Community moderation is stressful. We all should learn how to deal with it.

I am a community moderator and I used to have my job very stressful and frustrating sometimes. On the other side, I was seeing some other moderators who were living their happy life and were positive about what they are doing. That was alway a question for me that how these people deal with their repetitive and stressful work as a moderator?

I was searching in the CMX video a very interesting title: "Moderation Is Stressful, but Burnout Is Optional" by "Jenn Patel". Below is my understanding from Jenn's speech, which made changes in my carrier in a good way. The main question is: 

Why moderation is so stressful and how to deal with this stress?

Stress mainly comes from the expectations. When you think that people expect you to do something that you are not always perfect at, you get nervous. Let's see what people expect from us moderators?

 Showing up with empathy is difficult, hard to outsource, and will wear you out. But it's precisely what we need form you. 

Seth Godin

As we all moderators know, people expect us to be always patient and humble, however this expectation and huge responsibility can itself bring us lots of stress. 

So, let's find out how to get solutions out of stress. To start, learn to remember the 4 "A"s rule: 

1. Awareness

2. Attention 

3. Acceptance

4. Action

1. Awareness: Identify the stressor and find why it makes you stressed. If you don't find the source, you can't find the solution. The sources of stress usually have roots in your mental situation and the working environment. You need to look for the both internal and external stressors.  

2. Attention: How is your stress manifesting? It can be really impactful if we see how our stress is affecting the people around us, like our colleagues or even community members.

3. Acceptance: Don't hide it from yourself and others. As long as you are hiding it, you are not able to accept that there is an issue, so you will never look for a solution eventually. 

4. Action: Take action in yourself and the system you are working in. You might need to change something in your mentality (self-care), in your office, or in your team to fix the stress problem you have. 

Let's start with yourself and what you can do internally to decrease the stress level: 

• Self-Care: It is important for the moderators and the support team to learn that self-care is not selfish. Often times people in the "helping" professions, like community support and moderation, put themselves second, or put themselves behind anybody else. They think that the more time they are spending on their work, more people they are helping, no matter if it get's their mind frustrated. But the truth is that you cannot be the best of yourself for people when you are not treating yourself well. So, take care of yourself, keep the energy level high, then you are actually able to help other people better.

• Unconditional Positive Regards: This is not about thinking positive about everything, saying all is sunshine and unicorns. What it really means is to see the best in people and believe in that you can bring out the best from people, even when they are showing you their worst. It is not an easy task to deal with the people who are show the inappropriate behaviour, but as a member of the community management team, we the moderators should always avoid fight-back. Meaning, try to find the best out of any interaction with the community members.

The internal elements, like "self-care" and "unconditional positive regards", are the elements we have full control above. But, there are also stressful elements in the external environment around us. Let's see what are they, and how we can change them in a way that can help reducing the stress level. There are two different systems that can be used overcome the stressors in the external environment:

System 1: Strategy

What is the strategy you should follow:

1. Purpose: Why you are doing the moderation? What are you trying to offer to your community members? Is your community's purpose to improve people's knowledge, or to make them happy, or...

2. Focus: When you know the main goal and the purpose of your community, think of what is critical and what is nice to have that helps the community to achieve to its goal.

3. Streamlining: We go straight from the focus to the streamlining. Based on what you should focus on, you figure out what you should cut or what you should make more efficient?

4. Teamwork Beyond Your Team: Sometimes it is good to have collaborations with the other teams in your organization, who can make your life easier. For example, if there are things which are very manual and repetitive for the moderation team, you can directly contact with someone from the technical team and ask if they can make these processes automated? This way you will spend more time on interesting and challenging tasks that motivates you for your work.

System 2: Infrastructure

What is the infrastructure you should follow:

1. Automation: It is something like the example I have mentioned above. Another example would be to automate the process of welcoming a new community member. That can be done by automated welcome emails for the new members. Less repetitive tasks, less burnout experiences in your work.

2. Community Guidelines: There are lots of grey areas when you are moderating a community contents. Try to have a very detailed guideline, where most of the things are black and white, which makes you able to make the moderation decisions easier and faster. You do not need to make the hard and risky decisions as long as you are acting based on the regulations in the community guideline.

3. Resource Allocation: By the help you get from the streamlining (what we should cut and what we should improve), we learn where to put more effort on. For example, after streamlining you understand that you should spend more time on social media ad rather than working on the SEO by creating contents. Here you need to take an action and put the recourse on social media like instagram and Twitter. When you know what to focus on, you will be more productive and you will feel better eventually.

4. Training: One example is to have a FAQ section, where repetitive questions can be answered. It can be used as a source for training your new moderators or even your community members. This is again a part of the repetitive process that you can avoid.

This was what I have learned from this speech along with my personal experiences. I know that it might seem not effective, specially if you are currently experiencing lots of stress, but it has worked for me and all other moderators in our team. Now, we all are happier and enjoying what we do. It takes time and a little effort to manage these stuff, but it absolutely worths it. 

Wishing you all stress-free and fun moderation. 

If you found this helpful, please don't forget to like this posts or leave me a comment. I am willing t post more about the community moderation.