Strategies for Capturing Lost Knowledge for Employee Exits: Processes and Practices from Fortune 500 Organizations by BPI Research Staff
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Strategies for Capturing Lost Knowledge for Employee Exits: Processes and Practices from Fortune 500 Organizations By BPI Research Staff Table of Contents Overview and Background Pages 1-4 ● The Cost of Knowledge Lost Pages 1-2 ● Knowledge Management Defined- Pages 2-3 ● The Role of the Chief Knowledge Officer Pages 3-4 Process of HR in Knowledge Management Pages 4-5 Initiatives of Fortune 500 Companies Pages 5-6 ● Strategic Mentoring Options Pages 7-9 Conclusion Page 9 Appendix !: Annotated Checklist Pages 11-13 References Pages 14-16 Overview and Background Knowledge held closely is an asset. Knowledge shared is a treasure. With all the investment in corporate knowledge management systems, so much still depends on human nature. And, that presents a real risk to organizational performance and futures. In an economic ecosystem that tolerates and promotes employee movement among organizations over a life’s career, the cost of lost knowledge can be enormous for employers. It’s reasonable that an employee would “own” knowledge and experience in which s/he were Copyright © Best Practice Institute Page 1 critically involved by nature of their participation. However, their rights to its use are largely restricted only by circumstance. Creating a culture that values shared knowledge and an infrastructure that enables it may be the first risk management tool to protect the knowledge, direct its use, and prevent its abuse. The cost of knowledge lost In 2004, Pamela Babcock of SHRM warned, that the failure to share knowledge can create huge financial loss; “Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge.” That number was originally determined by International Data Corp. has been repeated in print since 2001. Christopher G. Myers references that same $31,5 billion in a 2017 Harvard Business Review article warning, “By trying to recreate the wheel, repeating others’ mistakes, or wasting time searching for specialized information or expertise, employees incur productivity costs and opportunity costs for the organization. Because, while formal systems might help communicate established best practices (the what), they often don’t explain how an individual should apply them to their own work.” Knowledge management defined “Knowledge management” once referred to the organizational manipulation and control of knowledge on hand. It assigned, allocated, and distributed data and information of company data and proprietary intelligence. And, it worried unsuccessfully against cyber-crime. Ganesh D. Bhat explained, “the knowledge management process can be categorized into knowledge creation, knowledge validation, knowledge presentation, knowledge distribution, and knowledge application activities.”. Knowledge management has, in short, been the application of systems to execute business processes. But, global drives add a value of strategic quality to the knowledge managed. Strategic knowledge is about more than quantitative and operational systems. It recognizes that each employee has explicit and tacit knowledge. ● Explicit knowledge it the information the employee was given in training and development. ● Tacit knowledge is the learning employees pick up, capture, and process in their experience with the employer. Copyright © Best Practice Institute Page 2 Both are lost to the employer when the employee leaves. But, while the explicit knowledge can be rescued and transferred, the tacit knowledge is a quantitative and qualitative loss to the organization. APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) has reframed that definition as follows: “APQC defines knowledge management (KM) as a collection of systematic approaches to help information and knowledge flow to and between the right people at the right time (in the right format at the right cost) so they can act more efficiently and effectively to create value for the organization.” With the extraordinary volume of data, accelerated competition, and light-speed growth, global enterprise is upgrading knowledge management because: ● Demographics: Aging experts retire and take their intelligence with them. Millennials often have a confused sense of rights to intellectual property. ● Training: Without shared knowledge, the cost and time in bringing new hires on board and performing to need s significant, ● Infrastructure: Reorganization, acquisition, and merger tax corporations with reinventing too many wheels. ● Discovery: Leveraging technology and innovation often grinds the experienced out of systems without respect for their experience. ● Recycling: Age does not invalidate knowledge or the holder. Organizations must learn from the past and the processing present. In The Economic Impact of Knowledge (1998), Ikujiro Nonaka wrote, “Knowledge today is a necessary and sustainable source of competitive advantage. In an era characterized by rapid change and uncertainty, it is claimed that successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it through the organization, and embody it in technologies, products, and services.” The role of Chief Knowledge Officer In 2002, Nick Bontis reported on the rise of the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO): ● 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies currently have CKOs; ● 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies currently have KM staff; ● 95 percent of CEOs polled at the 2001 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said that KM was critical to organizational success; and ● 91 percent of Canadian business leaders polled by Ipsos-Reid in 2001 believed that KM practices have a direct impact on organizational effectiveness, and one-third of Canadian organizations that have not undertaken a KM initiative expect to do so in the next 12 months. Copyright © Best Practice Institute Page 3 But, in 2015, Jim Lee is writing “Why Death of Chief Knowledge Officer is a Good Thing.” He opines, “First and foremost, organizational knowledge management shouldn’t be a function—it should be a capability. The difference in those words makes them worlds apart. A function implies constraint, clear delineation of roles, and perhaps even silos of responsibilities! Conversely, the creation of new knowledge, sharing of expertise, and taking advantage of organizational expertise can, and should, be done by everyone in an organization, from the newest employee to the most senior, from the least paid to the highest.” These different views really mark a maturing that parallels the advances in technology over those same years. That is, “knowledge management” once described functions preoccupied with accuracy, accessibility, distribution, and security. It now refers to a cultural and strategic shift to discern, share, and retain knowledge crucial to business success. There is overlap, to be sure, but this demands a new understanding of knowledge. There are, for example, core, stable, knowledge systems. Financials and payroll are bound functions that vary only when better technology comes along or regulations and practices change. Trainers can fill the gaps in these generally accepted practices. Then, there are dynamic knowledge bases in marketing, R&D, engineering, quality control, and more. Such knowledge is better shared for several reasons: ● It grows and improves with collaboration. ● It is not owned by any individual because it is group involved. ● It expands so rapidly it needs community input. With or without a designated CKO, leadership needs infrastructure that, in Nick Bontis’s words: ● Promote stability in a turbulent business environment; ● Enable the speedy delivery of productions or services; ● Create high efficiency in the knowledge value chain by the sharing of resources and realization of synergies; ● Enable the separation of work so that specialization is feasible. Such changes often fall to Human Resources to author or implement. Process: The Role of HR Because employee turnover, voluntary or involuntary, risks the loss of strategic knowledge, there is some logic in assigning the accountability to Human Resources.In “HRM and knowledge management” (2008), Ingi Runar Edvardsson differentiated to strategic approaches Copyright © Best Practice Institute Page 4 to knowledge management: exploitative and explorative. The approach simplifies and structures an approach HR can deliver and describes the assignable tasks. Recruitment and Selection: HR must rethink traditional job description, strategic assessment, and recruitment. The change asks HR to move away from recruiting to match function in favor of a match of personality with a knowledge sharing culture. 1. Training and Development: Knowledge workers must commit to continuing education, and HR must provide the opportunity, structure, and inventive. Knowledge management once focused on abilities, manipulators, and implementers. But, contemporary competitors must personalize knowledge through inventors and innovators. 2. Performance Management: If performance assessment remains a checklist or scaled score, it restricts and discourages strategic knowledge sharing. An archaic sense of individual merit, self-reliance, and responsibility inhibits lateral accountability. It is a short-term emphasis on application, volume, and metrics. When the strategy is exploratory, it rates quality, relationships, and interpersonal skills. 3. Compensation and Recognition: Standard approaches to compensation must change to acknowledge the personal value in knowledge management. Compensation statistics do not easily measure or