Without communication, efficient Knowledge Management (KM) would be exceptionally difficult to maintain. Communication is a knowledge manager’s best tool. By utilizing it effectively, you can strengthen literally every aspect of your business.

But how exactly do communication and KM interact? What defines their relationship? And how can you go about building seamless communication strategies?

For any business looking to get ahead in this rapidly changing, data-driven marketplace, the answers to these questions can make or break your efforts. Here's what you should know about strengthening your communication for efficient Knowledge Management.

The relationship between communication and knowledge management

First, it's essential to define the difference between communicative processes and Knowledge Management in general.

Communication, simply put, is the diverse act of expressing an idea from one consciousness to another. It takes on a variety of forms and these days is increasingly digital. In the business world— like in every other aspect of life—the effectiveness of communication can determine your success, whether you’re attempting to boost sales, cut costs, or improve the employee experience.

Knowledge Management, on the other hand, represents the ability of a business to capture information, share it, and apply it effectively. As you can see, communication is a central aspect of this process. Within the framework of KM, efficient communication is necessary in three key areas of business. These are:

1. Information gathering.
2. Disseminating insights and analytics across a company.
3. Forming a narrative that translates information into real-world applications.

Streamlining these endeavors company-wide is a fundamental skill for any business development manager. After all, you'll be working across departments and specialists to transfer information from one source to another. Without the right data sources, a proper method of communication across your company, and a narrative contextualizing your knowledge, you will fail in your endeavors to coordinate information.

As you're aware, this will make digital and global trade especially difficult. With Supply chains alone requiring real-time, transparent modes of communication, your ability to process information is key.

Strengthen your communication efforts to make these processes seamless.

How to make communication efforts seamless

Fortunately, strengthening your communication efforts doesn't have to be as difficult as it might sound. Sure, communication takes constant effort and careful coordination. But with a business framework dedicated to effective KM processes, you can build a communication system that all but eliminates human error.

Here are some effective strategies for helping you make your communication efforts seamless:

1. Constantly invite feedback: Without the coordination and cooperation of your entire team, your KM strategies will not be as effective as they might be. Because of this, feedback is one of the most essential communication techniques that you can use to promote the application of any knowledge. Coordinate with your team, creating an open and empathetic environment in which insights, questions, and concerns can all be shared freely and easily.

2. Build continuous learning into the company culture: Communicating knowledge effectively is much easier with a dedication from all parties to continuous learning and growing. By espousing these values in your company culture, you support an environment in which people are willing and eager to listen. This will help in your efforts to create an empathetic space for feedback and ideas, and will in turn help you encourage dialogue.

3. Encourage a dialogue: By building an open and horizontal dialogue with your workforce, your KM strategies will take on new life. Such an approach invites each member of your team to share their passions, their projects, their questions, and concerns to develop mutual understanding. This can take many forms, from circular in-person group brainstorming sessions to open platforms for instant messaging and knowledge sharing. The right tools will make such a dialogue even easier.

4. Apply effective communication technologies: In the wake of Covid-19, more business places than ever have moved to remote work. Without the right communication platforms, your KM processes will suffer. For example, Lucidspark states that more than 50% of employees admit to working on other things during virtual meetings, making a strategic plan for remote work vital. Tech tools like collaborative digital bulletin boards, group messaging, and document sharing all help to ensure that employees are contributing and staying focused.

5. Innovate, innovate, innovate: Finally, commit to an environment that is constantly open to change and adaptation. The digital world makes new processes possible all the time. From new communication tools to agile frameworks for coordinating your knowledge, your ability to innovate will determine the effectiveness of your KM strategies. A change mindset will help employees learn and grow while inviting greater understanding into knowledge applications.

Building efficient knowledge management through communication

By following these strategies for strengthening your communication efforts, Knowledge Management will improve across your entire organization. Open dialogue invites empathy and improved communication while continuous learning makes for more open-minded employees. Build a culture of innovation by highlighting these values, then reap the rewards as workers seamlessly apply new and improved processes.

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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IS ESSENTIALLY ABOUT GETTING THE RIGHT KNOWLEDGE TO THE RIGHT PERSON AT THE RIGHT TIME

It really doesn’t matter what industry you operate in – knowledge management is something you have to think seriously about. If you think about it, everything in your business is based on knowledge, that is data and information. Whether it is your product or service, which is built from knowledge held by your people, or your ability to engage with customers and provide value, which is based on knowing about their needs, or even your internal policies, which is based on knowing about best practices in the industry.

If your organization didn’t have knowledge, then none of these things would have been able to happen. That said, it’s not enough to just have the knowledge. The knowledge should be able to flow through the organization and reach the right people. That’s what knowledge management is all about.

What is knowledge management?

At its heart, knowledge management is essentially about getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. It is all about how you document, store, communicate and apply knowledge in an organization in order to improve the processes of the organization and, ultimately, its bottom line. Knowledge management is about finding the best ways to do the things above, so that it can be available on demand for anyone that needs it. In order to understand knowledge management better, we need to know about the different types of knowledge, namely explicit and implicit, or tacit, knowledge

Explicit knowledge

This is any knowledge that is codified and stored and ready to be shared with others. Thing about the rule book, memos, databases, tutorial videos at your company and so on. All of these are examples of explicit knowledge.

Implicit knowledge

This is the knowledge inside the heads of people on your team. But that’s not enough. For it to count as implicit knowledge it also has to be especially difficult to explain. Think about their intuition, natural talent and experience gathered over the years. Implicit knowledge is not only hard to explain, it is as natural for the holder as breathing. We all breathe easily, but not only do we rarely consciously do our breathing, many of us don’t even understand how breathing works!

The importance of knowledge management

Knowledge management is all about utilizing the knowledge in an organization to help it thrive. By having proper knowledge management, an organization can store explicit knowledge and organize it, codify implicit knowledge, turning it into explicit knowledge, and make all that knowledge accessible to your team or audience, so they can work better.

Knowledge management systems help with workflow, onboarding activities, and even HR processes, among others. For customers, knowledge management helps the organization to keep its customers informed and engaged, as well as build their trust in the brand. This can be in the form of bog posts, videos, FAQs, wikis, case studies, and social media content, among others.

What are the benefits of knowledge management?

There are many useful benefits to having a knowledge management system. Below are some of the most important ones:

It aligns the whole team

Knowledge management makes communication more systematic, which enhances collaboration. It also makes it easier for employees to see how their knowledge contributes to the betterment of the organization, getting them more engaged in the process.

It makes the team more productive

Organizations agree that improving their knowledge management systems makes them more productive. With a good knowledge management system, your employees have access to instructions to help them carry out their tasks and follow best practices. They can also communicate and collaborate with each other better and are more efficient as a result.

Persists knowledge in the organization

Good knowledge management helps your organization retain knowledge, even after the knowledgeable employee has left the organization.

Improves the customer experience

Good knowledge management is just as good for your customer as it is for you. Customer-facing knowledge allows the customer to better serve themselves, which improves engagement while reducing your workload. It also helps your customer support team by providing them with a large knowledge base that empowers them to deal with customer issues.

Steps to building an effective knowledge management framework

So now that we understand the benefits of knowledge management, how do you build a good knowledge management framework? Below are the steps:

Have a clear focus

The first step is to know who, exactly, you’re creating the knowledge for. Whether its for your internal team or your customers, it’s important to know who, so as to build the right knowledge management framework.

Define everyone involved and what role they will be playing

Everyone on the team should contribute to your knowledge building efforts. You need project managers, who oversee the initiative, knowledge finders, who gather the knowledge, good communicators to package it, and creators to make it accessible to the most people. These and other roles need to be defined well from the start, so as to make the process more efficient.

Define the tools you will use

Modern technology is a boon on the knowledge building process. There are many tools out there that you can take full advantage of when building a knowledge management framework. A searchable knowledge base is a good place to start. Not only should they be easy to search and navigate, but also allow for optimization and analytics, as well as communication and collaboration. You may also need separate communication, project management, and content creation tools.

Collect data

Next, collect internal data, reports from third parties, and consumer generated content for your knowledge management system. The main focus at this point is to collect data. It can be analyzed later.

Organize the data

Once you’re done collecting data, you can now organize it. For example, separate customer reviews into positive and negative, and then rank them. For most of your data, you will have to create some kind of hierarchy to help make sense of it.

Summarize the most important information

Next step is to give the data some context. Summarize findings in the most objective way you can, while giving it proper context. You can then store, analyze, and apply all that knowledge in the future.

Conclusion

As you can see, knowledge management is an extensive subject, and a single article can’t possibly hope to cover the full scope of it. We have tried, however, to cover the most important aspects. The main takeaway is that, with proper knowledge management, your organization can do much better.

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Clients often ask me how to make Knowledge Management (KM) a seamless part of their workforce’s day-to-day operations. They want to know how to shift people’s perceptions from KM as “another thing I have to do in addition to my daily workload” to something that is done naturally as part of their everyday workflow. The idea that there is no immediate, one size fits all solution to effortlessly integrating KM into their culture and work may seem daunting. This goal, however, is no different than getting fit for the summer.

All too often, I am the type of person who jumps on a scale after one workout and wonders, “am I fit for summer yet?!” Having said this, the only times in my life when I’ve ever truly lost weight, gained muscle, or felt more energetic were when I spent months building new habits, like exercising daily, eating a plant-based diet, drinking tons of water, and making time to do yoga and meditation. In a similar sense, within days of implementing a KM solution like a search tool, content strategy, or taxonomy design, stakeholders want to know how these solutions have positively impacted the organization. In order to truly derive this value, however, your organization needs to design KM approaches with your employees in mind. To make KM stick, you have to:

• Motivate your employees to learn and embody new habits;
• Measure the effectiveness of your efforts in a meaningful way; and
• Reward good behavior using incentives that cater towards what drives your employees.

While this won’t happen overnight, investing in a proper integrated change effort will enable you and your organization to be well on your way to making KM stick. Ultimately, you will start to see your knowledge workers creating, sharing, and making good use of their own and one another’s knowledge and information and eventually it becomes an unconscious part of your company’s daily operations.

Understanding

I’m a big proponent of design thinking approaches because they’re based on the fundamental principle that not everything works for everyone, so you have to understand people’s needs, desires, goals, feelings, thoughts, etc. before developing a solution to help them address their daily challenges.

When it comes to fitness, some people prefer individual workouts vs. group classes, designing their own workout program vs. getting a personal trainer, or working out at home vs. going to a gym. When you’re designing KM solutions, ask and observe your end users to determine what would work best for them. Questions to ask could include:

• How tech savvy are they? Do they naturally create, share, and manage content digitally or are they still more paper-based?
• Does their work involve more individual-focused activities, such as research, or are they more collaborative in nature because they’re focused on brainstorming and developing solutions as a team?
• Do they mostly work in the same office or are they physically dispersed with people working from home? Are they part of a local, domestic, or global team?
• How long have they been with the organization? How long have they been in the workforce? How long have they been in their given field?

Understanding the people that you want to adopt the KM solutions is always the starting point for helping them begin to work differently.

Motivating

Motivation is critical for making KM solutions stick because often times people know what to do, but lack the incentive or drive to do it. I know that if I exercised daily and ate like a celebrity, I would probably look like one… or at least look and feel like a better version of myself. What’s prevented me from doing what I should do? Doing what I want to do can feel more rewarding.

Change is hard, so it’s always easier for knowledge workers to revert back to their natural ways of doing things when they are introduced to a new process or technology. For instance, knowledge workers may be accustomed to shared drives with folders within folders within folders, but shifting over to a site that can leverage metadata, as opposed to folder structures, can be challenging, even though it dramatically increases the findability of knowledge and information. Even if the proposed solution or updated process will derive value and save time, well-ingrained habits are often hard to break.

Motivation comes in many forms and different people react to different things. Having said this, taking the time to figure out whether individuals are driven by learning and mastering new skills, recognition for doing good work, or cold, hard cash can help you experiment with ways to incentivize people to practice good KM behaviors. How about offering a reward for the person who creates the most new content in a month or the person who cleans up and archives and deletes the most obsolete information from the intranet or shared drive? When people are rewarded for doing things, it teaches them what to keep doing as well as what’s important to do in order to help their organization succeed.

Embodying

I can watch tons of YouTube videos and read fitness magazines all day, but unless I work out and eat right, I won’t see any results. Similarly, people need to engage in the KM processes in order to mature from a KM standpoint. At EK, whenever we roll out a taxonomy design or content strategy for a client, we almost always design a governance plan to go along with it. Having a governance plan will help ensure that the solution is sustainable, and not just a superficial quick fix. Run through the maintenance workflows, facilitate the governance meetings, update the design based on what you learn from analytics and end-user feedback, use the new enterprise search tools, facilitate the community of practice meeting– just do it! You have to continuously do these things and encourage others to do so in order to get accustomed to doing it.

Measuring

Sometimes the number on the scale isn’t very telling. Knowing that I ran a combined 15 miles this week and feeling my pants fit a little looser could better validate that whatever I’m doing is working. This is the difference between lead and lag measures. Lag measures are metrics that capture the impact of your actions, whereas lead measures track your actions themselves. A combination of both can give you the full picture of the rate at which your KM solutions are being adopted along with the effect they’re having.

Lead Measures

• Number of new articles published.
• Number of Communities of Practice meetings held.
• Time spent transferring knowledge to another team member.

Lag Measures

• Number of unique views on an intranet page.
• Reduced time searching for information.
• Lower bounce back or drop offs from a page due to not finding the right information.

You can capture these metrics directly from the KM systems you use (Content Management Systems, Enterprise Search Tools, Taxonomy Management Tools, etc.), and you can also deploy surveys gauging your end users’ overall satisfaction with the new solutions that have been implemented to help them create, manage, store, and act on the information that they find. It is crucial to measure adoption because the numbers will help guide your future actions by telling you what’s working and not working.

Rewarding

Lastly, and most importantly, reward good behavior! I try not to celebrate good fitness outcomes by indulging in decadent meals, rather, I treat myself to a massage or a shopping spree for new outfits because it motivates me to keep going without negatively affecting the progress I’ve made.

Choose rewards that will increase your KM capabilities. Treat your employees to an event where they can share their ideas for new initiatives, invest in that technology that’ll help further automate their workload, or promote the individuals who have mastered a subject matter and shared their knowledge with others in a meaningful way.

Conclusion

When I am living my best life due to healthy habits, I have more energy, and I am spreading positive vibes. I’m more active and engaged with other people. What does it look like when an organization is adopting KM best practices?

• More people are producing higher quality, useful content.
• Communication is flowing and team members are working towards a common language.
• New technology is being seamlessly implemented.
• There’s a higher rate of social learning and sharing. Individuals are constantly learning and growing.
• Team members are encouraging each other to share knowledge and information without having to be told to do so from the top.
• There’s more creativity and innovation being used to proactively solve complex problems.
• Your workforce is positive, engaged, and envisioning themselves growing within the organizing in the near and long term.

Ditch those crash diets and quick fixes and reach out to EK to learn more about how to make KM stick for the long run.

The Million Dollar Question

If I’m a subject matter expert – and I’m recognized and rewarded for what I know – what is my motivation to share? Is it for the good of humanity, or the business, or my fellow employees? Is it to leave a legacy? Is it just because it’s the right thing to do? For most people, none of these reasons are compelling enough to stop the knowledge hoarding madness.

Breaking the Cycle

In a Harvard Business Review article titled, “How to Prevent Experts from Hoarding Knowledge,” Dorothy Leonard suggests that one of the reasons that experts are reluctant to share is that those who possess this “deep knowledge” have been undervalued in the past. Another cause for knowledge hoarding is that experts have been rewarded for the wrong things and have become part of a “superhero” culture of gurus. It’s not that expertise isn’t valuable, however. “The Ship Repair man Story – Why Experts get paid more?” points out that expertise is precious, and that those that mishandle human capital learn the hard way.  

Engagement and Rewarding the Right Things

Creating a culture of sharing is the goal, and one proven approach is to focus on employee engagement. The exceptionally well researched Gallup Employee Engagement survey provides some guidance in areas on which managers can focus. Most relevant to creating a culture of sharing are the questions that ask: have you received recent recognition, do you feel that your opinion matters and do you think your job is important. High scores on these categories (and efforts to enhance these items) can pay dividends for managers who want his or her experts to share. Systems can also be created to track and report on who are contributing to knowledge libraries. Gamification and rewards can be tied to credible contribution – and that can help prime the pump of collaboration.

I find that quite often when we say Knowledge Management, we actually mean Content Management or other aspects of explicit knowledge. That is a logical starting point for most of us, for historical reasons but also because it is the easier of the two knowledge dimensions to quantify and measure both progress and business impact.

But what about our tacit Knowledge Assets? This is the collective knowledge comprised by different personalities, experiences (past and present, personal and professional) and passions, that is the main intellectual capital for any knowledge worker organization. Are we leveraging tacit knowledge in a way that drives our business forward? And are we able to effectively combine and balance the needs and desires for tacit vs. explicit – including return on investment (ROI), cost of creation, harvesting and curation? Is tacit knowledge the secret sauce that can help us maximise investments made on the explicit side?

I believe that we can and should. But before designing a solution or planning the next tacit KM initiative, it may be worth spending some time thinking through your tacit knowledge needs, how existing tacit knowledge is shared, collaboration forums etc., because most likely there are several initiatives already existing (likely in pockets) that you can build on:

1. What constitutes tacit knowledge in your company and what is its value to your business?

2. How and where does tacit knowledge sharing happen today: Is it informal or formal knowledge sharing and are there ways we can standardise to drive synergies?

3. How can you capitalise on tacit knowledge and demonstrate clear business value?

What do we mean by Tacit Knowledge?

For the sake of simplicity, I am using a broad definition of Tacit Knowledge: “any skills, experiences and expertise that exists in our people’s heads”.

For a professional services organisation like my own or any knowledge worker organisation, this is core intellectual capital. It is important to create environments where people can share experiences and have conversations about common interests, central to innovation. The key is to support the tacit knowledge exchange in a way that makes the knowledge accessible for others at a later point in time, to capitalise on it at scale, without stifling creativity.

How and where does Tacit Knowledge sharing happen in your organisation?

Most of us subscribe to the thinking that diverse teams are more creative, innovative and productive, and we strive to foster collaborative environments that can enable those teams to achieve more, by leveraging both explicit and tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge sharing can take many forms–from experiences and expertise shared in meetings and projects, collaboration platforms (formal as well as informal ones), Communities of Practice, Expertise Location Services, to new hire buddy-systems and peer mentoring.

It’s a good idea to start by identifying any such formal and informal occurrences before making plans to extend or attempt to merge to a common platform. It is likely to find informal forums with more engagement than formal ones.

Once these tacit knowledge sharing pockets have been identified, it is worth looking at the success and user adoption of them, to understand why some are more popular or more effective than others. This is especially valuable when looking at KM solutions. It’s very easy to jump on the social collaboration bandwagon and think that a new collaboration platform will magically solve all problems and be immediately adopted. This is highly unlikely as the “Build it and they will come” approach rarely works, in KM, or elsewhere!

The main challenge then becomes how to standardise and align where collaboration, or other forms of tacit knowledge sharing happens, so that it can be harvested for re-use and/or become available for broader consumption. We need to be careful here, that the organisation’s need for reporting and measuring impact or value, does not take priority over usability and impacts adoption.

How can you measure the value of Tacit Knowledge?

We tend to assume that if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, or has little value to the company. So how can we measure the monetary value of peer-to-peer interactions and capturing knowledge currently not documented? It may be valuable to consider at least these two aspects of “value” dimensions:

Activity metrics–designed to show and drive behavioural change and encourage or incentivise knowledge sharing and collaboration. Metrics can be very effective in driving behaviour, but we need to be careful to drive the right behaviour for the right reason, so that it doesn’t become a tick-box exercise.

Value metrics– with intent to monetary impact, which is always hard when trying to show $ value of intangible assets, like productivity or efficiency. It’s important to acknowledge this and consider indirect metrics (correlations) between knowledge sharing and business results.

In summary, tacit knowledge is as important, and sometimes more so, than explicit knowledge and you need to look at both when planning a KM initiative. Sharing and usage of tacit knowledge can be a differentiator for your business, as a foundation for innovation and collaboration, driving revenue, efficiencies and employee satisfaction. All of which can’t necessarily be directly translated into monetary value but are nonetheless contributing to business objectives.