Improve efficiency with better knowledge management
How to make knowledge more available to improve productivity and efficiency
How to make knowledge more available to improve productivity and efficiency
Key Takeaways
Improving knowledge availability can reduce waste, thus improving efficiency.
Help identify who has tacit knowledge and on which topics.
Set guidelines for capturing explicit knowledge and learn from those who do it the best.
Overview
When thinking about efficiency, organizations tend to adjust structures, lay off employees, and update roles & responsibilities. While these steps make sense, there is a hidden tactic few tend to use.
One of my first articles was about improving the organization’s knowledge management. I emphasize the importance of leadership and state of mind rather than using specific tools and processes.
In this article, I will go over three ways to improve your organization’s knowledge management today, making it more productive. My approach starts with tackling waste, as defined in Toyota Production System.
Who Knows What?
Remember times when you needed access to a specific software? Or the WIFI password? Or just how to make coffee in the new Espresso machine? A Research from 2013 found that the knowledge worker spends 30% of his workday searching for information.
The more expensive type of knowledge is tacit knowledge, which employees find hard to express formally. One way to significantly improve this knowledge availability is to share a “knowledge map” of the organization.
It could start with a simple Excel sheet listing all employees and their –
Interests
What they know about
What they directly own
It could also integrate with HR management software, specifying the above on each employee record.
The goal is to find the person who will help you the most with your question in the fastest way possible. Just imagine you could just look up the company Coffee expert or the one employee who gives access to that software you needed.
Where Does Knowledge Exist?
Other than tacit knowledge, there are many forms of explicit knowledge. Without proper guidelines, explicit knowledge becomes overwhelming and suffers from –
Lack of accuracy — as processes change over time
Lack of relevancy — documents from 10 years ago are still available widely
Lack of visibility — it is harder to find that one piece of information someone needs
With the above, people lose trust in the system and keep their knowledge to themselves. A quick look at the amount of data in personal drives/folders over the public ones can prove it.
To tackle it, the organization needs to define guidelines and procedures. They should include, but are not limited to, the following –
Which systems to use — for each use case, there should be one and only one relevant system to work with. A design spec might lie in Figma, while a marketing campaign in Google Drive.
Ownership — each document, folder, space, and system should have a direct owner/s. The owner’s responsibility is to validate only the relevant knowledge stays.
Verification process — on a recurring schedule, knowledge should be validated and verified. A great system also lists who confirmed the content and when. This methodology also helps build trust around it.
Who Does It The Best?
For the organization’s knowledge management to thrive, leadership must first acknowledge it’s an essential skill. Since it is a complex skill to learn, those who do it the best should be marked and set as an example to others.
These individuals act as ambassadors for knowledge management in the organization and can report directly to leadership on their achievements and difficulties and help build the strategy around this topic.
As habits are created, more individuals learn knowledge management skills and affect others, helping the organization’s culture blossom bottom-up.
Summary
I firmly believe each company should constantly work on reducing waste and improving productivity. A significant improvement can come from tackling how knowledge is created, transferred, and managed.
The first steps an individual or a company can take are to identify who holds the tacit knowledge, set the guidelines for creating and managing the explicit knowledge, and learn from those who do it the best.