The Business Case for Communities of Practice
We shouldn't need a business case for communities of practice, but this is for the times when we do
There is always an argument that you shouldn’t need to have to make a business case for doing the right thing. The fact that something is the right thing to do should really be reason enough for doing it. Sadly though there are many examples of the way this turns out to not be the case, and often there are understandable (if not agreeable) reasons for doing so.
There have been times earlier in my career that I’ve proposed starting a community to some perfectly reasonable people and heard the perfectly reasonable response “sounds like a good idea. I tell you what – put together a proposal and come back to me”. Seems fair doesn’t it? An offer to support my idea if I can prove it’s valuable. But is it though? If someone comes to you and says doing X will make this a nicer place to be, how much evidence do you really need before you’re prepared to listen to them? If I tell you doing something will make me happier, is it right that there is some uncommunicated threshold for how much happier it will make me before I’m allowed to do it?
Obviously this is a fairly uneven argument to make. If you want to set up a workplace-based community of practice, there are lots of considerations that you and I may not have to think about but will still impact us. If you work at a small start up for example, losing an hour a month of over half you development team’s time might be the difference between meeting a customer deadline or missing out on the deal that will pay everyone’s wages for the next several months. If you’re part of a large corporate organisation, you might be driven by time sheets and have a minimum threshold of billable hours. Letting the Marketing team reduce their availability might be something the leadership will have to explain and qualify to the next layer of leadership above them. If you’re a nurse, even though you absolutely know that your personal development is important, doing so mid-shift takes you away from delivering patient care and doing it in your on time disrupts your work/life balance even further (this isn’t me being unfair, this is the dilemma that health care professionals have to weigh and requires immense character).
Clearly then, whether we like it or not, there can be a reason for asking for a business case to set up a community of practice. To do my part, I would like to try and help and have tried to pull together a framework that can be used to help make that case. It wont work in every instance, but it should give you enough ideas to get you started.
Communities of Practice help build a sense of belonging: By being around others who think and value the same things, building an increased sense of connection to the group
Communities of Practice remove knowledge silos and single points of failure within teams: Democratising knowledge to wider groups instead of promoting and rewarding the hoarding of expertise and experience
Communities of Practice can improve the emotional wellbeing and resilience of your people: Research suggests that strong community bonds increase people’s tolerance to stress and adversity (not that this should be a green light to upping the stress levels)
Communities of Practice can reduce staff turnover and attrition: When people leave a team/business/organisation, they take their knowledge with them. People who are happy are less likely to look for a change
Communities of Practice increase the return on investment from each individual’s L&D/training expenditure: Sending one person to a training event benefits one person. Sending one person to a training event and giving them an interested and invested audience to share it with benefits the whole
Communities of Practice can lead to increased employee happiness: Being somewhere that you feel you belong, where you are supported by a strong network, where you are enabled to be more effective and successful by being part of a collective has an exponential impact on happiness and job satisfaction
Communities of Practice can lead to increased employee productivity: Happy people have fewer distractions, are more motivated, and have an amplifying effect on their colleagues
Communities of Practice improve internal career mobility: Strong communities provide a robust and ready made support network, reducing the barriers to entry into a new areas of the business
Communities of Practice can reduce the onboarding and upskilling timescale for new employees: Cultural governance – where the community collectively aligns around ‘the right way’ of doing things – makes knowledge acquisition more accessible to new joiners
Communities of Practice help drive improvements to key skills and capabilities: Supporting practitioners on their journey towards skills mastery enables a faster and more efficient learning pathway in the skills that matter the most
Communities of Practice reduce knowledge leakage: When people leave, they take their knowledge with them. A culture that rewards the democratisation of knowledge and a culture of sharing means it is retained when people do eventually decide to move on
Communities of Practice improve business resilience: Democratised knowledge, decentralised responsibility for learning and mastery, and a cultural support network makes a team/business more resilient to change, adversity, or departures
Communities of Practice can improve your attractiveness to potential new talent: The potential to be welcomed and supported into a new role, increased skills capability, and the opportunity to learn being engrained in culture could potentially tip the balance when a candidate is undecided whether to join or not
Obviously this list is not going to cover everything, and in many cases the points listed may not work in your company, environment or context. They also are by no means a guarantee of success - I mentioned last week that I’ve been struggling to think of things to write about recently, but I reckon that I could take one of each of these examples and write a case for and against them for the next thirteen weeks. If however you’ve been asked to make the case for starting a community of practice and don’t know how to respond, the point of this list is to provide a series of examples to get you started.
Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee :)