A look back at what worked well and what did not work quite well
I have had several guild or guild-like groups at work and this tries to compare all of them as a whole.
What worked?
Prepared Presentations
I think most folks attended to watch presentations. Mostly if the topic was boosted enough, the largest amount of participation usually came from presentations. What did this look like in practice? Presentations like, “Learnings from Building Service XYZ” or “Introducing New Way Platform to Measure Thing” worked great since, well, information like this should flow through engineering guilds afterall!
TWIL: This week I learned
Quick, simple learnings from the engineers was something fun and light. I think the thing that made this successful was that for a lot of folks, they had something new they were learning and were excited to share. These are simpler than lightning talks and are very much more akin to “I had to update a data access function this past week and learned about using Mongoose’s lean! This is how I used it.” (reference)
What did not work as well?
Cold calling / Impromptu presentations
Things like forced participation were rough. If folks attending the guild meeting were asked without preparation to present something, it was often met with a lot of friction. It seemed that most folks only wanted to be observers and be able to intake information from the guild.
Book Club
This was one of the things that just added an extra time that most folks could not afford. It was tough for a lot of folks to commit to reading since it was indeed something you would need to prepare for.
Neutral
Call for help / things that require more prep
There were often times where folks would come looking for guidance on a topic, but SMEs were either absent, non-existent, or needed time to prepare to be a bit more helpful
Is there an ideal engineering guild?
As one of the co-chairs of an engineering guild, I wanted to see if there was something more we could do for better engagement. I will acknowledge that what works for one company, may not work for another. But I am embracing this role as a new learning opportunity to see if what I have done in the past may be good for this latest version of our engineering guild. So… no, there is no “ideal” engineering guild, but let’s see what we can do!
Photo by Monstera Production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/multiethnic-students-gathering-around-table-with-laptop-6238170/