In every Communication there is a Storyline and often as Knowledge Managers we are at the center of it giving updates to leadership, interacting with project delivery teams and mostly Employee Engagement. Did you know that employee engagement directly correlates with a company’s financial health? Studies show that a majority of employees don’t feel engaged at work and one way is through effective Internal Communication. Employees have key questions and it is through answering these questions that you can increase employee morale and make sure you’re a Top Employer.

Now imagine the CEO of the company wants to come up with a newsletter where he speaks to the audience and makes a Connection. Often as Knowledge Managers when we are given this opportunity it’s a once in a lifetime chance and we want to make a good first impression, the Elevator Pitch.

Let’s begin with discussing the Biggest Elevator Pitch Myths and make it relatable to Knowledge Management Practices.

Prospects want consistency not creativity

MYTH:  If you give the same 30-Second Elevator Pitch to the same audience more than once, people will be bored.

TRUTH

• Repetition reinforces your message.
• The more times prospects hear the same message, the more likely they are to respond.
• Consistency implies integrity and trustworthiness.
• If you keep changing your Elevator Pitch your prospects don’t have time to respond

As Knowledge Managers, we conduct many train-the-trainer sessions for our KM Champions. Some of our Champions even record these sessions and look at it each time they engage with their internal stakeholders. Each time they are asked a question like the Benefit Realization of KM Contribution, they would look at your pitch and this repetitive sense making increases their understanding and consistency. In-time many of them don’t even have to come to you for a new joiner induction on introducing the portal, as they have now internalized the pitch and are confident. So, as Knowledge Managers we should work on perfecting our pitch the very first time and believe in our messaging, to ensure we are engaging a wider range of stakeholders through the community we engage on a daily basis.

Catch people at the right time

MYTH:  Once you’ve heard my Elevator Pitch, you don’t need to hear it again.

TRUTH

• There are always different people in the room.
• The people who already know you are in a different frame of mind today than they were last time.
• Your message strikes a different chord today than it did before.

Consulting Leaders often present Webinars and the KM team enables these sessions and anchors them. I remember during the last 10 minutes giving a short brief on the benefit realization to the audience a mix of Consulting, Sales and Delivery teams. My safe assumption was on an average there would be X leads generated as I was confident that there would be an average number of sales people who are responding to the proposal or delivering a client project and the solution presented helps their client. All of these sessions would be recorded and uploaded on the KM portal and after many weeks I would still get enquiries from a sales leader who attended the session then and now wants to engage with the presenter because as on today the solution meets his client demand. So as Knowledge Managers it’s important we focus on user personas and present out KM solutions Elevator Pitch as the messaging will eventually land and connect with our community at a later time if not today.

Focus increases opportunities

MYTH: Casting a wide net creates more opportunities

TRUTH

• Prospects are distracted.
• Prospects are busy.
• Prospects are being bombarded with messages.
• Narrow focus makes you stand out.

Many KM Professionals start with the Overview slide and then onwards dwell into the KM Offerings and benefits and go so wide that the audience has lost the plot. According to this blog post by Dan Steer we need to answer 3 questions.  

• What’s your point? Knowledge Management is often a relatable subject and hence it’s important we break the ice through Conversation ensuring we introduce ourselves and talk about What We do for our larger Community?,  the ways we enable business value through execution enabling self, teams and larger enterprise.  
• What’s in it for me? Knowledge Management Governance frameworks define the span of control and if a user is outside this circle then it is obvious they would want clarity on the reason they should be involved in enabling Knowledge Management.
• What do you want me to do?  This question aims to involve the user and engage them in contributing to KM as a Decision Maker (sponsor), Implementer (KM Team) or Influencer (KM Governance Team including the Steering Committee at times)

 
In-Summary to Put it all Together

As Knowledge Managers we make an Elevator Pitch each day in ensuring through our Conversations we enable our leaders to build trust through Internal Communication Digital Channels. Leaders are looking for Connecting with the larger enterprise and building trust to increase employee engagement and morale indirectly impacting financial performance as employees feel wanted.

There are myths of an elevator pitch and how as Knowledge Managers our behavior should be contrary to ensure we deliver impact. It is important we reinforce how KM can enable our teams and in-time help our community to elevate their understanding of how KM is beneficial.

We are called to Practice-Practice-Practice our Elevator Pitch and make it consistent rather than confusing our audience each time. In-time our km champions likewise leaders should recognize elements that ensure they revisit the KM portal and apply the knowledge rather than have us catch them or practice a pull-based rather than push-based KM. 

With time we should focus on ensure a strong KM governance framework and ensuring our internal stakeholders find KM relatable to participate in driving the adoption and we as KM practitioners can focus on capturing more business value of use-cases that they partner with us to capture each day.

For years, it has been proven that Storytelling helps audiences connect with a Brand. Storytelling has helped products connect with diverse audiences by enabling them to emotionally connect and become loyalists. Leaders have used Business Storytelling to Humanize a Business and increase profits, which in turn helps establish the values and messaging, creating a sustainable business model. Now, how can Knowledge Management learn from Business Storytelling and if we are already using it effectively, do we identify with some of its elements?  Let’s find out.

There are 5 elements of an Effective Business Storytelling framework; let's correlate these to our 5-C KM Roadmap.

Circumstances (Communication Strategy)

Each conversation in KM can be a different story, and as Knowledge Managers we engage with Leaders, Delivery Teams, and New Hires with have different knowledge needs but fail to recognize these as different plots. Each user has a very different circumstance on how KM can impact their need. Many times as Knowledge Managers we fail to go deep and want to go wide, and rely on our proven KM framework to deliver results for our teams and report ways KM is benefiting our communities. However, the result is our users fail to acknowledge how KM is enabling them, as they have not been engaged by us as KM Professionals. Is having a strong Communication Strategy the key?  Let’s find out more from KMI Blogger Amanda Winstead, who calls out 5 ways of Building effective Knowledge Management through Communication, to ensure we can deliver improved outcomes.  The key takeaway is to contextualize knowledge and encourage more open dialogue, which encourages networks to make people help each other and who are passionate to share their Critical Knowledge.

Curiosity (Critical Knowledge)

Curiosity is the most important element of Storytelling. Today, users want instant gratification and often it's the realm of the unknown as the need and the outcome are different. So, as Knowledge Managers how are we to develop these users into believers? We can definitely start with defining what is Critical Knowledge and speak to Leaders and Experts, and engage our teams to ensure we are defining it correctly. The larger question is how do users get access to this knowledge and acknowledge that it’s truly benefiting them and their KM Needs? This is where Communities of Practice, Lessons Learned Practices and other proven techniques help engage users and influence behaviours so users accept these proven methods each time they are looking for something.

While there are a host of KM Tools, Mind-Mapping is a great tool to understand the diverse user personas and reasons impacting KM Adoption. It’s important that we don’t exclude KM Teams, Leaders and IT/HR teams enabling in sharing Critical Knowledge.  Below is a simple graphic of Play-in-Action that is a great starting point to develop a Content Strategy.

Characters (Content Strategy)

Every Story has to have relatable Characters. Often, if a user looking for something they know in their subconscious mind then they form a Connection that helps them want to participate in the experience. 
Often Knowledge Management is narrowed down to just Collecting Content and building a heavy Knowledge Management systemic processes to keep it up to date. We fail to go beyond and KM is embedded in the organizational practices and slowly begins to demonstrate tangible value and align to what matters to the business. We need to draw a fine balance and be seen as People Leaders, and then make systemic approaches work to Collect Knowledge that can be aligned to our Content Strategy. It’s also important to not reinvent KM Best Practices and acknowledge teams who are practising KM in different ways that the methods or tools we are suggesting.

Conversations (Culture)

A story should be capable to evoke emotions and your audience will Share-It.  Imagine if our user community shares the impact that KM has enabled through expanding organizational networks. As Knowledge Managers, we should practice Conversational Leadership and ensure KM is aligned to the Culture Setting of the organization. We should shift our own behaviours from providing answers to developing systemic thinking to enable our leaders to explore critical issues and encourage our teams to participate and ask more questions. KM Tools/Systems have to be seen as Collaborative Social Technologies that facilitate this process and cannot be done away with. The ultimate goal is to guide collective intelligence towards effective action, ensuring capacity development of leaders to believe in KM as a platform to drive change.

Conflicts (Change Management Strategy)

A Story is incomplete without a Conflict that encourages the audience to think of possible options to solve the plot. Many times leaders fail to acknowledge KM and it’s seen as an overhead many strategic KM initiatives fail. It’s important as leaders / KM practitioners that we continue to align and capture KM Success Stories and align them to Organizational Metrics and make these visible. These Knowledge Nuggets will help our community of users see value and invest in showcasing how KM is a value-enabler within their teams. The goal is to go enterprise-wide but most initiatives fail as they fail to create unique business cases that KM can resolve. 

In –Summary to Put it all Together

People seek our great stories as much as food and water. Leaders for years have used Business Storytelling to improve their narrative on how they augment business value to organizational performance. As Knowledge Managers we enable them through our Conversations and support embeds a Cultural shift mind-set. It’s often that no two Circumstances are the same, and this is where the disconnect happens as the leaders see Conflict with KM and hence don’t develop the believers' mindset to support the KM team. It is during these times that an effective Change Management Strategy has to be enabled where we capture Knowledge Nuggets and share with our user community, resulting in Success Stories being showcased linked to organization performance.

Finally, as we align to KM Maturity and there is acceptance, we as Knowledge Managers need to ensure we continue to define user personas and don’t limit it to discounting our known experiences for developing Critical Knowledge. It’s important we are seen as important Characters and create avenues to recognize KM practices that are enabling teams to share passionately and practice continuous learning. It’s important we bring our own Curiosity to each Conversation and indulge our community to develop organizational ethos of being Conversational Leaders and enable teams to ask critical questions and aid in improving the collective intelligence. The final goal is to help our leaders in Capacity Development helping our leaders to believe in KM as an enabler for Change,

The Challenge

Knowledge is power but in reality, enterprises are knowledge-challenged with employees spending 20% or more of their time, looking for it to do their day-to-day jobs. Nowhere is the knowledge challenge more acute than in the customer contact center.

• Customers say that the lack of agent knowledgeability is the #1 impediment to getting good service (Source: Forrester survey).
• Contact center agents point to the same knowledge challenge with their tools being the biggest barrier to delivering good service (Source: eGain survey).

Training can help but it is not cheap, with US companies spending $92.3B in 2021 (Source: Training Magazine). Here is why the agent knowledge problem has become more daunting.

• Traditional training programs have been disrupted by the pandemic and hybrid work models, with 75% of agents still working remote. These agents have no next cube to walk over to for answers.
• Humans retain only 25% of new information they learn just after two days, according to the forgetting curve theory of Hermann Ebbinghaus. In fact, research by the University of Waterloo found that it is a mere 2-3% after 30 days!
• Today’s contact center agents are millennials and Gen Z with short attention spans—12 and 8 seconds respectively (Source: Sparks and Honey). They would rather just learn on the job.
• Agent attrition continues to be very high. This compounds the training challenge since L&D organizations have to start from Ground Zero with a constantly recurring stream of new agents.
• It is hard to teach situational knowhow, i.e., understand and solve a customer problem or provide them advice, based on a specific situation. This knowhow tends to be more tacit, requiring a way to guide agents step by step on what to say and do in the course of such customer interactions. Living “guided lives,” where they use GPS devices for driving or robot advisors for financial management, today’s agents are looking for that kind of guidance in their day-to-day work.

The Solution

The answer to addressing this formidable new training challenge is a modern knowledge management (KM) system deployed as a hub that unifies and orchestrates the following building blocks:

• Content management
• Personalization
• Intent inference, powered by ML
• Search methods for findability
• AI reasoning for conversational and process guidance
• Knowledge analytics for optimization

The knowledge hub eliminates silos, while serving as a trusted source of right answers and expertise, delivering them at the point of work, customer interactions, in this case. Leading organizations are already leveraging the hub, transforming the experiences of customers and employees such as:

• Leading telco improved First-Contact Resolution (FCR) by 37%, while reducing training time by 50% across 10,000+ agents and 600 retail stores.
• Health insurance company reduced agent training time by 33% and sustained agent performance even when 2000 of them had to go remote overnight when Covid hit.

With the knowledge hub complementing training, your contact center agents will become super-agents and all your employees will become super-employees!

Knowledge management can be a powerful tool in the right hands. It has many purposes, but its main goal is to help organizations utilize their knowledge, information, and expertise in a more meaningful way.

One of the ways you can use knowledge management is to increase your company’s revenue. Without further ado, here’s what knowledge management is and how it can affect your company’s profits.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Before getting into the benefits of knowledge management, it’s worth understanding what it actually is. Essentially, knowledge management is about collecting, defining, structuring, managing, and sharing knowledge and information in an organization. Usually, this is knowledge about the experiences of your employees, but it can also be information about other things.

The main goal of knowledge management is to use the organization’s collective knowledge to improve the different aspects of the said organization. For example, the experiences of the employees from one department could inform the decisions of the employees in other departments. The older your organization is, the more knowledge you will have that can be incredibly useful to your current and future employees.

Successful knowledge management requires a culture of constant development, innovation, and learning. Knowledge management can help in all kinds of processes that range from employee transfer and promotion to staff retirement to recruit training. So how exactly can knowledge management be useful for increasing profits?

#1 Improve Decision-Making

Effective knowledge management can help you improve decision-making by informing different departments, teams, and individual employees. When employees have access to the collective knowledge of your entire organization, they will have the experiences and expertise of their colleagues right in their hands.

Informed employees will be able to speed up the decision-making process and even make better decisions by taking into account a wider variety of factors and details. You can use various collaboration tools to further encourage the sharing of opinions and experiences during the brainstorming process.

#2 Grow, Innovate, and Change Culturally

Another reason why knowledge management is so valuable is that it helps you grow, innovate, and change culturally. You will be encouraging your employees to share their own knowledge while making use of the knowledge of their co-workers. This will help you spread more advanced ideas and perspectives on certain topics.

Moreover, such sharing of knowledge is bound to stimulate the growth of your organization and the innovation that will accompany it. Your industry is ever-changing, so being ahead of your competitors will require you to be constantly improving and finding new things, new methods, etc.

#3 Make Information More Accessible

Besides all the ways information and knowledge can now be shared within your organization, you will also be making information more accessible. There is always an issue with accessibility when it comes to sharing knowledge and information, but effective management can solve this problem.

If you need help structuring and managing your information yourself, you can always hire an experienced writer from the writing service Best Essays Education who will help you. This way, you can ensure that all the knowledge of your organization is stored and shared in an efficient way and that everyone has easy access to it.

#4 Avoid Redundant Effort and Expenses

By managing your company’s knowledge effectively, you can avoid redundant effort and expenses which will increase your overall profits. Rather than avoiding redundant effort and expenses in a straightforward way, it is rather an accumulation of different practices that will give you a good result in the end.

For instance, employees will no longer have to spend time doing something over and over again. They can simply check whether this has been done before by their colleagues and learn from those experiences. Instead of reinventing the wheel, employees can streamline their working process and stay motivated consistently.

#5 Increase Customer Satisfaction

In addition to helping employees, effective knowledge management will also have a positive impact on the experiences of your customers. More specifically, you can increase customer satisfaction by using your company’s collective knowledge smartly. You can share some information with your customers, but there’s more to it than having an open knowledge base.

Essentially, because every employee will have access to your organization’s knowledge, each one of them will be able to do a better job and deliver better quality and value to customers. As a result, the overall experience of your customers will improve making them happier and more satisfied with your business.

#6 Reduce the Time of Staff Training

Knowledge management is valuable to your current employees, but it is also incredibly important for those who are joining your team because it can help you reduce the time of staff training. Onboarding and training new hires always take time (if you want to do it properly), but knowledge management can speed up and streamline the process.

By training them with the help of the accumulated knowledge of your organization, you can ensure that they become competent faster and become accustomed to your company before they start working.

#7 Accelerate Customer Delivery

One of the things that contributes to the experience and satisfaction of your customers is delivery – and knowledge management can help you accelerate it. To put it simply, customer delivery is about providing your audience with products and services faster than your competitors would.

You could have the products and services of the same quality as your competitors, but if you are able to deliver them faster to your audience, you will have an upper hand. This delivery can be the literal delivery (i.e., shipping) and the delivery in the sense of presenting the product (i.e., product launch). Moreover, your services can include customer support, advertising, etc. In other words, everything that makes up your customer’s experience with your brand.

#8 Find Information Faster

Last but not least, effective knowledge management allows your employees to find information faster. It may not seem like something particularly important, but the speed at which your team members can find useful knowledge and information could impact all of their activities.

Decision-making, customer delivery, staff training, etc. – all of these are affected by how quickly any given employee can find relevant information. This is precisely why managing your knowledge and information well is so important for a company of any size.

Conclusion

All in all, effective knowledge management can definitely be quite valuable to your organization as it will help you increase profits. Consider other benefits of knowledge management listed in this article and start managing your knowledge more effectively.

Knowledge management is an important process and corporations can take advantage of to maximize their potential. Many organizations have a well of knowledge at their disposal, but they can't readily tap into it because it's not well managed and distributed. Insights become difficult to track or gain because trends from past employees, processes, and departments are not properly stored for future use.

Having the right management structure in place will ensure that knowledge becomes easily accessible throughout the organization.

This article discusses what knowledge management entails, the importance, benefits, and more.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management (KM) refers to the process of collecting, retaining, managing, and sharing knowledge and information within an organization. It typically involves a multidisciplinary approach to achieve company objectives by utilizing the available information within an organization.

More often than not, the knowledge and experience of employees (past and present) can help to tackle future projects. But when such information isn't kept and managed efficiently, the necessary insight will not be available to solve the problem at hand. Then, the organization will have to work on the solution from scratch instead of simply using a copy/paste approach. In short, KM can make an organization faster and more efficient in problem-solving and decision-making.

KM aims to make information and institutional knowledge readily available to staff or whoever needs it.

KM is broken down into three stages:

• Knowledge acquisition (or creation)
• Knowledge Storing
• Knowledge Sharing

By gathering and storing employees' knowledge, organizations retain what has made them successful in earlier times. In addition, sharing this information can help other staff boost performance, thereby improving the entire organization.

The importance of Knowledge Management

The importance of KM to organizations is that it makes them more efficient and aids decision-making.

Decision-making becomes faster since insights from past successes and staff knowledge are available.

Note that the use of KM is not exclusive to executives. Employees looking for information on how to execute a task will have access to the entire institutional knowledge. The result is that the overall expertise of every staff within the organization is at the disposal of each employee. The workforce becomes smarter.

In addition, innovation can grow within the organization since old practices can be identified and built upon.

In essence, KM is a way to share expertise within an organization.

Benefits of Knowledge Management

Some of the common benefits of KM include:

●      Sharing of expertise

●      Quicker problem solving

●      Quicker decision making

●      Reduced time to find information

●      Employee growth and development are fostered

●      The staff becomes more competent faster

●      Improved business processes

●      More innovation

●      Overall time savings

●      Overall organizational agility

Worthy of note is that how well the knowledge is managed plays a role in how much benefit is realized. Therefore, it becomes critical to design and implement an efficient infrastructure to make information readily accessible to every staff within the organization.

Thanks to cloud-based services, anyone can access information from their devices, right from their workstation, without moving an inch. You'd most likely need a managed IT services team to set up and maintain your network infrastructure, manage cloud configurations, and move data to the cloud. Managed service provider definition comprises many tech-related services, so you would have to make a clear agreement based on your unique needs.

Types of Organizational Knowledge

Three types of knowledge flow within an organization:

1.    Explicit knowledge

This is any information that can be easily put in systematic or mathematical form, written, taught, and shared. For example, how to set up billing/invoice, FAQs, instructions, etc. It's a formalized documentation of knowledge that can be used to make decisions, execute a job, or educate an audience.

2.    Implicit Knowledge

Implicit knowledge is gained by applying (or implying) explicit knowledge to a given situation. For instance, you can review FAQs and mathematical formulas to gain insight into the best approach to solve a new challenge. Other examples of implicit knowledge include an employee's ability to prioritize tasks and beat deadlines.

Most times, implicit knowledge has to do with the experience of implicit knowledge.

3.    Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge is intangible and difficult to explain or codify -- it is experience built over time. It usually involves things that we can understand without being said. While tacit knowledge may be challenging to capture and implement, having appropriate structures in place can facilitate sharing experiences between old/retired staff and younger/newer ones.

The Bottom Line

Employees will retire, and some will move on to other ventures. It wouldn't be best to allow their experience and expertise to go out the door with them. With KM, you can share all relevant information organization-wide. So whether staff gets promoted, retired, or transferred, their knowledge can help new replacements easily fill those roles.

At the end of the day, your organization becomes smarter, agile, and more efficient.

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