Hey James. 
I did! I think it is a combination of understanding the hidden costs of engaging and having a framework for participation.
The internal cost of staff engagement
Meaningful participation requires more than the time and effort spent actually answering questions. People need access to information, moderation support, follow-up frameworks, escalation paths, and clarity about what they can discuss/what examples they can share/what customers they can name.
Community teams generally absorb this invisible work because they know which subject matter experts to loop in, they have relationships with members, they have the skills to keep conversations productive, and they have the time to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. This ensures that trust levels are maintained and the community offers value to all participants.
Our team understand the value of that trust and how long it takes to build so the fear of doing something to erode it is enough to put some off engaging at all.
Building trust without overwhelming internal teams
Trust comes more from predictable behaviour than constant availability. Customers/members don’t need continuous access to your team if they have confidence in your processes. They need to know:
- where to give feedback
- what happens to it
- who reads it
- which discussions receive responses
- how decisions are made
- when we’ll report back
There needs to be some form of continuous feedback loop that is reliable—trustworthy with boundaries is preferable to being highly available but unreliable. No one is going to invest time giving feedback if they’re shouting into the void. You need enough direct contact to understand member needs, with enough structure that everyone knows what value they get from the interaction.
This interests me—let’s call in @mae and ask her how she feels about answering technical product questions. I think that might be quite eye opening.
I agree with you Andrew, there are probably always a handful of questions that anyone can answer but discoverability can be an issue in those cases. I’m interested to hear how other teams handle this.
I don’t think it’s off topic, I think there is something quite valuable that we can take from that. We need a better understanding of why we’re afraid to fail.