The goal of Knowledge management (KM) is not only to facilitate knowledge sharing for the optimization of resources, but also to improve efficiency, reduce the learning curve for new employees, foster innovation, and enhance overall performance across the board.

Let’s see how knowledge management as a discipline contributes to the success of each department and the organization as a whole. Considering the diverse range of organization ductions, I will be covering this topic in two blogs. 

Explicit KnowledgeTacit KnowledgePre-Sales The KM harvesting process ensures that success stories, lessons learned, next practices, case studies, Thought leadership, gold templates, and RFPs are readily available to use as a first draft. That can go a long way in producing quality and high-impact responses with a reduced scope of errors. The KM portals connect you to not only the content but also SMEs. This enables the bid and proposal managers to connect with colleagues from various teams, gaining valuable insights and experiences to enhance their proposals and improve their chances of success. Sales

Customer Insights: KM systems capture and share customer insights, preferences, and historical interactions, empowering sales teams to personalize approaches and enhance customer relationships.

Sales Playbooks: Documented best practices, successful sales strategies, and competitive intelligence can be organized in playbooks, providing a valuable resource for sales training and strategy development.

Product Knowledge: Access to up-to-date product information and features enables sales teams to convey accurate and compelling value propositions to customers.

Sales is broadly based on relationships and a successful sales pitch is not only about the product but a 360 representation of the org. Core values, IT infrastructure, org. Core values, and previous delivery experiences for similar services.

KM provides a platform to collaborate with experts from different service lines and offerings and get a holistic view, learnings, and previous delivery experiences to prepare a solid sales pitch backed by TL, success stories, and org. Performance records.

Marketing

KM supports marketing teams in creating, organizing, and distributing content effectively, ensuring consistency in messaging across various channels.

Campaign Analytics: Historical data on past marketing campaigns, including successes and failures, can be analyzed through KM, enabling data-driven decision-making for future campaigns.

Market Research: Knowledge about market trends, competitor activities, and customer preferences can be centralized, facilitating informed marketing strategies and product positioning.

The ability to communicate effectively, both internally within the team and externally with the audience, is crucial. This includes understanding the tone, style, and messaging that resonate with the target demographic. connecting with product managers and sales team who have previously worked with the client can help shape up the campaigns keeping in mind the customer nuances and preferences. 

The KM portal creates a network of experts from different service lines and offerings showcasing their expertise and areas of interest providing you a quick gateway to reach out to your experts of interest. 

HR

Employee Onboarding, offboarding, and Training: KM facilitates the creation and maintenance of comprehensive onboarding materials, training modules, and resources, ensuring a smooth integration for new hires.
The KM-powered offboarding process ensures that the knowledge is not lost with the loss of an employee from the team or organization.

Talent Management: Knowledge about employee skills, performance, and career aspirations can be effectively managed through KM, aiding in talent retention and development.

HR Policies and Compliance: Centralized storage of HR policies and compliance information helps ensure that all employees have access to the latest guidelines, reducing the risk of non-compliance.

HR as we all know is about human relationships. Having in-person discussions, mentoring and shadowing processes can increase the impact of onboarding and training manifold.

Likewise onboarding and offboarding process might not include minor details like client-specific details, their preferences, style of working, and key focus areas which can be uncovered by in-person discussion and exchange of tacit knowledge.

There is no function of an organization that will not benefit from the KM culture. KM plays a crucial role in optimizing various functions within an organization by facilitating the efficient capture, sharing, and utilization of information, insights, and expertise in the form of explicit and tacit knowledge. This can successfully lead to the development of new products, services, or processes and improve and optimize the current processes for the overall success of the organization. 
 

We recently asked KMI Instructor John Hovell why Knowledge Managers should practice Organization Development (OD) methods for a story we are doing, and he provided us with 
a new "Top 10" list...

FYI: John and Dr. Sharon Varney are teaching our next OD Certification class, Mar 18-20.  Details here...

10: Employee engagement continues to be a hot topic for KM. OD offers numerous tools and approaches to deeply understand what engaged individuals, groups and teams in your organization can look like.

9: KM and information management are so often blurred together and confused. OD brings techniques to “bracket” and “set boundaries” and increase clarity. 

8: Don’t do KM for the sake of doing KM, do KM to improve an organizational situation. OD does the deeper dive to understand what’s underneath the org situation. 

7: We talk about culture in KM quite a bit - in OD we often reframe "culture" as "group dynamic" and then work with the similarities and differences to shift the culture. 

6: KM often aims for organizational learning - OD looks at group dynamics that are enabling and disabling org learning. 

5: KM is interested in improving processes, OD deeply studies why the processes are the way they are.

4: It's often hard to get buy-in for KM.  OD offers tools to reframe buy-in and learn how to intervene with the resistance to move KM forward. 

3: KM desires improved collaboration - KM techniques can help - OD techniques can get underneath what's truly enabling or blocking collaboration.
 
2: KM is often about changing the organization, OD over-arches change management even more directly than km does.

1: You are the most untapped source of knowledge - OD will offer "use of self" also known as "self as an instrument."
 

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Knowledge management is now widely accepted as a key component for organizational success. By streamlining the organizational intellectual property, organizations drive innovation. However, the successful implementation of KM initiatives often requires a cultural change that is impossible to incorporate without adopting the change management principles. 

Let’s see how organizations need to leverage change management to optimize knowledge management efforts. But first, let’s see what change management is all about.

When an organization undergoes a state of transition, change management comes into play. Change management incorporates the whole 360-degree process of planning, communicating, and implementing strategies to minimize resistance and maximize the adoption of new processes, technologies, or organizational structures.

Let’s see how Change Management can smoothen the KM adoption process.

Most employees are resistant to change – Even though KM is now accepted as the keystone for Innovation and organization success, organizations still struggle with the adoption and acceptance of KM processes. When KM is introduced in an organization, employees must adopt new habits, share knowledge, and embrace technology and processes to support knowledge creation and sharing. The change management team prepares the employees for the cultural shift by proactively addressing the resistance and fostering collaboration to understand and address concerns to enable a seamless adoption of KM-led work culture. 

Bringing Stakeholders on board to shift KM – Change management plays a key role in engaging key stakeholders at all levels of KM adoption ensuring that their expectations and business goals are well aligned with the KM strategy. Engaging these stakeholders helps gather input, build support, and address concerns throughout the KM initiative, thus increasing the likelihood of successful adoption and sustained usage of KM.

Communication plays a vital role in driving awareness, and adoption of KM. To make employees agreeable to the KM style of working,  Organizations need to communicate the purpose, benefits, and progress of the knowledge management initiative. Change management methodologies provide frameworks for developing comprehensive communication plans and training programs, ensuring that employees build awareness and understanding, reducing uncertainty and resistance around the cultural shift.

This clearly emphasis the case of incorporating a change management function when organizations are driving a shift towards a KM style of working. Change management helps organizations navigate the cultural, behavioural, and technological shifts required to effectively implement KM strategy. It ensures that knowledge management initiatives are not only adopted but also integrated into the organization’s DNA, ultimately leading to improved performance, innovation, and competitiveness.

There are many companies out there with employees who don’t see Human Resources as their friend, especially when they have to reach out to them for help. For example, an employee may reach out to HR for clarification on a policy and not get a response for days. Or, within the HR team itself, members may find themselves obtaining the same information repeatedly from employees because they don’t have a central system to refer to.

If these struggles sound familiar and you’re ready to mitigate the harmful effects on your team’s productivity, collaboration, and communication, knowledge management can help.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept, experts say that “HR knowledge management is the practice of centralizing all HR documents, policies, information, and knowledge, and making that vital information easy for anyone in the company to access and update from anywhere.”

HR departments can use knowledge management to keep everything HR-related in the same place and accessible, which, in turn, betters the workflow across the organization. 

Let’s explore seven reasons why HR teams need to utilize knowledge management.

Standardize HR Policies and Practices

First, knowledge management can help you regulate HR policies and practices. You can keep your HR team on the same page with how they conduct themselves and go about their specific job roles.

Also, you can keep all of your company’s HR policies in one place and make them accessible to all employees. That way, when they need to refresh themselves on a specific policy or find out if a particular policy exists, they can access accurate information about those things.

Better Communication Practices

Unfortunately, there are various reasons why employees don’t share knowledge. For instance, they simply don’t have the time to get the information out because they’re busy with their primary job responsibilities.

Or, there isn’t a designated platform for sharing knowledge, which results in employees spending way too much time searching for information they need, so they just scrap looking for it altogether.

However, with knowledge management, you can create an environment that encourages better communication practices. You can set a standard that information sharing is not only encouraged but required for the effective communication and collaboration of the team.

Better communication practices make it easier to share information and develop a strategy for sharing knowledge across your organization effectively.

Get Information Faster

Knowledge management allows you to find the information you need faster. For example, employees don’t have to wait for a response from HR to find out information. Instead, they can access the same data themselves and find the answers they’re looking for whenever they need to. 

Also, a quicker turnaround can be especially beneficial for fully remote or hybrid teams as we trend in that direction for all workplaces. These employees don’t have the luxury of stopping by HR to get a quick question answered. So, knowledge management becomes that much more critical to how well your team works together remotely.

Learn More About How Employees Use HR Information

With knowledge management, HR teams can learn how employees are accessing and using HR information. For example, you can find out what kind of information they’re seeking the most and how they get to that information. 

Also, studying how employees use HR information can give you insight into which functions and features employees aren’t using, but should be because it would make their jobs easier. Armed with information like this, you can highlight opportunities for further training. 

Highlight Opportunities for Further Training

When you see how employees navigate your knowledge management system, you can pinpoint where more support and training may be beneficial.

For example, let’s say you’re getting consistent requests for information readily available in your knowledge management solution. You can then create specific training for finding this information in the system and offer it to all employees.    

Simplify the Onboarding Process

These days, a packet of information about their job responsibilities and your company’s history just won’t do for the employee onboarding experience. Instead, HR can improve the onboarding process by moving it to a knowledge management system.

Adding and updating employee information is a lot easier. Employees have access to all of their HR documents and information should they need it. They can also complete any paperwork, pieces of training, or provide any other necessary documentation right in the platform, minimizing the time and money spent on the onboarding process. 

Improve Employee Well-being

This benefit probably doesn’t come to mind right away, but a knowledge management solution can improve employee well-being.

For instance, burnout is real, especially during the holidays. It’s so easy to get consumed with completing projects before the year’s end and keeping up with customer demand during this time. But, with knowledge management, you can identify employees who’ve yet to use their vacation and sick days and encourage them to do so to avoid burnout and better the chance of them having good morale when they return.

You can also find out more about the personal lives of your employees through knowledge management. You can use what you learn about their passions, interests, family background, and other information to improve their motivation and, ultimately, their productivity.

For example, if you find out an employee’s been having a tough time, you can decorate their office space with motivational quotes, beautiful artwork, office plants, and other decors that they would love to lift their spirit.

Conclusion

HR teams need to utilize knowledge management to encourage consistent communication and accurate knowledge sharing across the organization. Knowledge management can also help you define how your teams work together and streamline their efforts.

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The effective knowledge harvesting, utilization, and sharing are pivotal to competitive advantage for any organization. As Sir Francis Bacon quoted “knowledge is power”. The channeled knowledge through the Knowledge Management (KM) system helps bridge the skills gap, allowing people to make better decisions and provide efficient and productive results, ultimately leading to time and costs savings.   

Knowledge can be broadly divided into two categories: explicit and tacit.  explicit knowledge can be easily codified and retained by the organization via manuals, documents, eLearning courses, etc. However, tacit or intangible knowledge that comes with people’s experiences and expertise can only be retained and channelized as explicit knowledge via the network of KM communities. This knowledge leads to better decisions and outcomes benefitting not only the people but the organization as a whole.

Below given are some of the most effective knowledge management practices to capture tacit knowledge and setting KM framework in any organization.

1. New Joiner program – A highly effective means of getting a new team member up to speed in a team is the new joiner program. This initiation process includes providing playbook, resource guide, manuals of common tools, processes, procedures, important contacts, etc. for effective knowledge transfer to the new joiner.

2. Exit Program – When an employee leaves the organization or team, he or she takes away all the tacit knowledge. It is vital to have in place a robust exit interview process ensuring the capturing of all the relevant learnings from the employee: including key job responsibilities, location of documented processes, positive and negative experiences, key contacts, etc. This knowledge should be wisely used for the on-boarding of new employees ultimately leading to over organizational development.

3. Sharing Best Practices - In layman terms, “best practices” is a technique that through experience produces better and tangible results compared to other tried methods. Capturing and sharing of best practices should be a critical component while setting up the KM framework to get the maximum possible benefits of shared experiences and knowledge.

4. Setting up Knowledge Repositories – Setting up a knowledge base and SME directory that can be easily accessed by all employees for best practices, thought leaderships, processes, and procedures can be an extremely effective cost and time-saving tool leading to greater productivity.

5. Collaboration and Communities – Collaboration and KM Communities are the building blocks of a KM framework. Collaboration allows people to connect with the other practitioners to share information, best practices, and breakthrough ideas for Innovation. Collaboration can be facilitated effectively using social network tools used in your organization, be it chat, blogs, wikis, live stream, panel discussion, audio/video conferencing. These powerful technologies are highly effective to promote collaboration in scenarios where the audience is globally dispersed or works virtually. Communities are a platform that can be used to capture the tacit knowledge shared by the collaborators into explicit knowledge that can be then accessed by employees globally.

6. Metrics Analysis – To measure the impact of the KM framework, measuring KM activities via metrics is of critical importance. The direct impact of KM on productivity, operational efficiency, cost reduction can be achieved by analysis of ROI metrics. The regular analysis of KM tools and initiatives can be also critical while upgrading the KM framework.

The purpose of the KM efforts is to make accessible the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. The above-mentioned practices are not exhaustive and certainly vary depending on your organization’s goals and priorities, however, they form the basis of effective KM.

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