SYNTHESIS SPOTLIGHT | Capturing Knowledge at DLR Group

I'm Susan Strum. I am the Chief Client Officer at Knowledge Architecture and with me today is Colby Dietz, Knowledge Manager and Stephanie Henderson, Internal Communications Leader at DLR Group. And you are in a Synthesis Spotlight, which is where we share stories of how our clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their firms. Today we're spotlighting DLR Group, a firm that has evolved and grown since they launched Synthesis 10 years ago and whose Internet you're going to see today has evolved and grown with them. This past June they introduced Synthesis six and they used that transition as an opportunity to capture knowledge from each of their core disciplines as well as emerging and specialty groups. Colby and Stephanie, who are with us, partnered on this initiative and today they're going to take us behind the scenes to share how they are managing firm wide communications and knowledge sharing for their 1400 plus employees. We'll save the last 15 minutes for questions. Colby and Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing what you've been up to with synthesis.

Thanks for having us Susan. Let's go ahead and get started and I can share my screen here. So as Susan mentioned, I'm Colby Dietz, Knowledge Manager at DLR Group. I have been with DLR Group for 12 years as of last, last week, the last half of that in this role as Knowledge Manager. I promise this is the one slide we're going to show. This is just an overview about TLR Group. So Susan mentioned we're over 1400 employee owners, 32 locations worldwide and we've been around for over 55 years now. So here is Square one which is our version of Synthesis Synthesis six. Just going to give a quick overview of Square one here for us. A navigation overview. The first thing you might notice is our navigation does look a little bit different than what Knowledge Architecture recommends or is out of the box. And that is because we have our own UX team on staff here at DLR Group and they helped us design our intranet. But our homepage, you can see it's pretty clean. We have our banner image, our stream, so need to know information here up top that I'll let Stephanie talk about later. Popular resources so these are some of the most requested clicked on used items internally and externally. So things like Deltec, Vantage Point, Open Asset, I'm new here and our IT help desk. And then lastly we have an employee block for Stephanie and I so people can reach out to us for questions about school Square One. Next we have projects. Projects is probably a staple of Synthesis Internet. So this is a Place for employees to share project news, project milestones, groundbreakings and awards. We also have some sector tags here so people can tag to their sector projects under projects. The biggest change for us going to synthesis 6 was the formation of our integrated practice community. This was a big change for us at DLR Group because internally, the way we are structured, we move some things around. But then we were able to make it work with synthesis 6 thanks to the mega menu and the navigation. Some of the content you see here on our old site, Synthesis 5 was under three or four different communities and we were able to kind of combine it all under this integrated practice umbrella. Previously as well, we only had disciplined communities for a couple of them. So interiors and engineering had communities where architecture and planning did not. So when we went to Synthesis six, we wanted to make sure that each discipline had their own place under integrated practice. So if I click on Architecture here, you'll notice here is the architecture community. And then we also worked with not just our integrated practice team, but our UX team to have some basic hierarchy and understanding here of what these second level navigation is. So on every discipline page you'll see the team practice and standards and professional development. And if I go to Interiors, you'll see they also have team practice and standards and professional development. We wanted some uniformity here between each discipline. So if I'm an interiors designer and I go to engineering, I will still be able to navigate around between each discipline. We did allow them, you know, after those first three to go and build out some more content. Interiors has been a community on square one for about four or five years now. So they've developed a little bit more content than architecture, which we launched in geonodor live with synthesis 6. The cool thing about this too is now that each discipline has their own place, we're finding that disciplines or architectures going into interiors and seeing what they're doing and now they're going, hey, we want that too. So they're starting to develop content and build out their community. And again, that's all under this integrated practice umbrella. Something that was also new for us. Going to synthesis 6 was a dedicated place for our specialty services. We had heard in the past that, hey, you know, these are services that are offered externally within DLR group, but not everyone internally knows about them or knows who that team is. And so some of these teams are pretty small, they're three to five employees, but we still wanted to give them a place on the Internet. So if I go to Lighting Design here, you'll see we Utilize the guide feature here. And so each of these specialty services has their own guide. And again, working with their teams together, we wanted to make sure there was some uniformity in this. So you'll see an introduction on our lighting design team, who they are, some best practices and checklists here, things like a skill matrix. And if I'm going between lighting design and our theater planning team, you'll notice it looks very similar just using that guide feature and keeping that standardization throughout. The something that they asked us is thank you for. You know, they were very happy to have a place to have their content, but they asked, what about post? And so we've been pushing hashtags on them. So for example, hashtag lightingdesign to still be able to track all of their posts under this integrated practice community. Next, we have enterprise. So this was another big change for us in the past. Some of these were their own communities throughout Synthesis 5, but we kind of put them under this enterprise umbrella. So hr, marketing and technology, these are still communities. So if I click on technology, I'm going to see a technology community there and have those resources. But the makeup of DLR Group changed in our structure. And so again with synthesis 6, we are pretty easily able to reflect that change here. And then lastly, we have our culture community. This is what I kind of call our fun community. So office celebrations, employee anniversaries, new hires. If someone got licensed, this is where they go to post. And of course, we have the anniversary and birthday blocks on the side as well. And then here we also have our equity community as part of our culture. So all information about DLR Group and Equity and EDI can be found under this community. So that is a kind of quick tour of our site and how we navigated some structural changes within DLR Group, but also gave an equitable space to our disciplines to each have a community practice as well. With that, I'll turn it over to Stephanie Henderson to talk about internal communications.

Great.

Thanks, Colby. So, as Susan said, I'm Stephanie Henderson. I'm DLR Group's internal communications leader. I've been with the firm for about three and a half years and I work with a team really supporting, supporting our executive leaders, our forums in our sectors to be able to communicate all of the amazing things that our teams are working on with our employees. So Colby and I partner together very much when it comes to square one on both the content and the posting strategy. For square one, One I wanted to do is just talk for a few minutes about how our Internet supports our communication Strategy, both our enterprise and more targeted communications specifically. So one of the first discussions we had when we were beginning the transition to Synthesis six was how do we continue to make sure that we are creating an intranet that is truly a source of truth for our employees? With Synthesis 5 and the previous iterations, we created a culture of design in which our employees were empowered and encouraged to share their voice via our intranet. And we also created an intranet that was considered our hub for news and information. So our employees had the expectation that they could go out to Square One at any point in time and be able to have that be the one true source of information about what's going on in the firm. We wanted to reaffirm that that was the purpose and intent of Synthesis six. Previously on Square One, we had utilized Page one to share firm wide news. Obviously with the transition to Synthesis six, we no longer had the option of Page one. So we had some very early discussions about what would be our strategy for sharing firmwide news via the Internet. Where we landed was using the Enterpr community as really the source of truth in the place that we shared news and information that impacts all of our 1400 plus design professionals. So whenever our leaders need to share information that impacts all of DLR group, that information is shared to the enterprise community. So information like leadership announcements, enterprise meetings and events, things that are linked to our five year strategic plan, our annual meetings, anything that's imperative for all of our employees to be aware of is shared on enterprise. We also have leveraged a featured post feature and I'll talk about that a bit more here in just a minute. But we have the opportunity to promote posts for a few days and then oftentimes those posts will transition over to the featured post functionality and stay up there for up to 30 days in time. The intent of that is so that if an employee happens to be on PTO or for some other reason, they don't make it out to Square One for a few days. They can always know that they can go to Enterprise and take a look at that featured post functionality and see what the news is that they might have missed that impacts them as a member of our firm. So that is how Square One supports our enterprise communication strategy. I wanted to talk a little bit next about Promoted Posts and what our strategy and philosophy is on Promoted Posts. So our Promoted Post process has matured quite a bit in the last few years. We like to promote posts for a few days on the homepage of Square One. This. This is oftentimes information that we think is news you need to know information that you as an employee owner need to be aware of. It oftentimes is information that's shared on the enterprise community, but not always. There are often times that we will promote posts that might impact a smaller, more targeted group, but if it aligns with our business plan, it aligns with our values, it aligns with our brand promise to elevate the human experience through the design, we will often promote those posts because we feel it's important and it's news that our employees need to know. To help us mature and streamline that Promoted Post process. In the last year, we developed guardrails for both Promoted Posts and Featured Posts. These are available to every employee owner and then are proactively shared with our community managers. The thought process behind these help us really kind of make educated decisions. When someone seeks to have a post promoted, or when we're having discussion about if a post should be promoted, we review these guardrails and just mentally make a note of is it timely? Is it relevant firm wide? Is it action oriented, strategic, grounded in our culture or national recognition? If so, then we will often promote it. I said earlier that we really encourage and empower every employee owner to share their voice on Square One. With that being said, every employee has the opportunity to request that a post be promoted. Colby is going to walk us through what we've created to help streamline that process. Last year we launched what we call a Marketing Easy button. So every employee has the opportunity to say, I have something I want to share with a firm via Square One. I believe it should be a Promoted post. I believe it's information that all employees need to know. And using the Marketing Easy button request, they can submit a request for a Promoted Post. What happens on the back end is once that post request is submitted, it's actually fed through to Colby and I. As administrators of Square One, we review it and then work with the person who requested it to determine if a Promoted post makes sense and if not, help advise them and guide them on where might be a better channel or better avenue for them to be sharing that information. So that's our thought process on Promoted Posts. The last thing I wanted to cover is how Square One supports more targeted communications. One of the really amazing things I think has been the biggest, one of the biggest value adds for us in transitioning to synthesis 6 is it's really helped us communicate to smaller, more targeted groups and it's allowed and empowered teams to communicate information that they need to be sharing internally within their own teams, to help their teams work more collaborative. Collaboratively. So one of the things that we created, in addition to what Colby talked through earlier, with some of the additions of those new communities, those new disciplines, those new new places for teams to collaborate and to share resources, is we implemented the featured post feature across all of our communities. And Colby, if you don't mind just sharing, maybe under architecture or interiors that featured posts. The featured posts, again, are a way for our community managers to really be empowered and to help make the decision about what information that they want to be sharing internally within their team or within their community. Our community managers have the administrative rights to go in and select any post that was tagged to their community and move it over to that feature post section. This has been a really great addition as we transition to synthesis 6 because it allows teams to prioritize and to promote content that's applicable and important to their team, even if it's not something that would be promoted, or even if it's something that would be promoted, but only for a few days. So this has really created a more evergreen opportunity for teams to be prioritizing content, content within their community. So, that being said, we have some guardrails. We really empower our community manager to make some of those decisions about what should be featured. And then, of course, anyone has the ability to request a promoted post or to work directly with their community manager if they feel that their post should be a featured post. That's what I wanted to share in terms of strategy and how square one supports it. I know that. Next, Colby and I wanted to share just a little bit about how we integrate and work collaboratively with our community managers. Colby, do you want to share a little bit about that?

Yeah, definitely. So community. Community managers play a vital role on our Internet. As Susan mentioned, we've had square one for a decade now, which time flies. But back in 2020, we did a kind of revamp of our Internet. We had grown from 500 employees to over a thousand employees and never made a fundamental change to our Internet. So in we merged some communities and moved some things around. But we also clearly defined the role of a community manager. We had some community managers that weren't necessarily the subject matter expert for that community, or we actually had a few people that left the firm and we had never replaced them. So kind of step one for us was to define the role of a community manager. And then we used this guide here to go to our leadership team and to explain this to them and then to get a recommendation from them on who a community manager should be for that community. But yeah, this guide here, it just talks about what the role of a community manager is. For example, their liaison between their community and Stephanie and I. They help support the community. They have edit rights so they can update things as needed. They're also responsible for this kind of spoken wheel model down here. Of all these responsibilities, I think one thing that's important to note is we do not expect all of our community managers to do every single one of these things. We tell them that they should be spending no more than five hours a month on square one and if they're spending spending any more time on that to let us know. Because again, it is our job. It's not their job. They're likely an architect and have other things to do. But you know, they do have the power to edit content, to keep track of engagement, make sure that the stream is healthy. And there's at least a couple posts a week that our business plan goals align with our intranet. As Stephanie mentioned, they can update the featured post and core tools documents as well. And then they also have archive rights. So one thing that we want to do, especially now that we've gone to synthesis six, is to make sure that our content is up to date and fresh. And so that's just a little bit of the role of the community manager. And having these guidelines has been great for us. Every year when we have a new community manager, the first meeting we have with them is to walk through this with them and their expectations. And Stephanie, do you want to talk about our quarterly check ins with our community managers?

Sure.

So, as Colby said, our community managers are so vital to the vibrancy and the health of our communities that we very much understand that they are architects, interior designers, planners, engineers first and foremost. And being a community manager is something that they've volunteered to take leadership of. But we want to make sure that we're supporting them and that we're providing as much information as we can to help ease the time commitment that it takes for them to be community managers. So one of the things Colby and I implemented about two years ago is we began meeting on a quarterly basis individually with each of our community managers for 30 minutes. The intent of those meetings is just to have a targeted conversation about the health of their community. So some of the things that we provide, we all know for those of us who meet with KA on a quarterly basis, KA always provides some really engaging analytics about your intranet. Overall, we take those analytics and we supplement them with our own analytics that we pull for each community and we put together just a short four or five slide PowerPoint analytics report for our community managers so that we can talk overall how Square one is doing quarter over quarter. And then we can talk specifically about the analytics and the health of their individual community. So some of the things that we like to talk about are what has been the most engaging content, whether that's through number of open rate likes, click throughs. We like to analyze the type of content that people are engaging with within their communities to help make some educated decisions and what type of content they want to drive as community manager. And then we also look at the frequency and the quantity of posts across their community and then how that compares to other similar communities. So we like to see communities continue to grow in the cadence and quantity of community communications that they're sharing year over year. We're at a minimum to stay consistent. And some of those analytics are really important to help drive those conversations with community managers. And then we always spend some dedicated time just thinking through what's going to be going on within your team and within your community in the next 90 days to help be proactive and helping them think through what type of content that they might want to be sharing with their team via Square One or what type of posts we can anticipate that will be coming from their team. And that's really informative and helpful for us again, so that we can be the best support that we can for our community managers and for our teams as a whole. What Colby is sharing here is just the second page of our community manager checklist. And it's just a checklist to show on a quarterly basis what are the things I should be doing as a community manager. Colby mentioned earlier that we don't expect community managers to be doing all of these things. We have communities that are at various places in their maturity. We have some communities that didn't exist exist six months ago that are still in the early phases of building and developing content. We have other communities that have been around for 10 years and are at a different phase in building out content. So this is intended to be more of guidance than a checklist that you have to do or are not doing. But it's a way for community managers to think about what they can be doing to help support their communities and support their teams.

And then lastly, I wanted to circle back to our UX design since we have a few minutes left here. You know, I mentioned that ours might look a little bit different, our layout here, and that we did have two UX designers as who are part of our technology team at DLR Group help us with this. I know that's not the case for most firms, but they did do something that I think is useful that, that most firms could do. And they simply built up a used a website to create a form, you could say, and asked them to go find things on the Internet and to get their feedback. And then they took all of those responses and put it into this giant mural. You can see there's a lot of sticky notes here. I think they, we got about 20 respondents and then they, you know, took all the results, put them into sticky notes here and then group them into positive emotions, negative experience and navigation. This was very helpful for us to go through and kind of see what people were thinking before we went live. And then our awesome UX designers even categorize us down even further into kind of a matrix here. And I can zoom in on this. And this shows us, you know, what would be high value to for the user and low effort for Stephanie and I, or maybe high effort for Stephanie and I, but low value for the user. And a lot of these suggestions were pretty simple for us to implement, but really do make the user experience better. So something here is we realized that not every employee knew what Total Rewards was on our HR community. So just calling it Benefits and making it clear and concise. And then on that Note, moving our 401 page, 401k page over to Benefits just because that's where people expected to find it. And again, in synthesis 6 with the content outliner, it's pretty easy to just drag that page over to Benefits and you're done. You know, things like moving popular resources and PDFs and directories. So that was another thing. On Synthesis 5, employees were used to seeing project directories on our Projects page. We didn't have that there at first, but it was pretty easy to just link it under our homepage and our Projects page page. And again, you know, yes, there is some effort that went into this, but there are some helpful insights here that we definitely implemented before we decided to go live with that. I think it wraps it up.

That's great. Thank you for covering so much so quickly. As a reminder to everyone who is here, we very interested in your questions. So there's a Q and a panel on kind of the bottom of your zoom tray. See a few questions there. Now please add yours in and or vote on other people's questions and that'll help us prioritize the ones that are most interesting to the community. I have a question that I am just dying to ask, so I'm going to ask it and then I'm going to go to the others. You know, when you were talking about your community manager check ins and reviews, it occurred to me that you are really putting yourself in a coaching capacity for those leaders. Coaching around internal comms and coaching around knowledge sharing. And you've been doing this for a while. So my question is, like, what? What makes that your coaching relationship worse work? Or for the ones where it's ideal and working really well, like, what are you doing that is really facilitating a good coaching relationship? And do you have any, I guess, related to that, any best practices or lessons learned for other people who are listening and like, yeah, I want to have that too, as they embark on those kinds of relationships in their business.

I'll let Colby cover the lessons learned. He's been with dealer group for about 12 years, and so I think has a lot more institutional knowledge knowledge than I did and the maturity of our community manager process. To your first question, Susan, I actually wouldn't describe it as a coaching relationship. I very much view Colby and I's relationship with community managers to be a collaboration. They are the subject matter experts for their teams. They understand what their teams are working on. They understand what their teams need in order to collaborate within their team, what their teams need in order to do their jobs better. Colby and I may be the subject matter experts on square one, but I very much view it as a symbiotic relationship where we both benefit one another and bring knowledge to the conversation. And that kind of knowledge share helps us make decisions that are in the best interest of the community.

Yeah, and I think over the years we have formalized this role. The first thing we did is we got leadership buy in. And, you know, I think Stephanie can echo this. When we meet with our leadership to talk about a community manager, a lot of times they will volunteer to be the community manager, and we have to kind of walk away from that and say, no, we want maybe a younger designer that's a part of your forum or your group that's in the know. Because a lot of times our leadership just doesn't have the time to check on some of this stuff. But it is a team and we are proactive. So we go ahead and put calendar invites every six months on their calendar so they don't have to schedule anything. We pull the analytics ahead of time and send it to them a few days in advance and then just use that 30 minutes to review a lot of that content with them. And then also it's an open discussion so they can tell us what they think is working and what's not working.

I will just tag on to what Colby said. I think in terms of best practices or lessons learned, tapping those emerging professionals to be community managers has been such an amazing thing. Our emerging professionals are so passionate, they're so engaged. And Colby had a great point earlier that often they're looking for ways to take on leadership and to, to show that leadership and being a community manager is a great opportunity to do that. So our emerging professionals are usually really amazing community managers.

Yeah. So it sounds like it's a combination of, of having the right person in the role, being in collaboration and having their, their executive, their supervisor kind of in it from the beginning and getting their mind from the beginning. Thank you. I'm going to shift over to a question that's related to this. What kind of analytics, post analytics, presumably, are you providing to content managers and synthesis experts?

Yeah, go ahead. Okay. I was gonna say in synthesis five, you know, we had posts and content analytics, I will say we are very happy to be beta testing the post analytics for knowledge architecture. And so we've had that for a few weeks now and we actually just met with our community managers last week and we're sharing those post analytics since we went live in June and walking through that, you know, we're hopeful down the road to have have our content analytics back and to review that. And it's also, you know, reviewing on the post, we talk about reach, rate and click through and Stephanie does a good job of describing some of the peaks and valleys that you see on the chart.

So we try to pull for the last quarter the graph that you can pull from the post analytics through ka. And then as Colby said, we talked about reach, open rate and engagement rate for those. As Colby said, we talk about peaks and valleys that we see and we try to use some educated deduction to figure out what might be driving those peaks and valleys. We also pull an Excel file that shows all of the posts that they have shared within that community in the last quarter and talk about what type of content is driving the most engagement and the most open rate. And that's pretty informative. Then we share quarter over quarter, how many posts, posts and how many posts in contrast to other communities.

Cool. Thank you. There's a question about your promoted post guidelines and community manager guide. The question is, how long did it take you to establish those? You know, one answer is probably 10 years, but there's probably another answer. And the other comment on that is it's a great idea. So I think if someone is interested in doing it, like how long does it really take to get alignment and to get something like that out to community and rolled out and working?

I think the community manager guidelines we may or may not have stolen from Knowledge Architecture and then created our own. I think, I believe years ago there was some sort of discussion or a one pager on that. And so we kind of crafted our own message based on that. That and you know, that took a couple months. And then, you know, the first thing we did once we had that formalized was to go back to those current community managers and say, okay, we've never actually explained to you what this role is. Here's what we think it is. Do you agree and do you still want to volunteer in this position?

The guardrails for promoted posts and featured posts are a couple of years in the making. We haven't been consistently working on them for a couple of years, but it's one of those topics that kept popping up where we kept having conversations of we really feel like we need to create some guardrails to help us make sure that we're being consistent in our decision making process. And it was a conversation that kept happening every so often. And so a couple of years after that conversation kind of happening, we finally decided, let's go ahead and create something that we can get alignment with our community managers on and then have available for everyone.

And I would just. Sorry Susan, I was going to say related to the permanent post guardrails. That is just an easy way for us to politely tell someone too that maybe this isn't applicable to the whole firm, but that also helps us too with a calendar that we have that helps us map everything out of when some post will be promoted and get us ahead of a lot of posts that in the past would show up and then they'd say, hey, can you promote this? And now we know two, three weeks in advance that this is coming.

Yeah, I love the way that you have invited other people to be part of that process. There's a question about your the featured post block on the communities like interiors or architectural. How do your community managers move post into their featured post block? Is it manual or do you have a hashtag or some other smart filter that they're using?

That's a good question. It is manual. So it is just a post block that we've put on the community page. And then since they have edit rights. They can go in and just type the name of the post that they want to be up there. And then Stephanie and myself also. So almost daily go through and check those to make sure that they do meet the guidelines and they are timely and they haven't been sitting up there for three or four months as well.

And then we too, if we're like, oh this is great, this would make a great featured post. We'll coordinate quickly with a community manager and move it over there. I will say as someone who does this every single day, once you establish it, it takes like 3 minutes minutes. So highly recommend. The ROI is totally worth it. The the value that it adds for the amount of time it takes is, is tremendous.

I'm going to ask a question about time, since you brought it up, which is about your time as individuals. You're doing other things beyond square one management, like internal columns, knowledge management. Like those are two big categories and the square is part of that. Could you share a little bit about how much time each of you are spending on this work on like a weekly basis and yeah, like what that looks like.

Do you want me to go first or so I think on average, if I had estimate between 10 to 15 hours a week is spent on square one. Obviously some weeks are more and some weeks are less, just depending on what's coming down the pipeline and content that needs to be built out on my end. But I do think having vibrant and healthy communities and having those community managers be engaged takes some of that weight off of us. And again, I mentioned that we only expect our community managers to be in there about five hours per month.

For me, I would estimate probably about 10 hours a week. I do also want to acknowledge and recognize that we have a communications coordinator on our team who goes in and every single morning spends about 30 minutes on square one just making sure that posts are tagged to the appropriate locations. He helps support making sure that tag that posts that need to be featured are featured. So that's an investment of another two to three hours a week by someone else on our team. But me personally, I probably spend about 10 hours a week.

There's a question related to this about your communities and community managers. How many total communities slash community managers do you have? And I don't know if that's exactly 1 to 1 of communities to community managers or not.

I believe we currently have nine community managers. We do have one community that has two community managers. They felt strongly that there needed to be two individuals who had different perspectives for the team and that's worked really well as where as well. But I believe we have nine community managers at this time.

You have guidelines for your community managers? Do you have guidelines for any other roles that are square one related?

That's a good question.

I.

You're something. Me, I don't think. Yeah, we have our role descriptions, but.

Our community managers are the individuals that we work with on a daily basis to maintain a healthy, vibrant intranet. Certainly if someone needs guidance or wants to work through how best to leverage the Internet, we would be happy to support that. But if someone's wanting to add content to a community, we would work through the community manager as the decision maker in that process. So really, to us, our community managers are the liaisons between us and the teams. And so at this time, we haven't really had a need to have descriptions or best practices for other others on the Internet and think of.

No. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know if you can answer this, but I'm curious, as the community manager role has matured, if that's reduced, if that's changed your interaction with the rest of the firm around Square one requests like, are more of them going to community managers and less going to you, or they're just different kinds of dialogue where, like, you still get the same kind of request and, you know, you still have the same kinds of conversations with the firm, but then there's new dialogue happening with community managers around content within the community.

Yeah, as far as request, I think I get less, way less now than what I used to three, four years ago. And I do think part of it is we teach people that the community manager is who to go to to ask that question. So if you're on the marketing community and you have a question, reach out to the marketing community manager manager. Also, the easy button to take some of those requests away has helped just to organize things as well. And I know when I still get a request, I'll respond back and help them. But then I always make sure to CC the community manager that they're that is involved so they can jump in if they need to.

Susan? I would say yes. And, and the reason I say that is I. I think that we have a vibrant group of community managers who probably do take a lot of those requests that would traditionally come into Colby and me, and they field them and they make decisions for their communities. So they are absolutely essential to us in that working relationship. The reason I say and is I feel like Colby and I are still intricately involved in working with leaders across the organization to think about what we want to be sharing, especially at that enterprise level. So I think we are able to rely on and leverage our community managers. But that hasn't taken away what our role is in working with leaders across the firm.

Yeah, thank you. Interesting story to follow. See where we are in five years. There's a question about one of this things on your communities, which is professional development. Like within Interiors there's this professional development section. Within Architecture there's a professional development section. So the question is curious if you thought to have professional development as its own community versus within the discipline pages and if so, why you went with hosting the content in the individual discipline communities. Why?

That has been a very robust conversation. Colby, I'll let you answer it. But that, that has been a point of conversation.

Yeah. And I, to be honest, I don't know if we figured that out yet, but I do think on our old site we did have not a community, but a page for licensure and professional development. But talking to our integrated practice team, you know, they said to them professional development architecture looks a little bit different than professional development for planning planners. And so they wanted their own separate page. And so we did decide to give them each their own page for that. Under another area of our site we do have where everything links to for that. So whether you're going to Architecture or I think our operations team, you can find some of that content as well. Over there it's just LinkedIn in both places. But again, you know, we've only been live for six months, so we'll see. But as of today, with the help of our integrated practice team and our UX team, that's why we decided to have it on each one page.

So my understanding correctly that the content really lives within the disciplines, but then somewhere you have like a professional development like link tree page that links out to all of those discipline professional development sections.

Yeah, I believe so. Like under our operations page we have some stuff that links back. That's the plan at least I think, you know, with our community manager check ins is also making sure that they are doing that and that it isn't. Yeah, you know that it's one page, but it's just linked in two spots.

Yeah, it's really interesting and thinking about the way that community managers and the communities have evolved and how much autonomy that they now have have with their community manager. Having professional development there feels like it's just part of that autonomy for architecture to be able to track their, their own professional development content and have that be separate and not need to negotiate with another team because they really are different disciplines. Fascinating.

I think DLR group too is a very matrix organization. And so our integrated practice practice team is made up of architecture, engineering, interiors, planning, among other people. And that was a discussion we had multiple times with them as that in that larger group.

I think it was important to us, as we were navigating the organization of synthesis 6, was to have unity without uniformity. So we wanted there to be some consistency and some parity across our disciplined communities, but also to empower and enable the communities to. To create the content that's most applicable to them and in a way that's most useful for them. So unity without uniformity was really important to us.

Yeah, you can see that. There's one more question. We have one minute, so I'm going to go for it and then we'll wrap up. Does your internal communications plan primarily center around the internal or are there alternative channels through which information or communications are disseminated?

So, currently our internal communication strategy does rely on square one to be the source of truth for news and information. So all enterprise communications, first and foremost, are shared through square one. We have other channels, like teams, like Zoom, like email, that we'll often leverage or supplement. But first and foremost, our strategy relies on our intranet to share enterprise communications.

Cool. That brings us to our time. Stephanie, Colby, thank you so much for the work you're doing and for being willing to share it with us. The culmination of many, many years and iteration with the Internet and with knowledge management for auc. So thank you so much. The recording for today's Spotlight will be posted on our website, it'll be posted in the online K community for our clients, and it'll be sent out via email. Upcoming events are on our website and Chris is going to drop a link to the chat, link in the chat to those now. And that's it. That's a wrap for today and that's a wrap for webinars for this year. Thank you both so much and we'll see y' all in the new year.

Thanks for having us.