Knowledge Management Planning and Employment
Bill Hewlett of Hewlett/Packard said; “If HP knew what HP knew, we could be three times richer.”
Employment issues are often broken into three common periods – The 3E’s; Entry, Expert and Exit. Knowledge transfers are commonly made at these three well-defined times. However, any experienced Knowledge Management Planning expert would counsel all organisations to do this gathering a lot more frequently for many good reasons. But as a minimum standard you should look at the Three E’s.
As a part of Knowledge Management Planning we try to move Knowledge from residing in the person to being resident in the position or systems and thus staying on the job, even if a person leaves. Why?
People will always come and go from any role, but critical knowledge must remain for the organisation to remain viable. Strategic control and Knowledge Management Planning in relation to employment is important because -
- New employees bring knowledge with them and the organisation must pay for that in the price a person sells their services for [their salary value].
- Existing employees develop Knowledge during their tenure. They will certainly cost money to employ and to train while you bring them to full production value.
- Departing employees take Knowledge with them as they leave, and after they leave the replacement must go through these steps again.
- The organisation is exposed to many risks without a Knowledge Management Plan. What happens when a key employee take weeks off work for holidays, sudden leave for sickness or injury? What happens if they join the opposition and take the Knowledge you paid for with them?
- Employee know-how is what gets things done. Know-who is vital Knowledge too. That is the Knowledge of knowing who can do things or supply things or make something happen. Contacts and networks are vital.
Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and sometimes what you think you know prevents you from learning what you need to know.
The most commonly practiced and best understood Knowledge transfer occurs during the employment process. However, in my experience, more people are employed or fired for their attitude - despite all the good science available.
The second most practised employment Knowledge transfer is conducted at exit. Again my experience has shown most organisations score an almost complete failure to comprehensively capture the Knowledge available as employees depart. That’s usually high cost to the organisation and potentially high-risk too.
Typically we go through many levels of research, from desktop to field interviews, audits, mapping, coding, practice tests, archiving and more to get the detail in each of the milestone periods of employment, and at least five for each of the intermediate steps.
What a people know is what separates any organisation from another. In service organisations it is all they have. Service is Knowledge applied to a task. Why would you not want to manage it strategically?
Packaged coded intellectual property like patents, trademarks, franchises and so on are only 20% of the whole know-how of an organisation. The remaining 80% is valuable too, but it is so intangible it requires careful and specialist outside help to bring it to bear on the market and for the organisation to derive value from it. Few organisations either need or could fully occupy a specialist, so hiring an outsource specialist is normal.
