Striking Down the Message Requirement - Other, More Organic Weekly Checks to Keep Your Staff Active
Most of you reading this have at least some experience working for, managing, or owning a server. By association, most of you will also, then, have experience either doling out or receiving weekly checks from department leaders, management or otherwise. There is always one glaring check that seems to almost scare staff into forcing themselves to be active without any semblance of productivity - the message requirement.
You all know what I mean - whether you just have to send a measly 100 messages per week in a server, or more or less the same in a staff server, it seems to be a weird addition to a measure of productivity from a staff member that every server owner wants to adopt.
I won't for a second act like I've ever been above it myself. I've been on every side of that system - I've spent time designing what I thought were ideal systems, and I've been on the passing and failing side of checks created by other staff members. For a while, I was also an adamant supporter of the server; at the time, in my mind, there was no better way to gauge the activity of a staff member, and I was a little ignorant of the fact that this is unrealistic for most people to uphold.
You may be reading this going "but Blizzy, what on Earth can you be hinting at?" I'll tell you - there is no logical reason to encourage message requirements from your staff. In essence, what I'll be covering includes a few major points:
- Message requirements, contrary to popular belief, rarely spur any organic engagement.
- Message requirements impede on the ability of your staff to be creative in their pursuits.
- Message requirements do not measure a staff's effective contributions to their team.
Let us break these down one by one, shall we?
Point 1 - Message requirements rarely spur organic engagement.
For our hypothetical staff team, let's assume the following requirements. Bear in mind, these numbers will exaggerated to be quite low, but the points I'm making should be scalable in nature.
Our staff team has 4 departments - the owners, the management, moderators, and community staff.
Moderators are required to send 25 messages a week in the main server chat, community team members are required to send 50 messages a week, and management are required to send 75 messages a week. Let's ignore the owners for now.
Notice that these three teams have at least 25 messages worth of overlap. Again, underexaggerated in some cases, but bear with me. Furthermore, management and community have 50 messages of overlap. What does this create? My oh-so-favorite common occurrence - staff-exclusive engagement.
What is staff-exclusive engagement? Go to the general chats of any server with sparing community engagement, and find the most recent messages. I can nearly guarantee that you'll see messages between, and solely between, staff members. Why is this? Well, these staff members are killing two birds with one stone! Both staff members meet their quota, and the community is "engaged".
Now take away this exclusive engagement. Was there any actual, new community engagement? I'll save you the time - no.
This is because, when staff members - especially those in servers with less activity - are instructed to send messages to be active, the easiest way to meet that metric is to talk to people they're working with to simulate conversation. This is similar to how MLM schemes often have fake side-chatter from hidden employees - there is supposed engagement to simulate good reception, in a desperate attempt to get at least some more organic engagement.
This phenomenon, more commonly referred to as artificial engagement, was something I discussed in a previous post. At it's core, by simulating engagement or simulating a growth towards engagement, you're very rarely going to actually discover any new engagement unless the people engaging fall into one of three groups: the one's annoyed about a ping (rightfully so), the ones actually watching the chat, or the "dead chat" preachers. This brings up my point - why force your staff to artificially engage your chat, when it evidently doesn't assist your server in any way?
To fix this: encourage your staff to host events, perpetuate organic engagement by allowing members to start the conversation (NB: if your members aren't doing this, that is a whole other systemic issue with your server), and by allowing them to feel at home in your server.
Point 2 - Message requirements impede creative potential.
Let's once more assume a situation involving our hypothetical staff team. Let's also assume the following:
- Community team members are required to host events.
- Moderators are required to perform open moderations.
- Management members are required to create guides and other infrastructural aids.
- Owners are required to check all these tasks.
As you can see, this becomes a scaling issue as we go up the ranks. Community team members can create chat events with prizes to encourage their members to be active, meeting their requirements. This is obviously up for contention, as you now create monetary-motivation engagement which is a whole other region of unethical community practices, but let's ignore that for now. Likewise, moderation members have plenty of, say, ads to moderate. Management, while otherwise motivated, can create guides and aids to meet the project side of their quota.
However, let's imagine a management member who has very little time online. They can work on their guides online, but if they are worried about spending their time on messages, the quality of their guides suffers. This affects the moderation teams, who are given inaccurate or otherwise not full instructions, and community teams, who are not motivated via a guide to be creative as they don't have a predefined region of operations for their events.
Moderators who do not clear rule breaking content, and who opt instead to desperately try to reach their quotas, spend their time letting others ruin the experience of the users they are trying to engage. This hurts the community team, who are already affected by incomplete guides, and accomplishes a net loss.
Community team members now have incomplete guides to accomplish their work, as well as a community that is filled with ads they may not have perms to delete. Now they are left to either try and clear this, or meet their message quota. Guess what they pick 9 times out of 10?
Again, this is dramatized for effect, sure, but the sentiment stands, especially with department leader and HR teams who ALSO have to establish checks. Trickle-down issues like this can easily cripple a staff team, and this all stems from a thought in management that they should meet their message quota instead. Think of things like Modmail, open mod guides, and event planning templates. These have to be done, as they are vital to keeping a consistent chain of events across all instances, and they aren't being done in favor of false messaging to meet requirements.
By establishing alternative requirements for your staff, you can have them complete otherwise relevant instructions while also working on making sure these instructions benefit the community and spur organic engagement through means other than messaging requirements. Furthermore, you prevent staff-centered interactions as well as false, meaningless, "hi" interactions.
To fix this: encourage and assign tasks that benefit the community and the staff member at the same time. Do not force work if there is no work to be done - if staff teams need to lay dormant for a while to accomplish what needs to realistically be done, then they can spend that dormancy trying to engage with members organically. Do not try to double buffer staff with dual obligations, as one side will typically end up hurting.
Point 3 - Message requirements are not a measure of contribution.
To preface this case with an example, allow me to introduce you to a server I will keep anonymous. In that server, I am a manager that handles in-house development, and attached to my role there is a message requirement. Anyone else confused yet?
In the eyes of the ownership team, my contribution is not effective if I do not send somewhere in the ballpark of 100-150 messages weekly. To summarize - I am developing a unique, in-house bot, that has commanded my attention daily for about 4 to 6 hours, and my contribution isn't appreciated because I don't send messages in a good enough quantity (NB: I do chat in this server, just when the organic situation allows.)
Let's bring this back to our theoretical staff team to lay down the rhetoric of how broken this can sound objectively. Community team members who only host events are not recognized. Moderators who only delete ads are not recognized. Managers who only create guides that help these lower departments are not recognized.
Let's finally address the hypocrisy as well - why is it typically the case that owners are not given self-imposed message requirements? The answer: "because we're too busy creating materials that benefit the server." Yeah, just like every other department! The reality of this situation is that you're assuming that hired staff exist purely to act as fake engagement to make your server look alive. We have a word for this, by the way - exploitation.
Before you assign your staff requirements, ask yourself: as server owner, would I want to assign this to myself for good reason? Furthermore, if I assigned this to myself, would it actually benefit my team? The answer should almost always be an overwhelming no with the message requirement debate. Instead, why don't we focus on the holistic nature of a staff team?
Allow me to picture my other server. I am a co-owner there, and it is a small community server. At this server, we in essence tell our staff to be members of the server. No message requirements, no additional prescribed weekly tasks, just a badge that says "I can handle issues if need be."
The resultant outcome? Our staff members are naturally engaging the team in their own time, encouraging our members to speak out about their issues related to the topic of the server, and handling inquiries as a natural process. In not being motivated by a number to hit, they engage in a way that is more sustainable for the server's stats as a whole, and we don't hire them to meet a quota in the first place.
The trade off? They are given instance tasks to handle. Create a ban list. Train some trial moderators. Check in on this member's posting habits for us. Still, we see very little artificial engagement from our members, and no artificial engagement from our staff. Our staff are treated as friends, not laborers.
To fix this: allow your staff to take up creative projects. Take a laissez-faire approach and re-evaluate your server's creative direction regularly to allow your staff to find a groove. Finally, encourage creativity and work that actually benefits the server in the long run.
Overall, we should see a recurring trend in our cases. Ownership often escapes unscathed without any requirements that they don't wish to follow, and instead pass these unrealistic and highly nullified in benefit onto staff under the pretense that it's their job. Instead, we need to learn to unify as staff teams and realize that the functional chimney benefits no one at the end of the day (NB: the functional chimney refers to the breakdown of communication and creative identity due to a lack of communication funnels, or adversely, too many necessary communication funnels. This can be an issue as well when we have way too many department hierarchy levels.)
In closing, please consider the impact that encouraging and enforcing artificial server engagement from your staff has on the team at large. Please feel free to cite this source, use the "To fix this" sections to remedy your staff woes, and reach out if you need clarification. All in all, please remind yourself: "I want my staff to be creative and organic, not robots!"