A Sustainable Approach to Technical Content Maintenance | Shannon Kaplan of AKF

So, Shannon, I didn't say anything about AKF. Could you just tell us a little bit about AKF size, number of offices?

Yeah, we have nine offices in the U.S. we actually have two offices in Mexico that have a somewhat connection, but not quite as integrated as the US we're about 400 people in the US, 100 in Mexico, and we do MEP design services as well as have several other integrated services, such as commissioning and lighting, that support the rest of the work that we do.

Cool. So your title is Operations at akf, which can mean lots of things. What does that mean in your case? Exactly.

So our company, I know we've talked a lot about culture and structure. Some here. Our company is very flat. That was one of the founding principles when it was created. We want a very flat organization. So we struggle a lot with titles. A lot of people don't really have defined titles. When I started making the transition to this new role, there was a lot of discussion about what should the title be, which is extremely hard when you don't have a lot of titles. And we tried flying a couple things out and they got vetoed. And I felt initially it was really important to have this title so that people would understand that I was doing something new. And by the time we got far enough down the road that it became clear just how difficult this was going to be, people had accepted what I was doing, and I said, I don't care anymore. Let's just go with operations. It's vague enough that it can cover anything, which has ended up being the case because, like, 50% of what I do is, oh, we need somebody to do this. Shannon, catch. And I'm like, all right, I'll take it on. Why not wide receiver?

I think that's what that means. Yeah.

I don't know.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Person that didn't learn to say no. That's what it means.

So outside of akf, you're also an associate at the East coast center for Positive Change. Could you tell us what that is?

Sure. As part of my journey to getting where I am, I, as part of my work in sustainability, ended up getting really curious about culture and change and how to impact a group of people. I decided to figure out how to learn more about it. And I ended up somehow, through that journey with a master's in organizational development and leadership. I really wanted to stay connected to that as I went back into my job, because I felt like that was something that really helped me do my job well. And one of the Classes I had taken that really motivated me and excited me was a class on appreciative inquiry, which every time they call it AI, everybody's like, you're doing artificial intelligence. And I'm like, okay, guys, we gotta change the language on this. But there was a group, and actually one of them was my professor who decided to start up the East coast center for Positive Change. There is a West coast center and there's a international center as well, and asked me if I would like to join. And I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to keep connected to that community and to be able to give back further into that community. And what I really loved about it is that it's really focused on how to motivate change through understanding what's going right and figuring out how to do more of that, as opposed to focusing on what's going wrong and how to solve all of the problems. It turns out if you just shift your focus to where you want to go, a lot of those problems just get solved in the new direction that you head. So it's really a way to help people feel good about where they're heading and create a lot of change that makes them feel really energized.

Thanks. So within your role of operations, one of the things that you've taken on and one of your early priorities was launching your intranet. And then now that you've been launched for a couple of years, it's the maintenance of this essential content. I wanted to just have you tell us a little bit about your structure for maintaining content and what that really means for people who aren't in your shoes every day.

Sure. So actually, one of the very first projects that I was handed when I officially was making this transition was, hey, we're going to build a new Internet. We're going to use this platform called Synthesis. We need a project manager. You've managed projects. Here you go. Make it happen. All right. So, you know, I tried to use some of the things I had learned in school. I tried to use some of my tactics from the design side. And we got together, this huge group, put together a workshop where we came together, we talked forever about navigation. I really wish we had had the discussion from this morning before we did all of that. But it was also interesting to see what we did kind of discover on our own and how we weren't completely unsuccessful. But one of the things that kept coming up as a theme when we were talking about this as a group was we don't want this to be like our existing intranet, not that it was terrible, but it had developed a reputation as the place where information goes to die, because it would never disappear. It would live there forever.

Internal life for information.

But it was like you would try and find something and you would find 15 records on this topic, and it wasn't always clear which one was the newest and which one was the right one you should be referencing. Or you would find it from five different people. And they were all from relatively the same date, but they were different. There was a lot of confusion. So on top of making sure that we better organized our content and made it easier for multiple people to update, one of the problems was we had about two people that could update our old intranet. We wanted to make sure that whatever we built was something that we could maintain. We wanted to avoid repeating that situation. So right in the very beginning, we were talking about maintenance. It was part of our conversation, and we knew that we needed to come up with a strategy on how to handle that. Otherwise we would just quickly find ourselves back in that position that we were at. So we talked about a couple different strategies. One of them was making sure that the content that was owned by a group was all in one location. I know that we talked this morning about making sure that you do the navigation based on the users, but the backend side, if we could keep all that content in one spot, we wanted to do that because it's really hard for people to maintain their content if they can't even remember where it is. So we did do that. I will say our navigation does not follow that format. So felt a little win there today. So what we also started talking about was, well, how are we going to go about keeping this up to date? How are we going to keep people motivated to keep it up to date? I had a genius moment where I looked at the list of communities that we had come up with. These are the big buckets we were going to organize our content into. And I was like, we've got six communities, and if you divide 12 by six, that means twice a year. I bet I could talk people into meeting with me twice a year to talk about what's going on with their community and their content. That doesn't feel like I'm gonna be overwhelming them. So I pitched this idea like, hey, let's do a meeting. I only have to do one a month. That's doable for me. I will talk to each of you. You only have to talk to me once every six months. And we'll just start going along our way that way and people said they agreed. And then they looked at me like I was crazy because we launched. And one month later I called my first meeting. They were like, shannon, we just launched. I don't care. We're starting maintenance right now. It's going to start this soon. Because if we don't build the habit of maintenance now, by the time we get started on it, we've already missed the boat. It's already beyond where it could have been. So we just started right away and got right into it.

You mentioned communities. We have a slide of the homepage.

Of Willis, which our Internet is called Willis.

Could you just briefly tell us what each of these communities are? I know some people know what that word means, and some people, sure, not absolutely.

So I know everybody said like, this is our Internet's name. Ours is Willis. It's not a person, it's an acronym. But I feel like it's become a person. The ghost employee. So we have on the navigation here you can see across the very top that there are what we call communities, but they're basically the top level of navigation. And so we've got six main ones. You'll count seven up there if you don't count home. That was actually something that came out of one of our community, our content review meetings. So we have people, which is literally about the people in our company. That page tends to be more like Facebook. People share fun things about themselves and each other and you can find where people are. We have our firm resources, which is all of those supporting services that serve everybody across the firm. Technical is where all of our community, our various practice groups have their information. So you can find stuff on BIM and revit. You can find discipline specific information codes, standards, project management for our project managers, marketing and bd. I hope you all know what that is that lives there too. And then we have one on learning, because that was a really important thing in our firm as well. And so we wanted to have a place where people could go and find information to learn. We did add calendars, which broke my perfect six communities 12 months rule. But it's literally just calendars. So it doesn't need the same amount of content review. It kind of maintains itself a bit. And that's one that I just take on personally and periodically keep an eye on. So I didn't let that disrupt my pattern of six that I had going.

No more communities, though.

I don't know if we do. We can always work with it.

But so you are doing these content meetings. You're meeting with each Community manager once every six months. Can you tell us about the roles and responsibilities basically for that meeting?

Sure. So one of the big things was, well, what is this meeting going to be about? What are you asking me to do? That's always a question I get. I come around smiling, want to help, what do you need? Is this a big ask? Is it a small ask? So what we started out doing was I wanted these to be a little bit informal. I didn't want them to be something that people would have a reason to avoid. So my first thought was, I'm going to have a meeting, I need you to come and I want you to prepare nothing. So by preparing nothing, it avoided all of the times that people would blow me off by saying, I didn't have a chance to look at this yet. I was like, that's okay, I didn't want you to. It's good, just come. So that was step number one. Number two, we started very early realizing that we were deeply interested in analytics. We had not had access to that before. And when we first started, everybody wanted to know, how's my community doing? What's going on? So. So we start each meeting by looking at the analytics together. It works that I'm personally comfortable working on the fly and looking at them, live with them and saying, oh, interesting. So I don't prepare a lot either, which also makes it convenient for me. I know other people need to do a little bit more search in advance and feel like they know the talking points they want to address with the group. But we talk about that together and we see what questions come out of that and we just take a look about, how is your community doing? What's going on? Where are people going? And from there we go into the community, we just open the intranet on the computer and we start looking at it and I just ask them questions, how is it going? How do you feel that things are working? How's the navigation? And then we start clicking into each page and looking at the content that's on there. And that's where we start saying, what's on this page? Is it fresh? Isn't it fresh? And this whole time I'm just keeping notes, and towards the end we make sure that each item that we've identified that needs to be changed has an owner. It happens that a lot of them end up being me, but that's okay because I'm really committed to making this happen. So I don't mind taking on the work because navigation changes are something that I'm going to do. But content changes, rewriting a page, updating a document, that's something that they feel that they can do, and they feel very focused on doing it because we've just identified that the wrong information's up there. And it's not like I was expecting them to look at that on their own. They now know and feel confident that every six months, I'm going to go and have this meeting with them and they'll have a chance to look at it so they can forget about it and do all the things that they need to do. If they remembered, great. But if not, at the worst case, we're only ever six months out of date and likely less than that, because it may take a month or two to start getting out of date from that meeting. So it's been a really simple formula that we've started applying. I try and put the little short agenda in the meeting invite so that we can all remember these are the topics that we're going to touch on. But we try and keep it really simple and make it focus more on the discussion than about having to have all of these checkboxes that we've checked along the way.

And then after the meeting, you obviously do what you've said you do. They may or may not do what they say they're gonna do.

I encourage them to, but it doesn't always happen.

Yeah. And like, how is that? Is that okay?

Yeah. You know, if I feel that it's really important, I may send them a couple more reminders. But some of this, it's really for them. And if they're not motivated, I may encourage them by saying something like, I see that you're struggling to get to this. Is there somebody we can find to help you with it? But ultimately, this is their information, and I'm truly just a supporting person here to help them get where they need to go. So I'm never going to force somebody to go in and do things if they don't. Usually when we talk about getting somebody to help them, that's like, oh, yeah, that would be great. And then it turns into, could you get them to help? And I'm all right, that's fine. I can do that. I know a lot of people. I'll go talk to some. But it is really ultimately not one of those things that I want to make it forced because I feel like that would turn people away and they'd not want to come to the next meeting. I want them to want to come to my meeting.

Do they want to come to the.

Next Meeting, I don't know. So somewhere in this room we have over there is Margaret, if you could stand up. No, you got to stand up. And Rob, could you stand up? So they came with me from our company. They are both people that get invited to these meetings once every six months. So if you want to know the real story about the meeting, find them after this is over and go ask them. Because I can only tell you that of course I think these meetings are amazing, but they'll give you the real scoop.

Fair enough. So I wanted to take like talk about the technical community in particular. There's lots of areas of content. We have our HR content and our finance content and then this engineering content which seems to be kind of the penultimate. If we can get that maintained, then we've really succeeded. So you have a community called technical and this is where lots of engineering tools and tips and resources are found. Wonder if you could tell us about how that first meeting with that community manager went and I can pull up that technical community if there's anything that's helpful there.

Yeah. So like with any of the groups, the very first meeting, people are like, I swear we just launched, you know, why are we here? And we spent some time talking about how the site navigation was laid out, what was going on with it and the analytics. And honestly the first question that came up was with the analytics, the usage wasn't as high as the community leaders felt that it should be. And then we talked about who we were expecting to go there. And I said, you've got to realize that not everybody in our company comes to this page. Our HR team, they're not coming here. Our marketing team, probably not coming here either. So let's talk about what percentage should be coming here and then understand how much of that is happening. So that really helped them put it in a different perspective. But then we looked at where people were going and where they might be finding what they needed or not finding what they needed. And we had a lot of discussions about what people weren't necessarily finding and why they weren't finding it there. And that led us to talk about how we could get people to contribute more content to this and share more firm wide. So even though there wasn't a lot of things that we needed to update because it had been, let me see, people firm, three months since we launched, I literally do them in order. That's how I remember which one to set next.

So People's January or something.

It's based on when we launched. So they were in August and Then, so it was October, and here we are, we launched in July. It's October. And I'm like, let's look at what content is old. And they're like, nothing's old. We literally just put it up there. So instead, we focused a lot on what was up there that was working and what could be better. And so from that, we ended up with a cry from them to go out and try and solicit for more content. And that was one of their big takeaways. We made some changes to the navigation. In fact, in every single meeting, the first round, we ended up making changes to navigation because people had ideas about what would work. And then when we lived with it for a little while and felt the realities of it, everybody wanted to make adjustments. Like, we created calendars because people couldn't find them. So we just made it its own space. But in particular for Technical, there was this idea of wanting to get more content out of our staff to find who had information that we hadn't yet put up here. So I think there's another slide on that. So from that we ended up getting Jake. At some point, he got really motivated by this.

And who is Jake? I don't think we've introduced this group.

Yeah, Jake is our technical director. So he's one of the leaders of this group. And he was like, you know, we've tried, we tried. This isn't working. How can I do it? So he took to the Internet and made an appeal for people to share content. Fortunately, he's also very entertaining and creative. So it wasn't just this like two sentence thing. He doctored up this whole image and of course that got a lot of people to read it. And as you can see, people did start to provide information from there. We actually had this realization that one of our big things about technical is codes and standards. It's so important to all of us. And he found out through this that we have a codes group that focuses on helping architects with code questions. And it turns out that everybody in their office, they're located in Boston, knew to go to them with questions, but nobody else was making that connection. And they had built this whole codes resource for the Boston office. And Jake was like, oh my gosh, we've got to get this to everyone. So he actually solicited one of their leaders, Caitlin, to come on board and help manage this community and to take over the management of that piece and rebuild it. And it completely revamped that whole section. And they immediately started getting content out and it was like Every week you were saying, like, this is now available. That's now available. And it really started driving people to the site because instead of going there and looking for something, not finding it and finding another way, they were now finding what they wanted. And so it wasn't even about that the content was stale. It was about continuing to build the content, about not forgetting to refresh the content and add to the content so that it became something better and more.

Yeah, I remember when you guys went live, there was kind of an audit of essential content and only a fraction of that stuff was actually on the Internet.

Oh, yeah.

The day you went live.

Oh, yeah, we trashed. Like I said, There was like 15 versions of things. So I tell people whenever we're cleaning things up, like we're moving, we're packing light, the boxes in the basement we haven't touched in five years are not coming with us. I don't care where it goes. Landfill, goodwill, doesn't matter, it's not coming. So we did do a little house clean, but that did end up making it feel a little empty. But what was there was at least relevant and meaningful.

Yeah. So as you're adding in someone like Caitlin, who's. She had some clandestine content swirled away, you found it. You want to bring her into the fold and make this more of a corporate resource. How do you onboard her to that role?

Yeah. So there's two steps. Step one, we get her access to make changes and we give her training on how to go in and actually do the work that she would need to do. Because that's important. I want her doing that work. I don't want to be the one doing it. I will become the roadblock. She's the one that knows the information. But then she gets invited to the content review meeting. And because it was her first time and actually you joined in on that once you got to listen to my whole spiel, instead of just going through the three point agenda, we shared with her how it came about and talked her through why we looked at the things and then did all the. The three whole things that we do in those meetings and really invited her to be part of that conversation and ask questions and participate. And she had a lot of really great questions about the analytics and then had some comments on how we could improve the way the rest of the site was functioning. And so it was a great way for her to feel connected to the kind of backend side of things and understand how this content was being used or sometimes not used and help generate ideas on how to advance that within our firm.

So you have content on the site, you're bringing more content in, you're bringing in more content managers, people who have it to maintain it, inviting them to these meetings. If you're doing your job really well, that means that every month you have more and more content.

I would love that.

Which also means more and more that needs to be maintained. And. And there's still just one of you. So how is that going?

I mean, honestly, that's been fine because I'm not trying to do it all by myself. They know what's on their site. And as much as we're adding content, there are other things that we're auditing off. We're realizing that it's not providing value. It doesn't belong there anymore. And part of what makes it being well maintained isn't about just having up to date documents. It's about being able to find what you need and not be distracted by all these things that really have no value anymore. So as much as we add, we're also kind of pruning as we go from time to time. And because we're taking the time to look at it, every six months, we will take out things that need to be removed. And we're just still scanning all of the information that's there and saying, if this is still the latest, I don't care if the document was written in 2016, if that's the latest that we have, then that's fine. That's the latest that we have. Maybe you want to think about if it's time for a refresh on that, but that's up to you and your group. The process isn't to the point where we're looking at every single document and opening it up, but we're looking at what's the date that it was posted and having those general conversations. I think the one area that's been tricky for us on this format is that we have this activity feed. People are posting up information. So it's really easy to maintain static content. You know what it is, you can look at it. But how do you capture all of those things that are coming into this feed that become really important? And what do you do when you've got a people community that has two years worth of posts and it's like, oh, look, two years ago for Susan's birthday, she went out for drinks. It's like, does anyone care anymore? So how do we deal with that? Content is something that we're still working on and trying to improve. There are Some times where we'll take something that came out of this and make sure that it gets captured into a static page. And we've also talked about at what point do we want to start culling things from the activity feed because it becomes too overwhelming on our search if people are finding it and then they're finding the post that had the wrong answers. And didn't you know, we have curated some of that as well. We have actually had people provide incorrect information on a post on technical had Jake email me that response is incorrect. I said we better get a correct one up there quickly. And they'll do that and then we'll let it sit for a day or two and then we've consciously deleted the incorrect reply so that in the future people are only going to find the correct information if they pull up that post. So that takes a little bit more vigilance. But particularly in our technical community, since that's the heart of what we do, people do seem willing to take the time to be a little bit more vigilant about that and say, hey, we want to make sure that we're memorializing the correct information.

How has this new version of essential content and maintaining it and having the technical essential content in its current state, I'm curious how that's impacted the practice of engineering at AKF and like the life the employee experience of engineers.

I think what's been really interesting is one of the things that we weren't sure what was going to happen was would people post questions up there? A lot of our question asking was to the person that sat next to you because they were the most convenient. And we have these experts all across all of our offices and how do we get people access to those experts? It was amazing. We had been live for probably three days, not even. And the first question came up from a junior person that typed in a question about something technical and it got answered. And some of the first people that answered it weren't those experts that we were expecting. It was other people. And we started learning that we had experts that, that we hadn't even thought of that were just kind of quietly sitting there doing their job. It's actually turned to the point where we have some technical groups that have become proactive and started sharing their own mostly weekly posts about different technical content that have gotten people to really look at new things. We have a really great guy in infrastructure who loves lifting weights at the gym. And so he collected calls them pump day posts. And they're about pumps, but they're also about Pumping it up. And they're really hilarious. I mean, at this point, it's not information that I'm ever gonna need in what I'm doing. And I read them because they're just fascinating. We have another woman in our fire life safety group who created a whole rap song about certain types of elevators and high rise buildings. And it was like you're trying to figure out the music to it as you're reading it. I didn't even know those types of specialty elevators existed. But now you do. I'm totally informed now. It's been really fun to see how people have embraced it to share some of this information. So we still have the people that are asking what they need, and we have people that are now proactively sharing information and in a way that if they were just doing it through an email, would never have gotten the same traction that it's getting now.

You have attributed a lot of the success of this program to its simplicity.

Yes.

And I know you have some diagrams. I'll give you the clicker.

When we were preparing for this talk, I feel like Susan really wanted me to talk about this technical content and I really wanted to talk about this other topic. And we reached a compromise and decided to talk about both. But then it was funny because as much as I pushed this topic, I realized that it was something that was from my intuition. And I spent an hour, two hours trying to find the backup for my intuition online, not on our Internet, because it had to go beyond there. And I found nothing. So I'm going to preface this by saying I'm about to show you graphs that are based on my non scientific intuition. So you are welcome to take photos. However, if you want to find the research that supports this, good luck. If you find it, please tell me. I would really love to know. All right, so this is my amazing graph. And I have actually changed this curve several times in the making of this presentation because I showed it to Rob, who's back there, and he said, I think you have it flipped. And then I flipped it. And I was like, that's not right either. So then I made the S curve, which I'm feeling pretty good about these today. So this is the deal. When people are asked to do something, there's a level of importance that they assign to it. It's going to be important either because their boss has made it very clear that this is important, or they're really energized and jazzed about it. So it feels important to them, but somehow they're assigning a level of importance, and that's their motivation and their desire to complete it. That will determine how much effort they are willing to put into something, whether it's their boss told them to and their boss said, this is your top priority. I expect to see this be the primary thing on your timesheet. Or they're saying, I'm so excited that I have this opportunity, I will work late to make this happen, because it's what I feel is the right thing to do. They're going to spend some amount of time, so this is my curve for how much time they're going to spend. So you could take something and say it's pretty important, but not very important. They're willing to spend arbitrary scale, 15 hours on that in a given week, because that's how it ranks for them. What happens when we do these intranet projects, or any project, is we launch something and it's very important. Everybody's talking about this. It's the new intranet. I want to be a part of it. It's exciting. This is a priority. We're carving time out. We're telling staff to put time on their timesheets for it, and they feel excited that they were part of this movement. So it's extremely important and they're willing to put up to 20 hours a week on it. But maybe all we really needed from them was eight hours. So we get what's this positive gap where their effort that they're willing to put into it exceeds what's required. And they're probably going to create something really amazing and they're going to be focused on it and they're going to take it on their own with full initiative. You're not going to have to push them to do it. But what also happens is we get to a point where it's no longer the top priority for them. That's done. We've moved on. Now I'm on a project that's the most important thing to me. I gotta get back to that. If you're still expecting them to put the same eight hours of effort into it now, you're gonna have to be the motivation for them. You're gonna have to make that happen. They're likely still not gonna put as much as you want into it, and you're going to end up with this negative gap where it either is not maintained at the level that it needs to be maintained, or it just stops altogether. We all have those initiatives, great momentum, it's done. It just doesn't get carried on. So When I was trying to think about why these meetings were so important. And it started with Susan's like, I want to talk to you about these meetings you're having. I'm like, I don't understand the genius idea. I'm having meetings. Who here has meetings? Everyone. Everyone's got meetings. All right, I'm doing meetings too. So that wasn't what made this special. What made it special was that they were meetings that people actually were okay attending. That two years out, I still not had a meeting not happen. We have had to reschedule them sometimes because it's down here on the importance level now where this graph is, it's not, not going to be their priority. And they do sometimes say to me, shannon, something's really come up for that time slot. But it's not, I'm not going to come. It's can we reschedule? And it's because the ask is low. The maintenance effort that I'm asking for them is one hour every six months, plus whatever we identify that needs to get done, I'm going to ask you to help me get that done. And since that's actually something that hopefully they're motivated by, hopefully they want their content to be up to date, they will find that extra time. But I'm not asking them to spend a lot of extra time. I'm not telling them, come prepared with X because come prepared with X is the first invitation to them saying, oh, I'm not prepared, so I'm not going to come. So that's been kind of my reason why I think this was successful and why I really wanted to share this. You have to think about, it's really easy in the moment of launch to come up with some maintenance plan that feels really sustainable at the time because the energy is high. But really the most sustainable maintenance plan is the one that takes very little effort over time and feels like that effort is 100% useful because then they're going to want to come back. So that's my non scientific intuition.

I think now is a good time to take questions if there are any out there. I know there's some mics on either side and a chat box somewhere in.

The room if you have one.

You can raise your hand.

Up here in front. Gregor. Thank you. Brian.

Hi, thanks for sharing all that. That was great. You said that on day three of your launch you started getting questions rolling in. Is this just through the activity feed and if so, how are you curating those to make sure that they got an answer and that they they got an accurate answer.

So it is through the activity feed. We just invited people to post whatever. Initially there was a little bit of momentum that needed to be built and I would see some of these and I would like mention who I knew knew the answer and be like, hey, now you're going to get an email that's letting you know that you have to go respond to this. So I would kind of. We were nervous, so we tried to make sure it happened, but then our level of excitement over everything kind of died down and we got a little lazy about the emails and it turned out that people answered anyway. Like I said, sometimes the first responder wasn't even correct, but it became an opportunity for the person that knew the answer to share the right answer and also educate this other person and kind of discuss. You know, that was a really interesting perspective. We tried to not write posts like, no, you're wrong. It was like, that was really interesting. But here's how we as a firm like to handle this. And then like I said, we ended up having a couple of those. So we had a discussion impromptu to say, what do we want to do about that? And that's where we decided, well, let's leave that for a couple days. Because by then people have kind of lost interest in that particular question and we can just kind of disappear that response out over time and people aren't really going to notice and be like, hey, you took that out. It's just that in the future, the content is now correct. So it took on a life of its own. People. If you give people a forum to speak, there are people that will take advantage of it. And our experts know that it's their job to make sure that the right answers are getting out there.

In the back. Dan.

You mentioned you didn't take all the extra stuff from your old site. How did you get buy in from some of the older staff? That's there because when we did it, they wanted everything to come along with it from the old site. So we had this big discussion on how or what we needed to bring across. So at what point were you able to say, no, this is not going to happen?

Well, so first of all, I said, anything that there's 15 of, we're only bringing one. That's rule number one. And that took care of a lot of it. But then when we started talking about where content would fit, like I said, we did a big navigation discussion and it was like, this is homeless. And then it was like, where could it go? And nobody could even figure out where it belonged. We were like, is this even important? And it was like, well, no. If we can't even find where this should be housed, is anyone looking for it? I'm also really big on trying to get people to just experiment. And I'm like, well, why don't we just experiment with not putting it on there? And if somebody says that they really need it, we can always bring it back. I do that with a lot of things. Now that I'm doing cleanup, sometimes I'll put things in, call it probation. I'm just going to hide it. It's going to be gone. We'll see what happens. It's not gone gone. We can always bring it back. And if in six months somebody has asked for it, we'll bring it back. But if in six months nobody's come looking for it, then I think it can just sneak out the side and go away.

Jim, you said something when we were in pre interview about also experimenting with ideas that you're not fully bought in on. Like, the community manager really wants to put 10 links in the left navigation. You're like, oh, cringe worthy. But they really want to do it and you want to create a positive experience for them. So instead of like shutting them down, you like present your case and if they still really want to do it, you'll do it.

Yeah, that's how they're gonna learn. I mean, that's what I mean. It comes down to this experimentation as well, is we're gonna learn by trying things. There were some things, day one that I really disagreed with, but I was like, it's your community. We'll try the first round of content meetings. Most of those things got changed and I was like, yeah, that's right.

It seems like the content meetings give you some more space to experiment. Nothing is permanent. It's not like it's going to be there and never change again.

Yeah, and I think that's what's been really great about it too is it's become a way for our Internet to feel like it's alive. We're not afraid to change things because we're always touching it and something's changing. Roughly once a month, something somewhere has gotten changed. And if it's a really big change, I'll put a post up about it and let people know, like, hey, we're creating a new community called Calendars. It's for calendars. If you want to find a calendar on our intranet, go to the Calendars community. If you want to find anything else, don't go there because it's just calendars. But it was helpful because in one of these content meetings, we had calendars all over the place, and somebody's like, they're not getting used, because I don't think any. Anybody can find them. And it was a great idea. So we floated it across all the community managers. They agreed, and thus calendars was born, but excluded from content review because it ruined my system.

Fair enough.

It's because it didn't need it. But there are a lot of small things that we change. And I may change the name of a navigation. I may just merge two pages that made sense to be merged to begin with. And I have not heard from people like, oh, my God, you merged those two pages and you didn't tell us. They just go on and they're like, oh, that makes sense. And they move on. So it depends on how big it is, but it's really an opportunity for us to have those discussions and to not just maintain the documents and the wording, but to make sure that we're maintaining the usability as well and that this really does feel like it's changing with us, instead of it stuck where we built it and we've moved on from it.

Employees use the Internet to find stuff. I hope so. Yeah, we hope so. But it's a little different from some of the stuff we've talked today about, like equity, where it's like, you know, their soul at work. I'm curious how this impacts, in your experience, how having well maintained content impact impacts the employee experience.

So I think it's a really helpful thing. People want to feel like they know where to find information, and there are times where you know that you can go to this person or that person and get it. There are a lot of things that you maybe don't want to ask somebody. You don't know who to ask. Being able to go there and find it right away is a really important piece. But more than that, it's become a connector for us and the. The conversations that go on. The fact that everybody in our entire firm now knows who Matt Yandoli, AKA Pump Day, is, and most people didn't know who he was before. You know, it's built this sense of community, and keeping that community clean and well organized is really important. You know, people don't want to go out into the neighborhood that's full of trash and no trees and have a party, but if it's a really beautiful park that's maintained well, people want to go there. So. So I think it's kind of like that if they know they can find what they need, that they're going to get the best information available at that time and have a way to make connections if they don't see the information and then feel like it's responding to them too. I think the fact that it does change that people can say, oh, I made a suggestion and look, there it is. That happened. It makes people feel a lot more engaged with it.

So to wrap things up, I wanted to share with you guys guys something that Shannon and myself and Sarah and Zuku and a number of other people in this audience actually collaborated on, which is this process for planning for essential content maintenance. So if you're interested in learning more about this or getting details on like what to talk about when you sit down with your community managers, what kind of questions to ask, how to ask, how to prepare for that meeting, this article will take you in depth in that with that. Shannon, thank you so much for sharing this with us.