Welcome back, community builders! I’m your host, Anamaria Dorgo. Today, I’m joined by Cory Welsh to talk about the power of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for women in the workplace.

Cory is a Senior Enablement Lead at LinkedIn and the Global Co-Lead of the Member Engagement pillar for Women@LinkedIn.

In this episode, you’ll hear how LinkedIn’s longest-running ERG is structured, what drives its purpose, and how a volunteer-led initiative can create real impact across a global company.

Cory also introduces a powerful idea: the Vision to Values Strategy. It’s a simple way to keep a community focused by tying its work back to the company’s bigger vision. At LinkedIn, that means empowering and inspiring women to grow their careers while staying authentic.

The strategy starts with a mission statement and breaks down into three clear pillars: building skills, strengthening the community, and amplifying impact. These guide the ERG’s work and ensure every effort connects to LinkedIn’s mission and values.

Enjoy the conversation! 

Today I am in conversation with a special guest. Beth West is the Director of the  Patricia A. Tietjen, MD Teaching Academy at Nuvance Health. 

Beth discusses how communities of practice are used to enhance clinician education, foster engagement, and build connections among healthcare professionals.

This episode is packed with practical tips, and lots of lessons learned during the several iterations of the community between 2021 and today. 

Beth has so much wisdom to share, and her commitment to continuous improvement and learning is nothing short of amazing! 

I recommend you grab a pen and paper for this one! 

Today, Anamaria is chatting with Daniel Prial and Sebastian Auris from Umicore. Daniel is the Communications and Community Expert and part of the Digital Workplace Team, and Sebastian is a Chemical Technician and one of the Digital Heroes, the community we explore today. 

Digital Heroes is a change agents community of about 300 colleagues around the world who are helping their coworkers navigate the maze of their organizations digital workplace. 

We talk about the need for the community, the early days, and how it evolved over time, and linger on the community dynamics, with its challenges and opportunities. 

If you are building an internal community and would like to share that story with our listeners, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠please fill out this form⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and we will reach out to you.

For this conversation, Anamaria is joined by Andrew Scullion, a senior Ruby Developer, and staff developer at Fullscript. Andrew’s story highlights an important message when it comes to building internal learning communities: designing a low barrier, straightforward, recurring learning session with your peers, has the potential to create ripples across a function. 

Not all communities need to come with a big strategy, massive resources or complexity. Some communities are small, intimate, real, and focused on the things that matter to their members in the moment. 

Andrew shares what motivates him to hold space for experimentation and learning for himself, and his colleagues, and explains how anyone in the organization can create an approachable, sustainable mini-community.

If you are building an internal community and would like to share that story with our listeners, ⁠⁠⁠⁠please fill out this form⁠⁠⁠⁠, and we will reach out to you.

Anamaria is talking to Alla Zhdan, a Community Consultant and Community Builder, as she is taking us behind the scenes of the Project Managers Community she led for four years at SoftServe.

We went into details on how Alla found and engaged the 15 Community Leaders for the 15 locations where the company was present. Expect a step-by-step, detailed process in her work, and make sure you have a pen and paper. There were lots of wisdom nuggets shared!

Enjoy!

⁠Connect with Alla on Linkedin.

If you are building an internal community and would like to share that story with our listeners, ⁠⁠⁠please fill out this form⁠⁠⁠, and we will reach out to you.

We're excited to bring you behind the scenes of a community of practice within academia. Our guest today is Danielle Taschereau Mamers, the Managing Director of the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative.

We are exploring a community of humanities faculty members who are doing research around questions of social justice and they are doing that using digital tools.

This is a story about a group of colleagues that started having lunch together turned into a grassroots campus network, turned into colorful community with a rich learning ecosystem. 

Danielle shares the initiatives that her and her small team have enabled for the community members, and the impact they saw as a result. 

Enjoy!

Connect with Danielle on LinkedIn, and explore more of her work.

If you are building an internal community and would like to share that story with our listeners, ⁠⁠please fill out this form⁠⁠, and we will reach out to you.

Listen to our conversation with Jeroen Hammer to learnabout the Q movement in the Dutch police force. When faced with the observationthat cases were piling up and there was little time and space to innovate andchange the way detective work was done, Jeroen decided to act with somecolleagues.

What they created is a bottom-up innovation movementthat truly shifted the culture in the police force with the support ofleadership sponsors.

In this episode, we dive into the beginnings of themovement, how it grew, how they structured it to enable development and all thework that goes into maintaining an active community: from stakeholdersmanagement to marketing, communication and more.

Enjoy!

You can ⁠follow Jeroen⁠ on LinkedIn.

If you are building an internal community and would like to share that story with our listeners, ⁠please fill out this form⁠, and we will reach out to you.

We've talked with Adina Beer and Peter Schmidt from Quality Minds about the first community of practice that Adina launched two years ago. We unpack the decisions she took in the early days, her philosophy and how she managed to infuse social and peer learning into a hierarchical and siloed organization.

We also talked about the importance of starting small, having influential stakeholders in your corner, listening to the members, and relentlessly advocating for the community within the company. 

We followed the team’s success to the point in which communities of practice were piloted as a strategic solution within a company-wide transformation process, and we learned what that looked like.

If you are building an internal community and would like to share that story with our listeners, please fill out this form, and we will reach out to you.

Anamaria is talking to Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, two internationally renowned social learning theorists and consultants. 

Their pioneering writing and consulting around Communities of Practice and Social Learning Spaces is influential in diverse fields, including learning theory, business, government, healthcare, and education.

They founded the Social Learning Lab to host events on theory, practice, and leadership, which is where I met both of them this year, as I attended a three-day learning immersion into communities and social learning. You can find more details about their work on their website: https://www.wenger-trayner.com/

In this conversation, we explore the differences between communities of practice, and social learning spaces, we go over their step-by-step approach to launching new communities within organizations, and close with their values creation model for communities, and how to measure the impact such spaces have thought story collection. 

Grab your hot tea or coffee and a notebook—this episode is full of note-worthy quotes! 

In this last episode of the second season, we are joined by Drew Pontikis—Head of Social Learning at PwC UK.
Throughout our conversation, Drew emphasizes the pivotal role of community leaders in fostering inclusive cultures and enabling meaningful engagement.

From unpacking the delicate balance between preserving existing community values while embracing new perspectives to exploring the transformative power of shared experiences and social learning, this episode offers a deep dive into the art and science of community leadership enablement.

Here is a bit more about our guest, in his own words: 

My name is Drew, and I help communities succeed. I work in Manchester UK for PwC, leading our Communities of Practice Enablement team. I've been working with communities and communities for the past eight years and have been lucky enough to work with community leaders from wide-ranging domains and spaces. 

Drew is also the brain behind the “Let’s Talk Communities of Practice” Substack Newsletter, which you can subscribe to here: https://communitiesofpractice.substack.com/

If you are building internal communities as well, we'd love to hear from you! You can reach out ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

Join us in this conversation with Katie McCauley who is currently part of the internal communication and community team at Oyster. She's previously worked on supporting Google's internal community program and is generally an active advocate for internal communities. We talked about both the business impact and the social and emotional value of communities in the work place as well as the role of community leaders in balancing creating versus fostering content.

If you are also building internal communities, we'd love to hear from you, reach out here.

Today I am talking to Luke Michalak, who during his time with SuperAwesome stepped into the Community Manager role for the entire company, as the world was forced into isolation during to the Covid19 pandemic. 

Over night, his role became crucial for the company culture, and his work focused on understanding his colleagues needs, and advocating for the changes they need to stay connected with the culture, and with one another. 

Luke talks about the challenges of creating the same experience for colleagues working from distributed offices, and shares practical tips that worked for him, from small and important tweaks to their onboarding process, to a full-fledged yearly calendar aiming to foster a sense of community across a distributed organization. 

If you are building internal communities as well, we'd love to hear from you! You can reach out ⁠here⁠.

Learn more about our guest: 

At SuperAwesome, Luke played a pivotal role in office management, vendor relationships, and community engagement, managing facilities relationships across North America (NYC, CHI, LA) and organizing major company events. 

This experience was crucial in honing his ability to create engaging and inclusive environments. The acquisition by Epic Games expanded Luke’s responsibilities, allowing him to spearhead global employee engagement and experience initiatives, streamline onsite operations, and launch the Epic Games NYC Office.

Utilizing platforms like Slack, Luke is cultivating engaging workplace cultures, emphasizing cross-functional collaboration, strategic insight, digital proficiency, and compassionate guidance.

In this episode of Mapping we take a little bit of height and explore the building blocks of community building with Tanja Laub. We cover building psychological safety in internal communities, surfacing and evolving their purpose, defining the audience accordingly and of course engagement! Pick up a cup of your favorite beverage and let her insights sink in...

A little more about Tanja, in her own words:

I work in the Community Management industry since 2006. I've built communities for the media company RTL and worked as project lead community at the perfume chain Douglas. In 2010 I started my own consultancy business and now help other companies build better communities, my main focus is internal communities. I have also been chairwoman for the German community management association for 4 years.

You can learn more about the circle framework we mention in the conversation here

and if you speak German, check out Tanja's podcast about community building.

If you are building internal communities as well, we'd love to hear from you! You can reach out here.

In this episode, Anamaria talks to Olha and Maksym from Luxoft about their internal tech communities, and how the strong collaboration between the Subject Matter Experts leading the community, and the Employer Branding team is helping them maintain 11 successful tech communities. They share what made the third attempt to launch internal communities successful compared to the previous ones, and give us details into their creative "Tech Influencer Bootcamp" and the effect it had on their colleagues. If you are building internal communities as well, we'd love to hear from you! You can reach out here. Learn more about our guests: Olha is an experienced employer branding professional and passionate community builder with a background in global tech companies. Currently, she serves on the Employer Branding team at Luxoft, a leading global technology company specializing in enterprise technology services. In her current role, Olha is involved in a project to build 11 global technology communities, where she applies marketing tools to foster growth and engagement. Proudly made in Ukraine :) Maksym has 20 years in the IT field from junior project manager up to department director and head of the project management office. He’s spent the last 10 years at Luxoft focusing on project management excellence and quality assurance processes. Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and accredited Kanban Trainer from Kanban University (AKT).

Susagna is a corporate rebel at heart and it's no surprise that she ended up creating and nurturing communities as a way to influence and transform her company. In this episode she takes us through her personal story with communities: from building the first one from scratch with little guidance to successfully exiting it several years later once it had grown to a movement with its own voice internally. A great listen, so sit back and enjoy!

If you are building internal communities as well, we'd love to hear from you! You can reach out here.

A little bit more about our guest, in their own words:

Scientist turned project manager turned capability developer, I see communities and the spaces they create as essential for learning, creating belonging and psychological safety as well as motors for advancing knowledge. At the end of the day, we come together in organizations to do what we cannot do alone, so community is the basis for delivering big things.

For the last conversation of Mapping Ties Season 1, we sat with the inspiring Deborah Madelaine—who's the Global Senior Manager of Social Learning at Mars.

We talked about pivotal moments in bringing communities to the forefront of social learning within Mars, how Deborah and her team enable volunteers within their internal communities, how to build community across multi-cultural companies, and timezones, and how to effectively onboard new members.

Check out all our notes in the Padlet board, and join us for the free live workshop on January 18th to unpack the lessons we learned in season one, and continue the conversation!

In this episode, we chatted with:

Mandy Ho, Program Manager EMEA University & Asian at Uber EMEA Co-Chair + Women at Uber EMEA Central Lead @ Uber

Crystal Andrus Training Supervisor & Career Development Committee for Women of Westlake + Hispanic Organization for Leadership & Action Co-Chair @ Westlake

about Employee Resources Groups.

• What are they?
• Why do they matter?
• How are they structured?
• How do we measure their impact?

Explore our notes and takeaways here.

A decade's worth of lessons learned packed into a one-hour conversation with the one and only Jaime McGeathy, Communities Director at Microsoft.

Jaime leads the "Connected Communities" program at Microsoft, bringing together 75 internal employee communities aligned around customer business priorities.

She shared her team's strategy to reboot the community, all the ways communities and members can join the program, practical ways to recognise volunteers, as well as a run through the tools and platforms they are using internally.

Find our detailed notes on the Padlet board.

We've had an insightful conversation with our next guest, Michelle Farrell, who's a Senior L&D Consultant at Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency and has been building several communities for the past years.

We touched on ways to launch a community, the tools Michelle uses, and the very creative simulation game she designed to get people accustomed to the tools, as well as practical examples to reward contributions and enable community growth.

You can check all the insights and takeaways in our Padlet.

We brought together Justyna Baber, the former Innovation Community Leader @ IKEA and Nast Marrero , the Business Agility Coach & Community Catalyst @ The LEGO Group to chat about communities used to foster a culture of innovation across the organisation.

We touched on the spark that led to their communities, the formats they use to bring people together, the tools and ways they measure impact.

Check out our detailed notes in our project Padlet, and enjoy the conversation!