My Forum Experience: Staff Management Styles Shawn J. Gossman Owner, www.WeatherBB.com/forum So I have decided to write a new series of articles on something that will keep me more interested in writing them. I figured there would be nothing better than writing an article series on my experiences on forums. I am not writing these to show off or say that I have a lot of experience, rather to show how I do things and offer it as a learning tool for those who wish to use it. I hope you enjoy my article and please show your support by sharing it elsewhere and commenting with your own experiences on the topic. In this first article, I want to talk about my experience with managing staff on forums, mainly because I have never really wrote a good long article about it. Team management is one of the most important aspects on running message forums in my opinion. Without the help of others, you forum is often dead and vulnerable to being attacked or spammed while you are away or sound asleep in your bed. A team also helps you build a community by posting new topics, giving fast and reliable support and reflecting your forum as a very professional staffed message forum which is vital for forums these days since many use them for support reasons or to ask questions and what not. Deciding on staff member can be the tricky part. Too many forum owners instantly make those who ask first staff members before shopping around. I used to do this and found that most of the time, those staff would either go inactive or try to change the way I WANT the forum ran and lose and eventually demote themselves or say bye-bye and leave. Now days I mainly only hire inside the forum and active members who post good posts. I don’t want inactive members who are not friendly, I want those who are a big part of keeping the forum active and love to answer peoples questions and requests. When deciding on staff members, you need to take in consideration that whomever you decide to make staff, their actions and styles will reflect on your forums. Basically, how they act many will see that as how your forum acts in general. So be smart about it and make sure you choose the right staff. Professionalism is not cheesy. Many of today’s forum owners think that giving a staff member a fancy title and having them be polite and professional is goofy and will do no good for your forum. These people are wrong and probably run fun houses more than a message forum, lol. Sure, there is a such thing as being too professional but giving each staff member a title and list of certain duties will not only help members understand what their job is but also will keep staff members interested in their job. If I join a forum and am made a moderator with no assigned duties, then I get bored when I don’t know what to do. Also something I have learned that will keep staff active is allowing one to be promoted to something like Lead Moderator, Supervisor, Manager, etc. They will actually work hard to become better. And have them be professional meaning not starting fights with members or calling them names, no breaking of the rules and maybe even offer them an official email address for official-use only. There is no I in Team. We have all heard that and its true. This is one reason why I make supervisor members of certain duties and give them a team of staff members. They will usually work together and report to their supervisor. This keeps them active as a team rather than the lone staff member who does things and never tells anyone. A great way to get a staff team to work together is get them to know each other and become good friends. Let them learn about each other, trust each other, IM and swap profile links and so on. One way I do this is by having a corporate intranet for all my sites, a place where all of them can meet one and other and become friends. Another good method I have learned is by making a staff forum for laid-back staff only off-topic chatter, it allows them to get to know one and other. Well that is about it for this article. I hope I said something worth something rather than stuff that has been said over and over again. Please feel free to comment with more suggestions, tell me your style of running a staff team? How do you respond to staff conflicts? What about when staff members do actions you do not allow them to do? Tell me more about how you work because I am very interested.
