Employee well-being has always had a significant impact on company results, but the connection came into sharp focus during COVID-19. As everyone moved to work from home and worries about ill employees mounted, it became even more obvious that employers benefit from protecting employee well-being.

In a 2022 McKinsey survey that covered 15 countries, 28% of U.S. employees reported burnout symptoms, and 32% reported moderate distress. This happened even though the same survey found that 74% of U.S. HR decision-makers reported making mental health a top priority.

Fortunately, improvements can be made in addressing employee burnout, including using knowledge management (KM) to better share work best practices and help encourage employee productivity and autonomy.

What is Burnout?

How can you know if your employees are struggling with burnout? Signs of burnout include symptoms of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.

For example, employees may struggle with anxiety, fatigue, headaches, and an increasingly cynical outlook. Burnout can happen in any professional field or industry, and it can happen at any level of work, from the frontline worker to the highest executive.

Another sign of burnout is disturbed sleep. Employees may have symptoms of sleep disorders like insomnia, for example, which can be caused by anxiety or depression. If burnt-out employees don’t take care of their health, they could develop sleep apnea or grind their teeth at night causing jaw pain and headaches.

As an employer, you might think that burnout is something employees need to handle themselves, which may be partly true, but you must offer significant support. Not only can employee assistance programs provide resources to help employees manage their mental and emotional health, but knowledge management strategies can help make work less stressful.

Using Knowledge Management to Detect Burnout

You can use the principles of knowledge management to help your organization detect burnout and take action to make things better.

It starts with managers getting relevant training to help them become better leaders. High-quality and ongoing training can help build a company culture based on trust rather than fear, for example, and allows employees to be more honest about their feelings, workload, and other stresses.

From there, detecting and managing employee burnout continues through knowledge management strategies as managers share best practices amongst themselves. KM helps ensure that organizational knowledge doesn’t stay siloed in specific departments or individuals at every level of the company.

Detecting burnout among employees is a type of tacit knowledge, which means that frequent roundtables or workshops among managers can help these leaders recognize signs and respond with appropriate resources. Over time, there might be a codified list of symptoms to watch for. Still, it’s important to keep the conversations going because how employees respond to stress, especially in your company culture, changes over time.

How Knowledge Management Can Address Burnout

Addressing employee burnout has two equally important aspects: preventing burnout and connecting burnt-out employees with the resources they need to reset and return to productivity.

Preventing burnout is, of course, the best option. Knowledge management plays a significant role in helping employees work productively with lower levels of stress, which helps prevent burnout symptoms from developing.

For example, one major stressor is following all the cybersecurity rules that help keep company systems secure. Knowledge management strategies can help employees learn from the company’s IT professionals about how different business scams operate so they don’t fall victim to them. Knowing how to identify and avoid phishing scams, fraudulent phone calls, and malware in ways that are simple or even automated can help everyone in your organization be more productive and less stressed.

You can also set up workshops and other ways for employees to share best practices within departments and between them for best ways to use company software, execute common processes, and more. Knowledge-sharing workshops may improve employee well-being by helping employees do their work more effectively, stay productive, and spend less time on meaningless tasks. They’ll be more autonomous and independent in the work, which all drive employee engagement and satisfaction.

How to Implement KM Effectively

If you don’t already have KM strategies in place, it’s time to implement them. Knowledge management allows you to spread the expertise of key individuals and departments throughout your organization, helping everyone work effectively and reducing the problems you experience if a vital employee leaves.

Knowledge management involves accumulating institutional knowledge, storing it, and sharing it with employees at the right time. That might mean having a company “university” with on-demand training modules, a searchable knowledge base, internal wikis, or forums and discussion boards where employees can share best practices.

As you implement these new processes, ensure you use change management strategies to improve adoption and keep the momentum moving forward. Process improvements often fail because organizations make common mistakes, like making new processes too complicated or not having anyone in charge of key parts of implementation.

Instead, have strong accountability for each part of implementing knowledge management, keep communication about the new processes strong, and be willing to adapt your plan as necessary. The accountability and strong buy-in will help make KM successful in your organization.

Burnout is Bad for Business

Burnt-out employees are less productive, more likely to be absent, and have lower motivation and poor performance. Your organization can’t afford to ignore burnout. Instead, know the signs that an employee is beginning to struggle and use knowledge management to both detect and address burnout.

When you do, you’ll not only reduce burnout, but also improve productivity, help employees feel mastery and autonomy in their work, and increase the chances that work is carried out in the most effective and efficient ways.

When you are asked what the KM team does or what it can offer to clients, here is a menu of services that a KM team can provide (non-exhaustive). The overall knowledge management strategy and services are always tailored by the knowledge managers basis the goals, priorities, and needs of the organization. However, the list below provides a quick glance at the scope of knowledge management that goes much beyond bringing knowledge to one place for easy access to the organization. 

Knowledge Management (KM) serves as a powerful catalyst, not only for consolidating knowledge but also for fostering collaboration, innovation, and the acquisition of valuable tools and insights. It empowers individuals to transform knowledge into actionable strategies, ultimately enhancing their professional lives. KM represents a cultural shift that emphasizes the significance of collective knowledge sharing and idea exchange.

Through its services, KM focuses on the profound impact that its adoption can have on growth, employee job satisfaction, service delivery, customer experience, and ultimately, business profitability.

Let’s take a look at some of the key services offered as a part of KM strategy:

Capability Description / OfferingsKnowledge Planning Touchpoint with KM sponsors, SMEs, and leads to understanding their specific goals, requirements, and timelines. Develop Knowledge strategy, plan, roadmap, and project plan to map to the service requirement. KM Platform Management
and Tracking KM platform development roadmap. Develop a continuous improvement plan for enhancement. Conduct feedback tracking, metrics, and reporting to measure and track the KM strategy progress Content Management Manage content lifecycle (capture, structure, reuse, and improve). Develop strategies to improve the adoption and awareness. Incorporate feedback mechanisms and track improvement via metrics Collaboration
and Community Building              Launch collaboration platforms like wikis, discussion forums, and Communities to enable people to collaborate and innovate. Design and spearhead campaigns to facilitate the flow of tacit and explicit knowledge Innovation and Cultural Shift Stay updated on both internal and external trends and introduce new practices and initiatives to enable people to perform their jobs faster and better.Create visibility for the skills, and expertise of people from across the organization and provide opportunities for them to collaborate to help solve key business problems and share their experiences with wider teams.

To ensure the success of knowledge management initiatives, it is crucial to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the objectives of the knowledge management program in your organization. Here are some essential KPIs to help you measure the success of your KM program:

1. Knowledge Usage: It is important to track the frequency with which employees or users access the knowledge base or repository. High knowledge usage indicates that the information provided is valuable and relevant.

2. Knowledge Accessibility: The ease of accessing knowledge should be measured to ensure that employees can quickly find the information they need without unnecessary barriers.

3. Knowledge Contribution: Monitoring the rate at which employees contribute new knowledge, documents, or updates to the knowledge base is essential. Encouraging contributions fosters a culture of knowledge sharing.

4. Time to Solve Issues: Measuring the time it takes for employees to find solutions to problems or answer questions using the knowledge base is crucial. Faster issue resolution indicates the effectiveness of the knowledge management system.

5. Customer Satisfaction: If knowledge management is utilized to support customer service or support, it is important to track customer satisfaction metrics. This includes assessing whether customers are finding the answers they need and if their issues are being promptly resolved.

By focusing on these KPIs, organizations can gauge the effectiveness of their knowledge management initiatives and make informed decisions to improve their knowledge management programs.

Training Efficiency: Knowledge Management (KM) plays a pivotal role in facilitating employee training and onboarding within organizations. By closely monitoring the rate at which new employees acquire proficiency and become productive in their respective roles, organizations can gauge the efficiency and effectiveness of their training programs. This assessment serves as a valuable tool in optimizing training methodologies and ensuring a seamless transition for new employees.

Error Reduction: It is crucial to assess whether knowledge management initiatives have resulted in a reduction in errors or mistakes, particularly those stemming from a lack of knowledge. By monitoring this aspect, organizations can identify areas for improvement and ensure that knowledge is effectively disseminated throughout the workforce.

Employee Engagement: The satisfaction and engagement of employees with the knowledge management system should be evaluated. An engaged workforce is more likely to actively utilize and contribute to the knowledge base, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

Knowledge Retention: The ability to retain and preserve critical knowledge within the organization, especially when employees leave or retire, is of utmost importance. Tracking knowledge retention ensures that valuable insights and expertise are not lost, enabling seamless knowledge transfer and continuity.

Search Effectiveness: The efficiency and accuracy of the search functionality within the knowledge base should be evaluated. A well-designed search system significantly enhances knowledge accessibility, enabling employees to quickly and easily locate the information they need.

Cost Savings: Analyzing the cost savings resulting from reduced training time, decreased error rates, and more efficient problem-solving facilitated by the knowledge base is essential. This metric provides organizations with a clear understanding of the financial benefits derived from effective knowledge management practices.

Learning and Improvement: The organization’s ability to learn from its own experiences and apply that knowledge to enhance processes and decision-making should be measured. This metric reflects the organization’s commitment to continuous improvement and its capacity to leverage knowledge for optimal performance.

Knowledge Quality: Assessing the relevance, accuracy, and usefulness of the knowledge within the repository is crucial. High-quality knowledge contributes to better decision-making and problem-solving, ensuring that employees have access to reliable and valuable information.

Adoption Rate: Tracking the percentage of employees or teams actively using the knowledge management system is vital. Higher adoption rates indicate a successful KM framework implementation.

Remember that the specific KPIs you choose will depend on your organization’s goals, the scope of your knowledge management initiative, and the nature of your business. Regularly review these KPIs to evaluate the success of your knowledge management efforts and make informed improvements. 

Knowledge Management is all about knowledge creation and the activities that support the creation and dissemination at various organizational levels. It starts with instilling a knowledge vision, building a collaborative culture, facilitating conversations, globalizing local knowledge, and encouraging creativity and innovation. 

Knowledge can be both explicit and tacit. The knowledge that can be quantified and documented is explicit knowledge. It is tangible and can be conveyed through processes, documentation, books, videos, etc. However, this just forms only a fraction of any organization’s knowledge while the rest of the knowledge bound to peoples’ experiences, intuition, insights, expertise, and personal conclusions is tacit knowledge. 

Recognizing the importance of this tacit knowledge and capturing it in a methodical way to make it explicit is a challenge for most organizations. The tacit knowledge may seem too fluid and inconsistent, but its fluidity is what makes it a powerful innovation tool. The conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge known as externalization is critical for an organization’s long-term success.

So how can organizations capture it?

Instilling collaborative culture to encourage discussions and socialization among employees to get people talking about their experiences and observations is how tacit knowledge can be assessed and used for the creation of new concepts and products.

How to do it:

Socialization and Informal Communication: Foster a culture of open and frequent communication among employees. This can be achieved through engaging in team-building activities, informal gatherings, or leveraging online collaboration platforms. By creating an environment where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas and experiences, the exchange of tacit knowledge becomes more fluid and uninhibited.

Nurture Community of Practices (CoPs) – The foundation of the CoPs is to connect people by encouraging conversation to build and share knowledge. The moderators should periodically reach out to its members to harvest and tag knowledge leading to its dissemination across borders and different organization levels.

Storytelling: Encourage employees to share captivating stories that showcase their unique experiences and expertise. Harnessing the power of storytelling enables the transmission of tacit knowledge in a relatable and unforgettable manner. These stories can be effectively shared during meetings, workshops, or via internal communication channels, ensuring widespread dissemination and engagement.

Mentorship and Apprenticeship Programs: Introduce mentoring programs that enable seasoned employees to provide guidance and share their invaluable tacit knowledge with less-experienced colleagues. This personalized one-on-one interaction serves as a catalyst for effective knowledge transfer.

After-Action Reviews (AARs): AARs involve a structured review process that encourages participants to share their tacit knowledge, lessons learned, and insights gained during the project. This valuable exercise helps identify best practices and areas for improvement, contributing to the organization’s growth and success.

Knowledge Capture Workshops: To explicitly capture tacit knowledge, organizing workshops is highly recommended. These workshops can incorporate brainstorming sessions, role-playing activities, and other interactive exercises to encourage participants to share their expertise. By creating an environment that fosters knowledge sharing, organizations can tap into the wealth of knowledge possessed by their employees.

Create Best practices and knowledge sharing Wikis and directories – Encouraging a culture where people share best practices, not only enables collaboration but also saves the organization both time and money.

Employee Surveys and Interviews: Conducting surveys or interviews with employees is a valuable method to elicit tacit knowledge. By using open-ended questions that encourage employees to reflect on their experiences and share their insights, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of their employees’ expertise. This information can then be utilized to enhance processes and drive innovation within the organization.

Job Shadowing and Cross-Functional Training: Encouraging employees to participate in job shadowing or cross-functional training programs is an effective way to capture tacit knowledge. By observing the work of others and asking questions, individuals can learn from their colleagues, thereby gaining valuable insights across different roles and departments. This cross-pollination of knowledge contributes to a more well-rounded and knowledgeable workforce.

Recognition and Incentives: Recognizing and rewarding employees who actively share their knowledge and expertise is crucial. By providing incentives, organizations can motivate individuals to contribute their tacit knowledge to the organization’s knowledge base.

Capturing tacit knowledge is an ongoing process that requires a culture that values knowledge sharing and continuous learning. A combination of the various strategies discussed above will ensure the effective capture and utilization of tacit knowledge for the benefit of the entire organization.

As a knowledge manager, I often struggle to convey the importance of my role to those outside of the KM community. For most, you can be a content writer or a technical writer, but if you explain that you manage all this knowledge and make it accessible to everyone in the organization, they draw blank.

So here is a simple definition to explain what it is and its purpose in the organization. Hope it helps when next time you have to explain how critical is your role for your organization.

Our role is to ensure that valuable information is not only captured but also made accessible to everyone within the company with the right metadata and tagging to ensure that the right knowledge is delivered when looking for specific topics. This means that we are responsible for creating systems and processes that allow for seamless knowledge sharing and collaboration.

By collecting and organizing data, we can ensure that everyone has access to the knowledge they need to make informed decisions and drive innovation.

But that's not all - knowledge management also involves collaboration and the creation of new ideas. By working together, we can generate fresh insights and push the boundaries of what's possible for the growth of employees and the organization as a whole.

In today's fast-paced business world, having access to the right information at the right time can mean the difference between success and failure. That's why knowledge management is critical to any organization's success.

So the next time someone asks you what you do as a knowledge manager, don't be afraid to share this exciting and important role with them. After all, knowledge is power, and we are the gatekeepers of that power! So KM is much more than storing and sharing knowledge and it's all about managing possibilities to help your employees grow, learn, share and innovate and deliver the best outcomes to clients and customers.