Managers typically focus on managing people and operations but often overlook one of the most important management responsibilities — managing knowledge.
So what exactly is Knowledge Management? Knowledge Management can be defined as a process of identifying, creating, capturing, organizing, storing, sharing, and effectively utilizing knowledge and information within an organization or community. Note the important distinction between knowledge and information. Information is what you put in your digital and paper files or on your bookshelf, and encompasses everything from strategy, goals and policies, to communications, financial records and data, presentations, and operating manuals. Knowledge is “know how” and includes the collective wisdom, values, skills and experiences of your team members.
The next thing to understand is that Knowledge Management is both a management discipline and type of business culture. There are many theories, models, tools and techniques used by corporations in support of Knowledge Management business strategies. You could write dissertations on the subject, and many have. My modest goal here is to introduce you to the subject and offer seven tips that line managers can use to better leverage the information and knowledge contained in your business unit to improve the productivity of your team or business unit and unlock their potential.
Why Knowledge Management is important comes down to productivity and efficiency. In many offices, people segregate information, making it difficult for others to find and use. Often, they’ll engage in tasks that involve work that has already been done by others, which they may not be aware of, or are having difficulty finding. This is almost always the case if your operations have become siloed around different business functions. It often seems that every office has business critical functions that are dependent on one staffer who has the knowledge and experience required to perform those functions, which means things can grind to a halt when that staffer is ill, on vacation, retires or leaves for other employment. These types of situations cause duplication of effort, rework, and workflow interruptions, which reduce efficiency and productivity. They can also blur transparency and create confusion and frustration for your clients or customers. There is also the costs associated with outsourcing work that you didn’t realize could be completed in-house by team members who have the required knowledge.
It’s also important to note that implementing Knowledge Management, like any change to your operating culture, can be difficult, unless everyone understands the benefits and you proactively reinforce and incentivize its use. Building a Knowledge Management culture will require time and patience, with opportunities for feedback and adjustment, and pauses for reflection and learning.
Once you’ve made the commitment to employ Knowledge Management techniques, you’ll find that successful practice reinforces participation and compliance. You should see, and will be able to demonstrate, improved business continuity, enhanced operational resilience, and stronger collaboration. If you understand and document your processes and have logically organized your information, you can create tools for staffers, as well as for customers or clients, that empower self-service and self-help. When your customers or clients have problems or questions, any of your staff can play the help desk role if they are empowered to access the relevant information. And once your people get used to regularly sharing information, collaboration increases, which allows individuals to tap each other’s knowledge and experience. Knowledge management is especially empowering for your hybrid and remote workers because it helps remove many of the barriers created by distance and time.
Here are seven basic techniques you can employ to better manage and exploit the knowledge embedded in your operations:
- Digital Information Storage: Make sure your staff are storing their work products in a digital format in a secure environment that everyone on the team with permission can access. You will need a logical storage architecture and standard protocols for file extensions and file naming that make it as easy as possible for everyone to find, access and share that information. The platform and software will depend on your employer — and there are many powerful Knowledge Management and collaboration platform tools out there. For many smaller operations, a KISS approach to tech support may be best to support adoption. Most of my career I’ve worked with nothing more than the Office application suite, with information stored on shared network drives or in the cloud secured by firewalls and folder permissions.
- Strong Search Tools: Having information carefully filed away does not ensure you and your staff can efficiently access it. The time required to find something with a weak search tool often leads to decisions to just re-do the work. Also make sure that your storage file architecture and naming protocols are consistent and optimized to your search tool. Implement file retention policies that require periodic removal of information that is no longer current or business relevant to improve research results. Keep your eyes out for new technology as AI is revolutionizing the search space.
- Process Documentation: If you haven’t already, document your business processes, starting with those you consider to be most business critical. Document them down to a “how-to” level that takes you step by step through the process. Knowing how things get done, in what order, by who and why is critical to avoiding disruptions and enabling smooth transitions of process ownership. It also creates an opportunity for you and your team to spot inefficiencies and simplify processes to free up time for other productive work. By knowing what needs to happen at each step of the process and who is responsible, it also speeds up troubleshooting when there is a problem.
- Cross-Training: Having documented key processes, it is much easier to cross-train your staff to provide back-up and operational resiliency. Make sure you have staffers designated as back-ups and cross-trained for all key critical business functions who can step in when needed.
- Team Collaboration: When you assign a project to a team instead of an individual, you open the door to the sharing of information and knowledge within your team. The extra staff time invested will usually pay off in better solutions that require less tweaking and rework, and can be implemented more quickly. Team collaboration allows knowledge pooling, increases access to diverse perspectives, creates opportunities to build leadership and communication skills, and allows for complex tasks to be broken down into parts and steps that can be shared out to the group members.
- Skills Inventory: Many companies have adopted Intranet-based skills inventories that capture information about employees, starting with names, roles and departments, but also including skills, qualifications, training, certifications and educational background. This tool is designed to help management identify employees who possess certain skills, such as a foreign language, a software certification or legal training when the need arises. If your employer has an inventory tool in place, make sure your staff have entered their information, and familiarize yourself with the tool. If there is no corporate tool, then consider conducting a skills inventory survey for your team. Not only does it provide you with a way to identify and tap expertise that you may not have realized was available, it also allows you to assess any significant skills gaps or missing competencies that can be addressed through training or hiring. At a minimum, spend the time to get to know your staff’s skills and interests so that you can tap into that knowledge as opportunities arise.
- Culture Building: Ultimately, building a knowledge management culture is less about tools than it is about your people and the work culture they operate in. Staff have to understand the new culture, what the strategic need and benefits are, and how it will affect them before they will commit to the change. If they are siloed or averse to changes in technology or work processes, then they may resist your efforts to employ knowledge management. They may be concerned that cross-training will make them replaceable, or that sharing their work products will allow others to steal credit.
Overcoming hesitation and outright resistance requires time and patience. You need to champion the change by setting a personal example. Make your staff part of the change process, and provide them with opportunities for learning and feedback on problems encountered and best practices learned. You may need to provide training and resources. Establishing adoption metrics will help people feel a sense of progress and provide a basis for recognizing individual and group contributions. You may need to set and enforce expectations regarding how information is stored and shared. You can help speed the process by engaging them in managing the transition and by incentivizing the desired behaviors. Once your staff can see the benefits and feel safe in the new culture, they will take ownership and help you drive the change.
Closing Note
While working from home during COVID on projects distributed across global time zones, I came to appreciate just how powerful asynchronous collaboration and information sharing could be. It was no longer possible to just walk down the hall and ask a colleague for help. By using search and information tools, I could tap into the work being done by my colleagues and staff, often eliminating the need to recreate analysis already done by others, or prepare a report or presentation from scratch.
At the same time, I realized how much duplication of effort was still occurring, as my staff were often engaged in doing similar projects requiring similar information, but for different clients or at different times. I occasionally had to deal with staffers who saved their work to their desktops or thumb drives instead of our collaborative workspaces. I also struggled with weak search tools that delivered tons of irrelevant information extracted from an un-curated and ever-expanding collection of digital files, created in part because it was easier to increase memory allocations than to conduct document reviews in compliance with the corporate file retention policy. In each case, these types of problems can be managed once you understand them and become less frequent as staff experience the benefits of information sharing and knowledge management.
These experiences made me a true believer in the value of Knowledge Management and the potential it offers for enhanced efficiency and productivity if you make it a true part of your operating culture.
