Editorial
It’s always challenging when a valued contributor leaves the team. Unless there’s a crossover period, the people that remain are suddenly doing more with less. Recruiting a replacement is a long-lead exercise and time intensive for everyone involved. Then there’s the process of onboarding and getting the new hire up to speed, which can take upwards of twelve months.
Often, one of the biggest losses when someone leaves is institutional knowledge. Long-tenured staff develop a kind of “brains trust” knowledge over time. They’re exposed to all the exceptions and nuances that may be encountered in business processes or deployment projects and have the learned experience to deal with it.
Systems to capture institutional knowledge have long been a ”North Star” of forward-looking organizations. If done correctly, these systems can become a wiki for how to perform a job. Today, however, effective instances of these systems remain the exception rather than the rule. While organizations want an easy way to capture their institutional knowledge and make it searchable, many have not yet settled on a way to do it.
Misconceptions of Institutional Knowledge Capture
There are misconceptions about the optimal ways to approach such a project.
When institutional knowledge capture follows a “big bang” format, like asking all employees at a point in time to document everything they understand about their job role, it tends to fail. Immediate traction and cooperation across an organization’s staff can be difficult. There may be questions about why the exercise is being undertaken, and fears among staff about how the captured knowledge may be utilized. In organizations with high turnover, employees may fear that their roles are being automated, outsourced or similarly replaced, which could put a dent in their level of cooperation.
However, taking a more granular or siloed approach to knowledge capture can also cause problems. If knowledge capture is run at an individual business unit level, it runs the risk of inconsistent capture that reinforces internal knowledge silos.
Organizations that have taken either approach invariably need to call in expert assistance to optimize their programs of work. The pressure to get things right is higher now, due to broader trends in the job market. Specialized skills are hard to retain, and even harder to attract. An effective knowledge capture system helps existing staff perform their roles, and new staff to onboard faster. Institutional knowledge is always within reach and is easily discoverable.
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How to Get Knowledge Capture Right: 5 Tips
In my experience, these five aspects of knowledge system design are what separate leading and lagging organizations, and are worthy of close attention:
Continuous Capture
Some types of knowledge are more easily captured and systematized than others. The set of linear steps that show how a process is performed may be captured manually or even with automated discovery systems, and presented back to teams as the official documented way of replicating that process.
But when it comes to capturing “brains trust” knowledge, it’s more challenging. The knowledge of how to respond to an outlier or uncommon scenario is freshest just after team members have gone through it, making that the best time to attempt a capture. Knowledge capture should be part of the business-as-usual process: if you learn or do something new, share it and document it for next time. It needs to be proactive, organic and continuous. In order to constantly improve, an organization needs to learn from doing. It can only do that effectively when what gets done gets recorded.
Be Unobtrusive
A “big bang” approach to knowledge capture risks placing too much of an imposition on staff. If presented with lengthy surveys on a too-frequent basis, people and focus is drawn away from business-as-usual tasks. People who are time-poor may not provide the most comprehensive responses to questions, leading to incomplete capture. In addition, the project may be overwhelming because of the volume.
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“What’s in It for Me?”
Underpinning every knowledge management system implementation are a series of drivers and OKRs at a senior executive level: whether it’s to reduce turnover and increase retention, or to improve operational efficiency, auditing, accreditation and governance outcomes.
But these do not speak to the individual employee benefit of documenting your institutional knowledge, nor are they likely to help secure broader buy-in. The key to progressing a knowledge capture project is to show staff how the exercise will benefit them. They will be able to perform their roles better, and respond faster, when there is a way to get their questions answered at any time – particularly ones they may think are inconsequential and are too shy to ask.
Be Transparent
With the value of knowledge capture defined, it must also be communicated openly, transparently and on an ongoing basis. Everyone that leaves an organization has some level of intellectual property that leaders and teams would rather retain. That’s a clear project goal and vision, and one that can be executed if it’s understood, when there is buy-in, and if the capture process is frictionless. When the reasons for knowledge capture aren’t communicated or are unclear, people will fill in the gaps and negative sentiment can form.
Lead Sponsors and Internal Champions
Like any organizational change program, top-down sponsorship is critical to success. When the program is kicked off, it needs to be given appropriate internal visibility and be championed, both up high and at lower levels in the organization. A knowledge capture project that lacks executive sponsorship will fail at the first attempt to secure people’s participation.
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