Choosing Your Staff
Choosing staff is one of the easiest things to mess up on when you are administering or building your forum. You could be making your forum for the first time, or be an experienced webmaster and still make a mistake on hiring staff. In this article, I am going to teach you how to choose staff wisely, carefully, and correctly.
Correct Amount of Staff
Choosing the correct amount of staff is usually the hardest thing to master. Many people will hire loads of staff when they start their forum because they think their forum will look better with more staff, or they just don't want to have to do any staff work themselves. Whatever the reason, the amount of staff really influences the public view on your forum. Say you just opened up a General Discussion forum. You have 10 members right now. A good number of staff to have is about 1 admin (you), and 1 moderator.
Having too many staff at early stages can make your members feel uncomfortable and not want to join your forum. Now, say that your forum has grown and now has about 1,000 members. That is a pretty good number to hire a second administrator (or a third if you started with two) and one or two more moderators.
Stress and Work Management
Public View is not the only reason you should manage your staff well. Their workload and stress can also depend on your judgement. If you have too many moderators on a forum, the staff tend to slack and get sloppy. If you have too many, they are worked too much and tend to quit or take a leave of absence. Workloads can vary between the positions. For example, being a Review Team member here at Forum Promotion, you simply grab a review to complete if there is one open, but imagine if there was a required number of reviews you had to do to stay on the review team. Everyone would be trying to reach that number, and the workload would change up a little.
Reputation
Last but not least, the people you choose to be your staff has a massive impact on your forum. When you are hiring someone (lets say, Hilbil100), you want to do a background check, so to speak. Go and see his previous employment place. Check out what friends he talks to and how he conducts himself on the forums. You want people that are professional and will work hard to be your staff. If Hibil100 cusses and disobeys the forum rules, one should not even consider him for staff. If he is kind to all other members, gives constructive content, and always follows the rules, you have a good staff member right there.
Also, looking at their personality is a huge factor in how they will preform. If they are the laid back kind of people, it is possible they will slack or make ill-moral judgements.This also ties into their rationality. Sometimes people like to be too formal for a non-formal forum or website. This could create some social differences between your staff, which can be a good and bad thing.
Conclusion
All of the points above are here to help you choose your forum/website staff effectively. Hopefully, this article will give you some tips on choosing your staff for your forums and why it is good to choose wisely.
