WHY should you spend your time building communities?

A bit of context

I’ve always been really interested in people. While other people I know exercise more or go out a lot in their spare time, I spent many hours a week answering various emails from people I don’t even know personally. These people needed free advice and some comfort and inspiration while facing challenging times in their lives or careers.

In the early 2000s, it was just about sharing my experience as an expat in Switzerland.

Then it came down to sharing my experiences as a working mother of two wonderful toddlers.

Afterward, it was about agile testing and creating the first agile testing community in Switzerland, which ultimately helped me build my track record and be accepted as a conference speaker around the world.

Throughout these years some gender issues kept repeating and made me uneasy.

Is having confidence and grit as a woman

a blessing or a curse?

How do you finally get a promotion? How much money should you make? Why is a man who is willing to work “full-time” always perceived as more committed than a woman who is the same or even more competent but is willing to work “only part-time”?

One day I decided that I was studying these topics enough and that I needed to act and involve in conversations a lot more people than just my closest friends.

How Swisscom’s Women in Tech & Lead community was born

I called one of my favorite recruiting experts at Swisscom Cristina Ernst (who, by the way, would later become the trainer for the next generation at Swisscom and also rocks that job), and asked her for advice. I was actually hoping that Cristina would help me with a small sponsorship request in the company, especially with an idea of having another HR person working a few hours a month and organizing various networking and learning events for the women to help socialize and learn from each other.

Instead, Cristina stated that these initiatives, when initiated and organized by staff, have much more weight and impact. She put me in touch with the HR diversity team, which generously sponsored many of our quarterly events — I count around 12 in those 3.5 years between May 2016 and December 2020.

So I started on my own. I emailed around 10 other women in tech I knew at Swisscom which wasn’t many (out of thousands of employees!) for already almost 2 years I’ve had on my Swisscom employee account. However, the nice thing about networking is that one person can invite the next, and so on.

At our kick-off event on May 25, 2016, in the Swisscom Pirates Hub, we were around 20 and everyone was very happy and motivated about the initiative.

Elena, former HR Diversity lead, greeting attendees at our kick-off event

At the next event, a workshop to define our vision and goals, we were almost 30. We have created a number of action points that deal, for example, with the younger generation, career advancement, mentoring and coaching. In the next months and years we tackled lots of those topics.

I was fortunate to have my helpers and partners soon: My Swisscom bestie Kristina who was always there to cheer me up, fantastic Anne-Sophie who volunteered to organize monthly lunches in Zurich and Viola and later Daria who organized monthly lunches in Bern. There were many more colleagues willing to help organize various events and I would like to thank everyone once again for their time and commitment. I’ve learned so much from all of you and really hope that I could give something back!

I compare building and running a community to creating a WAVE.

You could start with a little wave here and there and keep producing more and more of it until you really start shaking things up.

In my next 3 years, a community grew to more than 100 members and more than 200 event attendees. In my last year at Swisscom, I was very happy to be invited to the Diversity team’s workshops and also to see how “Women in Tech & Lead community” was included in the strategic initiatives around diversity & inclusion topics on the Swisscom’s “diversity & inclusion map”. We had our own blog, event pages and chat group.

I didn’t count the hours of my free-time I spent running the community and I hope our helpers didn’t count them either. There were some occasions when only 2 people appeared at the monthly lunch or when half of the attendees at our networking event canceled at the last moment because they were just busy or not motivated enough. And yes, there have been some comments in the organization that would fail to understand that it is not “just about women”. Even so, our organizing team has always been motivated and passionate enough to keep going, and that is what matters.

A few learnings from my journey

1. Start small, but aim big
2. Get enough helpers on board
3. Acquire powerful sponsors
4. Employee resource groups or communities need to come bottom-up. Only then they are not forced and can build a genuine interest and authenticity.

Some competencies and skills I acquired

1. Staying in touch with the heads of the organization and your colleagues is a great way to understand how things work in your organization and what both sides, employer and employee, want. It’s vitally important to keep the big picture in mind while taking care of smaller actions.
2. Focus on the most painful problem worth solving. For large organizations, this is definitely the percentage of employment and retention of working women at every level of the hierarchy. I’ve learned how to support the company’s employer branding and diversity and inclusion efforts, while continuously talking about the benefits and career opportunities internally and externally.
3. Connecting people is what I really enjoy and where I excel. Knowing who is working where, on what project, and what skills they may need in the future to find the right match is like playing a video game for me.

The promising future

Today, I am working on building my own business and realizing a vision of helping the world of work become an equal place for everyone, regardless of your background, gender, age or workload.

If you need help and advice to inspire your employees to start building their own learning and networking communities, please contact me. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or write to me at contact@sharingtribe.tech

My thanks and gratitude go to:

* Elena Folini and Roger Perregaux from the former HR Diversity Team

* Zuzana Skarpiskova, Sabrina Lehmann, Stefan Gal from the current HR Diversity Team

* Hans Werner, Swisscom Head of HR

* all other attendees and supporters and among them: Laura Voicu, Monika Graf, Nadia Moser-Ritler, Edda Rettinger, Helia Burgunder, Isabel Steiner, Anne-Sophie Xu-Guitton, Sabine Gambuzza, Ilka Gelhhar, Kristina Vajnand-Golesworthy and Daria Isaeva.