When I was in higher education, leaders often used the term “best practices.”
It got tossed around like a beach ball in faculty meetings, department meetings, and at the beginning of each school year when our superintendent addressed everyone in the district.
Best practices is a catchall phrase that sounds good. It sounds important. Makes people want to lean in and learn more. Or at least have their shot at hitting the ball when it lands in their section.
Generally speaking, best practices are:
“Standards or a set of guidelines that are known to produce good outcomes if followed. Best practices are related to how to carry out a task or configure something. Strict best practice guidelines may be set by a governing body or may be internal to an organization.” [source]
Best, however, compared to what?
And in what contexts?
These are important questions.
The Thing about Best Practices
The thing about best practices is they are designed to make everyone's life easier. "This is how things get done around here" and all that jazz.
The challenge is, best practices are often biased. Standards developed by one demographic don't make sense for another demographic.
Here are a couple of common scenarios where best practices become muddy:
In organizations:
Is what’s best for a new 25 year old customer service employee trying to pay off student loans and find affordable housing the same as what’s best for a 61 year old vice president with a few million in the bank and his mortgage paid off who’s thinking about retirement in a year or two?
In the solopreneur/freelancing world:
Is what’s best for a 40-something mom with three kids trying to build a livable income from her cottage industry business online the same as what’s best for a single 29 year old man building his online fitness company?
The comparisons are absurd.
Yet this blanket term “best practices” shows up over and over in social media posts. On blogs. In videos, on podcasts, and on the websites of the world’s most powerful companies.
Best Practices Don't Level the Playing Field
Despite what you might hear out there in Internet land, the online playing field is not level.
Many variables make up the online equation. Best practices is but one of them.
I understand the need to put into place cultural and operational guidelines for all professional spaces. Work can't be a free-for-all. Not IRL and not virtually. People need and like having guidelines that imply fairness and equality. People like knowing "how things work around here" so they can function without falling apart from crazy making rule changes.
In the online space, where more of us work these days than ever before, best practices have emerged for common requirements.
- Building a website?
- Posting and engaging on social media to build an audience?
- Developing content for promotional purposes?
You will find people who have developed best practices for each of these situations. You will find people who have adopted them, too, and are actively following them.
(This website reflects best practices for design and UX as I understand them as of the publication of this post.)
But are online best practices equal and fair?
Do the guidelines guarantee everyone who follows them will succeed?
Hardly.
Best Practices Are Limiting
The technical tools offered to consumers for developing “best practices” in our chosen fields are, by their nature, limiting.
Often delivered in a “one size fits all” approach (e.g. theme packages for building your website; templates for Instagram posts, etc.), these tools can't guarantee everyone who uses them will see positive results (e.g. consistent monthly income; growing audience numbers; sales page conversions...).
Algorithms are constantly changing.
What worked for SEO yesterday is obsolete today.
Tech platforms roll out “new tools” for us to use when we haven’t learned the old ones yet.
Keeping up with technology is exhausting enough.
If you’re working hard to build a business online or find a new career opportunity, exhaustion goes up exponentially. Often with minimal returns.
So...
How do we develop best practices in our tech-centered world that produce “good outcomes” for everyone?
I don't have an answer to this question right now. But I'm willing to ask it.
I'm willing to ask others what they think best practices could look like for doing business online.
How can we work together to create them so that they do what they're designed to do:
Give us all a shot at hitting the beach ball.
Guide us all towards experiencing excellence.
And yield good outcomes that matter and make a difference.
