyst between the executive team, leadership team and staff. You mentioned that you had this role of actually meeting people sitting with them one to one, no matter the roles they were in, the teams they were in. And that even your leader, your CEO or the top leadership said, hey, look, find me something to change here. Like listen to the teams and capture the improvement suggestions and we're open to listen to that. And you also mentioned onboarding. So for me, I'm thinking like, okay, those are, those are big tasks for someone that has wears the hat of the community managers, less office manager, etc. And I'm thinking, well, where was the HR team here? Where was the L&D team? Tell me about that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was definitely a very small but scrappy mentality about the organization, particularly around the time that I was coming in. There was a cultural shift, I would say, in terms of how the organization was set up and how the organization was finding success. They recently brought in some new team members and extra expertise and they repositioned how they were really approaching everything. But it was coming from a space of necessity from what I could tell. And a lot of the budget tightness was coming from a space of we don't know how much money we have right now. And we need to be very careful and very intentional with where our money gets spent in order to make sure that we're having a huge impact. And so I feel like my role was interesting in that way because of the money tightness. I was able to play many hats or wear many hats because a huge nature of my job was responding to internal support in whatever ways that it would come up. That being said, a lot of these support systems, such as the IT team and the HR team, a lot of the main functions that one would imagine that those teams would do were outsourced at the time that I was coming in. And so when I was joining the organization, although I was reporting to the Chief of Staff, they were originally thinking that my role later on report to a HR director and senior HR leader of some sort. When I came into the organization, they didn't have an HR team. And so I was kind of one of the first individuals doing more hands-on HR things in terms of putting them forward and then living next to the population as we were doing them. Thankfully we did get a HR lead within the first year or so of me being there. And that really helped kind of pull all these miscellaneous HR things that were outsourced together and put them all into one roof. And that was a big push for us to put it into a calendar and also be more intentional with how we went about solving a lot of stuff. So yeah, it was a very small bit of money. We didn't really have any internal support for the North America team except for me as the office manager and community manager. And a big reason that they brought me in as the office manager is because they grew to a point where they needed an office. And so they had the office set up and then they brought me in. And thankfully being tied to the chief of staff, I feel like that allowed me to have a room to speak on the needs. I was hearing from my community around me and then figure out where I can go to allocate resources towards kind of the problems that I was identifying. And so we worked a lot in collaboration with the IT guys, even though they were based out of Poland. We worked in collaboration with the finance team and made sure that there was like community type things built into the budget for managers. And so there was a very distributed approach to how community was insured, I guess, as individuals were coming in. And that was something that was very, very clear in our onboarding practice as well. I have to say that I am loving the fact. If it's very unique, the fact that a grader I hear it's a startup, it's a company that's ready, well, start 200 people, it's a company that's relatively young, relatively small, but the fact that they brought a community manager and office manager and you were the person that was kind of waving the people flag, right? Because that was your role before for the HR was higher, the internal HR to wave the people flag, or the L&Ds to wave the people flag. I think that's fascinating. And I wonder if you have, what is your intuition telling you? What do you think prompted that? I know you mentioned that, okay, we had an office, so we moved it to the office. So there was a very clear practical need there to have someone overlooking the office for all of the very practical things, as you said. There's swag, the office, the dreams, make sure there's coffee and all that, but your role was much more than that, right? And you get, as the time advanced, you got more and more green lights, encouragement, freedom - Aware also. - Be the glue, yes, to be the glue and kind of be the person that keeps its ears open to report back any type of potential issues. So why do you think that was the case? Where was it coming from? Like what was the need there that the senior leadership was trying to meet with bringing you on board? - Yeah, absolutely. I really love that question. And there are a couple of things for me to note on. I'll start with the most interesting, I guess, which is that we were an organization that already valued community in a pretty specific way. And I think that understanding of the value of a community manager, then allowed imagination to go further and then bring it more into the internal space. And I'll go further and I'll say that when I was joining Super Awesome, it had a team within the North America team and within the organization that ran an app called Pop Jam. And Pop Jam was a kid safe social media app, which sounds all kinds of messy when you talk about data privacy for children, but they were pretty local about the fact that they were the only organization that was ever kind of doing that. And it was the only space that I could see that Super Awesome was going directly like business to customer or B2C is in business to child. Most of the work that we did was in business to business then kind of helping businesses move into this kid space. But by having this direct relationship with this population of children through an app for them, we had a huge team of community professionals, community managers, community leaders who'd been working on the app for years, even before we had them under our roof, they were together as a team in a different organization and then that kind of scene came into Super Awesome and rebranded in different ways and our product team allowed the apps to expand and grow. And so by taking individuals who've been championing digital privacy on the internet for kids for decades and taking people who were very intentional about setting up online spaces and moderation, even though moderation wasn't a huge part of my job, there was also a lot of daily challenge type programming that they would do in the app with the kids and they would ask them questions around like, what's your favorite movie right now or tell me something you care about? And it led to a lot of really silly stories from the things that our moderation team were able to kind of pull out and then highlight. But it also painted a story of the value of community done intentionally and in our case, it needed to be done intentionally because if it wasn't, then you're falling into the bucket of what everything else on the internet is, which is built unintentionally for children. So I feel like that really set a standard in terms of what quality community management is, although their operations and management doing things were completely different to be as honest as possible. But at the same time, we had team members and we work offices which uses a community manager title for a lot of the individuals that sit on the floors and maintain unity between the different corporations or institutions that are like sharing floor space in a co-working space like we work. And so it felt like my community manager title was very inspired by that in certain ways. And then coming in before me, they did have this culture crew of North America leads their individuals who kind of volunteered extra time to go above and beyond to make sure that people felt supported in different ways. And so we had a team member in LA and a team member in New York and a team member in Chicago that were already doing a lot of extra in order to make sure that we had team dinners or team outings or things like that. And so it really had a point where they needed something centralized and something that could kind of cover all those variables without putting too much pressure on the distributed population as much as there is value in making sure that you have budget and that there's clear guidance on any way. Do these things quarterly and we also have room for these types of interactions that are more cross social and chill and way more fun. It does hit a point where there's value in saying, let's be more intentional here. And so I feel like my organization didn't necessarily fully understand the depth of how I would grow into the role and the value that I would provide in it. But looking back, it's easy to see all of the very linear, very obvious needs that came up along the way that it just made sense for me to kind of jump in and be up on this ways. So. - They probably haven't really anticipated how your role will evolve all the time. But what I hear from you is that there was this general awareness and understanding that community is valuable and that it's worth investing, that good things can come out of that. And I have to say that probably the biggest challenge that organizations, companies face today when they're starting to build internal communities is lack of good practices and lack of personal experiences with what good community looks and feels like. Many of us don't know that. We didn't have the opportunity to experience that. And it's very hard to imagine what the community space can become and what the potential is to distribute the way you work and to bring people in and to give everyone a seat at the table and to truly listen and to co-create and to collaborate. And everything that falls under the bucket or the umbrella of community, right? It's very hard for them to imagine when they have not seen good examples of that. So I like it how it sounds like in your case, when you started, there were already from we work and the way they were managing their customers, I guess, clients, but also from your team that was building communities, customer user facing, right? With the kids, with the app. It sounds like top leadership was, you didn't have to sell the idea of a community. You didn't have to get anyone's buy in. It was almost like a no-brainer that you would come in and that we need someone to nurture and take care and intentionally elevate our culture. And this is maybe the second thread that I would like to pull there because it sounds to me that the nature of the work and the products that you were, that you colleagues were working on, it's purposeful work, right? So everyone was going probably to work feeling we are making a change in this world by building an online space that's safe for kids. We know how problematic that situation still is. And how many challenges the industry still faces when it comes to child's protection online. So I think that must have had boosted or kind of created a very good cultural basis inside the company. So it sounds to me that you joined in a fertile ground of already a culture that was very healthy and also already with the support of our leadership that was aware of what community could become and the impact it might have. And your role was to bring more intentionality and to elevate. And this brings us to the actual, you know, the projects you've run with the data, the data there because I thought it's so interesting how you join. And I think that's an interesting element to put forward before we actually understand how your projects were working. - Yeah, and if I can just say really fast, I felt like during this time specifically, I was standing on the shoulders of giants. Like it felt like because the mission statement was so clear and because our North America team was very sales driven in certain ways, there was very clear goals and metrics that were trying to be set. And it felt small enough at the time that the leadership was really listening to the individuals that they're putting these goals onto. And so there was constantly a dialogue between exact painting a picture of where we should be going and then people kind of from the ground up reporting back, well, these are what my clients are talking about. This is what I am seeing. This is what I'm noticing. These are the problems. And I think in that dialogue, managers can manage and exact team can lead and staff can do their job really well, but ultimately, this is the fact that we had such a great team of executive members that were subject matter interests and the things that they were really good at. It felt like we had individual space for people to be themselves, so fully lean into what they were caring about and everybody that was sitting in the group participating to this mission, they were all hyper-specific in that that everyone had a goal, everyone had a very clear expectations lineup for them, they more often than not had a really fantastic skill set that allowed them to work collaboratively in towards the mission. Because we had such defined outcome with this is where we're going, it created a lot of room and vision to say, okay, this is what I can do, how can I bring that to the table? And there was just like a lot of enthusiasm coming around the time that I was jumping into it. It's. What you're describing, you're talking about the company culture, but everything you're saying can be applied to a community culture. So the company was already. The company was already a community when you joined, right? So they were already their behaviors, the way the leadership was listening in, people felt hurt, they felt they have agency, they felt that they. things forward, someone will listen, their work was valuable, they found meaning in their work, very collaborative, really open, very daily. Exactly. So for me, it feels like because the way I've seen community like build so far is we bring either a department together or we bring a part of the company together around the certain skill set because that's a community of practice. Sure. Or we bring. We build our employee resource groups around specific gender or interest or sometimes rebel communities around locations. So it's the office in LA, the office in New York and so on. So there's so many, many reasons that why companies build community. But it's always. It's always including some and excluding someone else, including some people and excluding the rest of the population of the company, the rest of the employees. Whereas in your case and of course you are still small, but still you had your challenges and I want to get back to that because you were small, you had 150 200 employees, but you were spread around like in US entry locations and you had offices in London. So you were. And you had people working remotely mentioned. So even before COVID, you were distributed. So I'm sure that there were challenges there to keep this cultural live and to keep this community together. But I find it fascinating how the community was everyone. Like the employees, the entire. Or your entire colleagues, that was the community. And probably the purpose, the sole purpose of you being there to nurture that was. Was actually a thriving culture where everyone felt heard and they felt that it can bring their true self to work to contribute to this beautiful mission that the company had. So there's something very magical about that. It's caling up and growing and have a big massive thousands of employees companies will put some challenges there. But talk to me about that. Talk to me about those challenges and I had to laugh because when you were talking about COVID, I wanted to ask, "Oh, so you were in the office and then COVID came and made things harder." And then you said, "Covic came and made things easier for me because suddenly we weren't in an office and we were all. It kind of leveled up the playing field because we were all online." So let's maybe zoom in on that. The wellness and the culture program that it kind of had put in place and came to be, can you give us a couple of examples of how that manifested in real life. Absolutely. And I really like that you highlighted my idea that COVID made things a little bit easier. I feel like that actually a personal gripe I have with the industry in general, but there's so much value in online community management because it's the most uniform experience that everyone's going to have. Time and time again, I see emphasis put on in person, which is always going to be important. If you have people, they're going to be gathering in one capacity or another if they like each other by any means or if they have common goals. And so I see a lot of value in figuring out how to make these gatherings more attentional or facilitate them, not question agenda in it. But to answer your question, so wellness and culture calendar, it really started at the very beginning where we would do Wednesday breakfast in the office, pizza Fridays, kind of a situation. And then everyone's in a blue moon. We would do some additional programming where we will bring in a speaker or something well-being-related like massage is enough is kind of a thing. And so that then created a scenario of meeting with this culture crew of individuals and all the different locations and meeting with them monthly and being like, okay, well, this week in June, we're going to do this. And then the second week will do this. And then the third week will do this. L.A. team please come up with something that feels adjacent in some capacity. Like you don't have to eat breakfast together as a group, but maybe you go out to lunch together as a group because there's only seven of you. So that's easier than going out for breakfast, particularly when you're in L.A. and time zones is the thing. And it's a London-based company when you're signing on at 9 a.m. that's kind of deep into people's work days particularly with New York and London being your primary collaborators. So time zones were always something worth being mindful of. And then there was always like budget differences and how far money could go for certain groups depending on their physical location and also their size. So for $50 per person can go a lot further with 75 people in London than it could go potentially for five-feet lot in Chicago or maybe not depending on what the goal of the program is. And so it just felt like we were doing a lot and we needed to formalize it. And so through this HR director who came in, that's when we started to build this bridge of repeatability in our programming and meeting monthly and advocating for things to be done that made sure that our company culture that was super duper strong and London maintained. There's always cultural differences to you which is really important to be mindful of. So like you couldn't really do like drinking-based programming out in LA because that team had to kind of drive home at the end of the day and it's not a public transportation culture in the way that the New York team is or the London team is. And so you had to be pretty open about what fits I guess as programming but in that you also have to be really clear of what the need of the program is. Like are we just doing this for you guys to feel connected to each other? Are you doing this so you can receive information? Are you doing this so you can co-create? So you could welcome somebody into the group so you can celebrate someone's achievement, big sale or successful client kind of a thing. So yeah it started there and at the beginning it was, we started in January 2019 and our January program was like goal setting month because it felt very apropos with New Year's resolution type thinking. I remember my collegiate background is an exercise science and a little bit of like coaching and a theory and so I did a goal setting talk that was one hour long and on different strategies around goal setting and how that can be applicable for the day-to-day life. And then February we rift on Valentine's Day and we did happy healthy heart month. So I think we did like a step competition and we did a talk on heart health and also had like celebration recognition moments tied in around Valentine's Day so you could do like extra thank you shout out kind of things around those times and then yeah it continued to grow and grow and grow. We did like a sports month one time where we put yo-yos in every office and encourage people to just play with some yo-yos every once in a while we would do like a swag drop kind of a thing that would be tied to like a monthly program. If we were every quarter we needed to do a team social so those were always kind of big dint of the calendar programming as well and then also we had like our offsites and things too. I will say that yeah when COVID hit it really pushed us online and again this is one of those moments where I felt like I was standing on the shoulders of giants because it felt like having a team that was aware of the value of online connection allowed things to be a lot easier and it didn't happen necessarily like come from my brain. And so the hardest meetings that we were ever taking specifically around Melissa Kultger calendar was the one at the top of the month where we had to name the month. And so we would come up with these like really corny like puns trying to like figure out like what the theme was based off of what we were doing and yeah even in those moments it felt like pulling teeth and we realized that we needed to be a little bit more intentional about it. And so we used the Employee Engagement Survey which was a tool that was later introduced into the ecosystem of things as a way to guide us in terms of how we took feedback or did specific programming and so a great example is I think really early on in the engagement surveys we learned that people knew that there's a lot of programs going on but they didn't know how often the programs were or they were missing like a centralized calendar. And so as an initiative that we launched the next month as a way to solve this problem we bought giant whiteboard cameras. and made a whole wall of that in the office. And so I created a physical location to act as an inbox of sorts, but also as a just like this receptacle where we can put up holiday cards or pictures of people's pets or their babies or their thank you notes, plus miscellaneous stickers and shout outs and jongs and things. And so sometimes it can be like a really physical solution. I feel like the most impactful ones that I at least remember are always tied around a specific need, but when we had to kind of move online, therefore we reshifted our employee programs that were about information sharing and celebration recognition. And we kind of put those together. And so those were quarterly milestones to make sure they hit. We always had a moment during our offsite where we were like me and 15 or me and five where people can like share a quick slide in front of their peers and say like this is who I am as they joined the organization within that six month period. And so that shortened down to like me in a minute. So all our new joiners had one minute to basically give like a quick little quip about themselves very publicly on Zoom in front of everybody at the team all hands, which I know is pretty exciting to do seeing creative visuals. And so we made sure that they had plenty of examples to see of how it worked. And we just had some really creative outcomes from that. And people would do wraps, they would make a video, they would create a collage kind of a thing. So we had individual moments kind of baked in that spotlighted individuals personality. And then also by centralizing our information sharing into a Zoom-based format and also collecting questions ahead of time, then we could be really intentional with how our time with spent shared well people from all over the globe are on Zoom together for two, three hours at a time. And so that was our global gatherings. And Super Awesome still does those quarterly. And then they also do quarterly checkings as well. And so then that helps maintain some semblance of business based goal setting and showing up for that. But then we were able to also maintain the fun elements of what we were doing. And I don't know if I've told you this yet, but we had our lead for sales based in Amia. They connected with someone who was in charge of Burning Man, like the virtual Burning Man celebration. Wow. And during COVID, 2020, yeah, December 2020, we connected with this group called Sparkleverse that built a microsite for us where you can go into this website and click into the different pieces of the website. And the website was designed to look like a map on this little asteroid. And then you can click into these different rooms called like Mission Center or like Supernova Dancefloor. And then once you go into those rooms, it's a click-through link to some Zoom room or some specifically designed web page. So you're doing either a small group activity or a large group activity. And those are the moments that we were able to build that allowed us to be fun and engineer like serendipity into the thing. And that we did in December of 2020, I believe. And then also the summer of 2021. We did a archipelago themed one. And the paid actors that were participating for the archipelago one, they did like a pet talent show and a scuba diving class instructed by Mermaid, Flood on Zoom. And a game of survivor as well. So we had a lot of like silliness that was kind of baked in. And I think it's really a value to kind of show that even though we're going to something pretty hard right now, we could still come together under something kind of weird. And I'm just really grateful that our team allowed us to have so much room to play. Those were fun moments because you're in someone's home, you're on Zoom with them. So you can take individuals with talents and things that they want to share and create space for them as well. And so we were able to do like musical sets from any of our staff that played instruments and wanted to share. Our CEO was a radio DJ like way way back in the day before they did the startup life. And so they even did a DJ set during our company Holiday Party on Zoom. And so we had moments for business and then we had moments for fun. And then we also engineered spaces into our Slack, which is our online community space, that I totally see Slack as a community platform. I'm going to put my two cents a there and say that. It is. Some people will chase you down. And they will find you down for the state one. Totally. I agree though. I agree. It's so noisy as a platform. And so it's hard to be really intentional with how that spaces are set up. And this is actually something that relates to what you were talking about earlier. It's like how do you kind of cut it up into pieces or bucket it or build community around really intentional places and things. And I always viewed the entire population as one umbrella group or one bucket. But then when I was kind of assuming into a specific problem around like the LA team and their inability to do a specific type of social, then I'm like, OK, well, let me cut this population smaller, find a group need, and then how do I show up for this need as a group. And so that allowed me to play a game of size and scale, where I'm either zooming in on solutions that are really singular, and then repeating those throughout or finding other people where those solutions might be helpful. Or I'm doing small group solutions or then even in like a COVID case where we're resetting our entire programming to be from an onsite with hanging out and dinner and party afterwards to then a virtual offsite, which was, yeah, able to show up for its needs in a tongue way, but way more global. So we really danced around in terms of how community manifests in different ways and where the needs are, the solutions are. But thankfully, through building the rapport over time, it was easier to pick up clues faster on where to go next. So just to double click on that a little bit, because I think I heard you say that putting that calendar together felt like pulling teeth. I could feel almost like, oh, no, I'm have to push a ball up a heel. And I think many community managers struggle with that to be honest. This-- I think we kind of sit in our little corner, at our little desk, and we're like, oh, what else can we do for the people and for the community? And what else would be fun? And we kind of try to think of different ways and some of them work and others flop and so on. And granted, I think you-- I don't want to say used, but you took advantage of the feedback that you got through the employee engagement survey. And I think that's a really good data point that internal community builders can lean into to kind of extract data. We also mentioned that one to one report with your colleagues, especially with people that were living in different locations and in different offices, did that task got any easier in time? Did you deploy any sort of new strategies to make your life easier when it comes to content? Or to maybe to be like-- Oh, great question. --to have less heat and mist initiatives and more initiatives that were informed by something or someone. Yeah, there's many different routes, I guess I could go through on that. Yeah, going into the calendar planning sessions, it did feel tough, specifically when it was like, at what point will I run out of ideas? It's like a lot of novel programming where I'm just going to pull an idea out of thin air that feels adjacent to things we've done in the past. And it's like, will this be fun? Will this land? I guess my camp counselor background played into this. We did this in camp counseling where we would sit down, plan out all the fun miscellaneous things that we would play with and do with the kids that week. And even theater and improv groups and things like that, there's rooms and there's games to pull from when we needed. But ultimately, what was the biggest aha-- or breaks your moment for me-- was I felt like I was constantly just ruminating silently around what is the themes here, what's the commonalities of what we're doing. I wished that I could come up with a vocabulary to talk about why we were doing them or how they were. And so that way, when we were going into planning sessions, I can pull categorical solutions, specifically around the needs that I was hearing presented by the team that was asking us to do this. And so I really, really, really leaned into the community manager title that I had. And I was going online and looking at a lot of community manager dialogue in newsletters and LinkedIn and in thought-leader spaces, just trying to read as much as possible. And a lot of it was gibberish for me at the beginning. I just had no idea what a lot of it was. But at some point in time, I realized that if you zoom out, it's not really a lot of the gap of torches or study. It's all kind of just fruit. It's all just gathering people and bringing them together. With that, allow me to reframe a lot of the advice that I was getting around how do you intentionally gather people in online spaces or physical spaces in an external community way, or how do you take events, expertise, and then channel that into what I was doing. And I really want to highlight Carrie Melissa Jones, specifically because they're webinar on content categories of community engagement was just foundational. Well, for me, it was a webinar that I went to pretty early COVID and it was exactly what I was thinking about for so long. Like, what are these categories? Like, is it an educational program? Is it a co-creation program? Is it a celebration or an recognition program? Is it a welcoming type program? And so that was a theoretical formula of enough background context where then I could start to look backwards at everything I did and bucket it into a specific place and give it specific tags and be more intentional with what I was doing from that. There's later pieces of development that really helped me kind of push this forward in terms of ideas around, like, pre-aparquer and the art of gathering and being more intentional with our gatherings. I feel like helps me take this idea of intention and then execute it forward. But then a huge tool in my toolbox as well. I love a tool is the idea of nonviolent communication as a way to converse with a lead or someone that you're in collaboration with and really getting to the bottom of what's implied or what's needed from them in order to have an event be successful. And so nonviolent communication allowed me to kind of tune in more to the subtleties around what I was hearing in my direction to then be able to show up for things. And then this vocabulary that I was then able to develop, we could then be a little bit more impactful with how we went around solving our problems at scale. And then also at the same time, we were being acquired by Epic Games. And so that created a in-group and an out-group in a way where it was like us coming into a larger organization. And so we could get a lot of extra resource from this outside organization and see how they were done. But then we could also really zoom in and focus on what we did as a smaller group. That allowed us to bring extra resources to the table and extra tools.epic had in their toolbox. Ultimately, there was a lot of magic in that small group size and in direct conversations. And that's a huge huge piece to answer your question in the first place is that in dialogue with humans is where you're more often than not going to get an answer in a community way. 100%. Yes. If you don't know what to do, go talk to some people and see what's on their mind. And you'll get some clues pretty quickly. You can clearly app so loosely. And I think that's a beautiful way to kind of-- because we're approaching the end of our conversation. Look, I have still threads to pull here. But this is a good sign that everything you share today was of value to me. Epic, my interest, and my curiosity. So thank you so much for sharing. And yes, to that very last phrase. I keep coming back to where we're building the community at butter and in general as a startup. Even in the way we work with our users, as you remember, what my manager always says. And we still do that. She says, we have to do things that don't scale. Do the things that don't scale. And that's the one on one top, the coffee chat, that actually asking and waiting for a reply with an open mind and so on and so forth. Luke, last question for you before we close it off. OK. Not related to community building. So let's imagine-- OK. That's-- Good. --you have this kind of once in a lifetime opportunity to broadcast a 60 minutes live message-- Different, perfect. --to the entire Earth's population. Once in a lifetime, 60 minutes to the whole world. OK. What would you say doesn't have to be related to community building? What would be at the core of that? Think about it. I know I'm catching you by surprise, but-- Yeah, absolutely. I think you can take it. I think you're off for the challenge. I think my best advice or if I were to have myself box, stand up and try to people and give them something to think about, I would probably like to include the message to people to care openly about things, put yourself forward, thinking that individuals who act a little was about everything or are distant, and they might see that as strength in certain ways. But I'm individually very inspired by stories of people who care and show up and continue to show up for the things that they're enthusiastic about. And ultimately, I love passion and enthusiasm, and that's my favorite thing in the world. It's finding something that people really enjoy, and then giving room to talk about it or experience it. And I would-- yeah, I'd like to champion a message of-- find the things that you care about and show up with them. And another piece of wisdom that I've been reflecting on a lot lately is one of my favorite things growing up is remembering the things that I liked as a child and then put down over the years. And so I like that invitation of going back and reflecting on what sits well for you and what you love and what do you miss and how can we build bad into our life, so we can be a little bit more connected to our own authenticity and our own enthusiasm and love. So that's the kind of program that I would hope to-- build messaging around to find your thing and show up for it, because that's really cool. And people need to see it. I love that. Luke, well, you did that today. You found your thing, Luke. Thank you. And we showed up for it. Thank you for spending the past hour with me and answering all my little questions. It was an absolute pleasure. And we'll see you around. Where is it that people can find you best if they want to hang out with you and pick your brain? Absolutely. Thank you as well. I feel like, yeah, you, Sophie and the entire Mavic ties crew are continuing to show up for it as well. And so that's what's really fun is that we get to build this dialogue together and grow together also. But yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I am on the job hunt right now. So you'd be able to hit me up to talk more about these things to learn and grow together. My LinkedIn is first name, last name, Luke, C, Mishalak. And-- Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes as well for folks to find it very easily. I'm going to hit in on the internet. So you can come find me. I promise this will be nice. I love that. Well, that's actually how we found each other on LinkedIn, right? Yeah. And I-- I was a matter of fact. Keep the dialogue going and continue with the connections. It's just really cool to find other people that are so passionate about this. Perfect. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your day and see you around. Take care. You too. OK. Bye. Thanks for tuning in for today's conversation. If you are building internal communities within your organization, with love to learn from you, find the link to our tally form in the show notes and share your story with the mapping ties listness.