Quite often a good story is the best way to impart knowledge (Davenport and Prusak 1998).

Storytelling is the oldest technique of knowledge transfer and has been touted as the most effective medium to pass across a message to someone since we tend to memorize stories better than dry facts and can easily link them to our personal experiences. Medical technologies have also proved that storytelling is a natural way for brain to capture and retain information.

During the recent years “power of storytelling” has garnered a lot of attention from the perspective of Knowledge Management and harnessing the tacit knowledge of an organization. In a domain that has been primarily dominated by charts and facts, storytelling has a great potential as a knowledge transfer and learning tool. Capturing tacit knowledge is a pain point for most organizations so no wonder, storytelling is fast gaining recognition as a KM tool.

Let us see below how the role of storytelling in a KM framework.

Fostering collaboration – In an organization people often come together as teams, groups, communities. Using narrative techniques during these sessions help people collaborate and learn from each other’s experiences as they have a context missing in the traditional form of meetings.

Transfer of tacit knowledge and understanding - Stories allow tacit knowledge to be shared more easily as stories provide context and focus on issues relevant to the listener. Storytelling allows a seamless leap from information to knowledge.

Ideation leading to Innovation – Ideas pave the way for Innovation. Employees have hands on experience with processes, clients, products, and customers. When they collaborate to share their stories while collaborating formally or informally, they create a new paradigm by introducing new ideas with potential for improvement and innovation.

Organic way to learn - The wider purpose of any KM framework is to equip employees with knowledge for greater good of the organization, and the medium of learning is vital. Various studies have proved that story telling is most effective in imparting and capturing of knowledge. Tacit knowledge from experienced members and outgoing employees can be embedded in narratives to help inexperienced employees learn and upskill.

If the question is why stories work so well in knowledge management, then the answer–simply–is that “our brains seem to be wired to easily and almost automatically organize information into stories” (Reamy, 2002).

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In the last two decades, the creation and enablement of knowledge as a source for an organization’s competitive advantage has been highly emphasized.  There has been a paradigm shift in how an organization's knowledge is now viewed and nurtured.

Knowledge Management is all about knowledge creation and the activities that support the creation and dissemination at various organizational levels. It starts from instilling a knowledge vision, building a collaborative culture, facilitating conversations, globalizing local knowledge, and encouraging creativity and innovation. The integration of the above processes leading to the generation of new sources of knowledge is the key to the success of any organization.

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 the 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 a 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:

Instill a knowledge-sharing culture – As the saying goes, lead by example. If leaders inculcate the culture of sharing their learning and experiences via forums like CoPs, stream, blogs, etc., people are sure to follow.

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

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.

Set up a Post-Mortem process – Put in place a process to document analysis and learnings from all team members at the end of each project. This will enable externalization and improvement in processes.

Set up exhaustive exit interview - These are no longer the times when an employee used to join an organization straight out of college and work till retirement. When a company loses its employee, it also loses the accompanying knowledge and experience. The need is to have an exhaustive exit strategy in place where outgoing people capture their experiences, feedback, contacts, insights, and a directory of work that can be passed onto the replacing employee to get a head start.

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Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to work better leading to a well-informed, efficient, and innovative workforce. Let's see below how it leads to cost savings for any organization.

• Connecting people to people via the medium of Knowledge Management (KM) communities or knowledge-sharing platforms provide them with a streamlined channel to capture, store and share knowledge leading to increased efficiency and decreased response time.
• With a KM framework in places, people are well versed with best practices followed by employees from other teams working on similar projects leading to a decrease in errors and an increase in quality of work output.
• A higher degree of employee accountability is created when knowledge is easily shared and accessed via various KM channels and tools like communities, knowledge repositories and discussion forums.
• With increased focus on KM employees get a chance to connect with global peers to share and learn from each other leading to Innovation and creation of new products and efficient ways to perform services.
• Client satisfaction is a vital component of sales & delivery for any organization. By having easy access to the knowledge sources, you need to perform your job efficiently, you shorten the sales cycle.

Well, these are reasons enough to start putting together a KM framework for your organization if not already in place. And coming up in the next article is how to capture knowledge and make it available for value creation via various KM channels.

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Organization’s collected knowledge is its most essential asset. The development of this intellectual knowledge from tacit to explicit, sharing and utilization forms the basis of knowledge management. Its purpose is to ensure that the relevant knowledge in people’s heads and the hard drive is captured and made available to the whole organization for the realization of an organization’s goals.

Communities of Practice (CoP) are fundamental to knowledge management (KM) framework in any organization. Their purpose is to provide to the members, flow of information, access to global peers, a platform for collaboration, innovation, reusing of ideas leading to improved business performance and delivery.

Communities are a platform for a wide variety of knowledge activities, including gathering and disseminating content, brainstorming, asking for help, solving problems, finding experts, keeping members informed of emerging trends, learning, and transferring knowledge.

Bringing to life a community can be a great first step in laying the foundation for gathering Organization’s knowledge and channelizing it for growth of employees and realizing delivery excellence. However, the real challenge is to drive these communities to success and ensuring that they adapt with the changes in business and that they do not fizzle out over a period of time.

Here are six commandments to drive successful Communities. These are not exhaustive but certainly layout the foundation stone for steering successful CoPs.

Community governance: The Community managers and stakeholders should be clear on the Community purpose, expected behavior, what they want to achieve out of it and run periodic checks to review the purpose and strategy and modify/upgrade as needed to keep the Community relevant for members. The community structure (open, close, or moderated) should directly align to its purpose/

Why should members join?:  Why will members take out time to join these communities or participate in community-related initiatives? What’s in it for them should be clearly outlined and communicated to the members. A period review of members and their activities should be conducted. Seeking feedback from them on relevancy and how you continue to keep Communities effective for them should be the key to have engaged members.

Role clarity for stewarding the community initiatives: As discussed above, there a host of activities enabled via a Community. The community manager should clearly define roles and responsibilities for everyone administering the sites including the content team, community champions, and specialists. Also, he or she needs to set up frequency for reviews, analyzing activities, seeking feedback, etc. to ensure that the Community continues to align with its business goal. If not, take a step back to review and refresh it.

Thoroughly defined content strategy: The content posted on CoP should be fresh, relevant, and reviewed regularly for taxonomy and accuracy. Policies should be in place for archiving old content, content review, and ensuring that the latest content is highlighted. Create an alert system so that members are aware when content is posted. This will ensure the regular access of content and Community by the members.

Collaboration and content harvesting activities: Collaboration and crowdsourcing are at the core of what communities. Schedule regular collaboration activities to foster knowledge sharing and innovation. See here various collaboration tools you can leverage for your communities. Also, organizing regular content harvesting campaigns leads to the gathering of content sitting on members' hard drive which could be reused by other members spanning organizational boundaries.

Performance evaluation: Regular evaluation of performance metrics helps community program managers understand what areas the community is performing well and what areas need improvement. This is essential for driving sustainable communities.

Let me know your thoughts on what other actions can help drive sustainable CoPs.

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Files, memos, manuals, guidelines, onboarding lists, CRM data...

Businesses operate a vast amount of knowledge to survive and thrive in a competitive environment. If properly harnessed, knowledge can boost the productivity of entire companies.

That’s why companies are investing in knowledge management systems – the tools that make it easier to share, access, and update information and knowledge within an organization.

In this post, we’ll talk about how these five knowledge management examples can boost organizational productivity:

• Document management systems
• Cross-training programs
• Content management systems (CMS)
• Chatbots
• Social networking tools.

Let’s begin.

1. Document Management Systems and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Organize and promote the use of systems like Google Docs and Notion

These days, every company uses document management systems like Google Docs or Notion. People create presentations, spreadsheets, guidelines, and text documents to share information within a company and store valuable knowledge.

Google Docs, in particular, is super popular.

It’s easy, simple, and free - anyone can use the suite to create documents, share them, control access permissions, and download files. With this document management system, a company can store information in one place, safely, and access it at any time.

Another advantage is that Google Docs’s cloud-based system reduces the need for a centralized organizational data repository and allows collaboration. These features help employees to be productive and achieve more, faster.

One more popular option is Notion. Companies use this system as a go-to source for company information like policies, marketing strategies, HR information, employment terms, and many other useful data.

2. Cross-Training Programs and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Improve employee skills by implementing cross-training programs and initiatives

Every company has training and onboarding programs to allow new employees to gain knowledge by working with experienced employees. Cross-training programs, on the other hand, are for employees to expand their skill set.

In the hotel industry, for example, employees learn how to work different jobs in a hotel or restaurant. Someone working at the reception can explore new roles for delivering service to guests, both online and offline.

The positive effect on productivity can be significant. Employees who participate in training expand their skill sets and can serve customers better. That’s why cross-training is an effective knowledge management approach to increase employee productivity.

Executives value the importance of cross-training as a way to improve employee productivity and interconnected operations.

“While it’s natural for all of our team members to have areas of focus....  all of the pieces of an operation are connected—which makes cross-training critical,” Hotel Business magazine quoted Kevin Lillis, the CEO of Hospitality Alliance, as saying.

3. Content Management Systems (CMS) and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Promote and lead the use of CMS/prepare customer knowledge base for sharing

Companies use CMSs like WordPress to manage, store, and monitor content projects from beginning to publication. They make it easier for marketing teams to collaborate on and track the performance of content projects.

Why is that important?

Content marketing is a cost-effective way for online businesses to connect with customers and promote their products and services. More than 91 percent of companies use content to achieve their marketing goals – and they need to track a wide range of KPIs.

That’s where CMS comes in.

This tool helps to:

• Manage website content
• Create, store, and publish blog content
• Manage product pages and landing pages
• Increase a site’s visibility on Google
• Keep websites secure with built-in plugins
• Collaborate on content marketing projects in one place
• Analyze the performance of content.

A CMS is essentially a database of content-related information and knowledge that a business possesses. Thanks to the tool, businesses can organize their content marketing effort, monitor their performance, and be more productive.

4. Chatbots and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Promote conversational knowledge sharing via chatbots with employees and customers

A chatbot is an app that simulates a conversation with a human online. When a user asks a chatbot a question, it uses algorithms or pre-determined answers to provide a reply in seconds.

Knowledge managers recognize that chatbots are an innovative way to collect, store, and share information with both employees and customers. Here’s how they can help.

Businesses create chatbots to automate internal knowledge sharing by:

• Sharing information about the company policies and procedures with employees
• Answering the most common onboarding and questions.

Using chatbots for marketing purposes is also becoming common.

Website chatbots perform customer surveys, share lead magnets, generate information for a marketing research paper or report, answer customer support questions, and connect visitors with service agents.

As with many other innovative knowledge management initiatives, managers need to secure buy-in from company leaders to start developing chatbots. That’s why they need effective communication tools to promote new projects to any stakeholder.

5. Social Networking Tools and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Facilitate the use of social networking tools and manage shared knowledge bases

Almost every company today uses a private social networking tool like Slack. Certified knowledge managers are among those promoting and managing this innovation.

The most important benefit of networking tools for productivity is the fact that they bring people, technologies, and processes together. An organization becomes an interconnected community where any piece of information or knowledge can be shared in seconds.

The role of communities in knowledge management is profound. Not only collaboration and information sharing become easier, but knowledge storage, too. Since private social networking tools store all historical conversations, anyone in the company can access previously shared files or conversations.

Knowledge Management and Company Productivity: Summary

The role of knowledge managers in promoting and maintaining high performance standards is significant. By using these five approaches, for example, they enable cooperation and increase engagement within an organization – a must for effective knowledge sharing, innovation, and digital transformation.

Throughout the process, the managers also play a deciding role in ensuring that knowledge management is tailored to employees’ needs and challenges. The success of this project means increased collaboration and engagement, which ultimately leads to higher overall productivity.

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