Podcast
Finding that balance is a motivation for Laura Pike Seeley, knowledge program leader at global architecture firm HKS, Inc. She joins Get Reworked to discuss how the firm strikes that balance through a blend of knowledge sharing practices and approaches.
"Digital workplace design is critical here, right? Most of us spend an enormous part of our day working within the digital workplace and the tools that it connects us to. So this environment can be full of flashing lights and distractions, or it can be an environment that guides you through the noise to find the connections and the ideas that matter most to you," said Laura.
Highlights of the conversation include:
- How HKS Inc balances live knowledge sharing lessons and static knowledge hubs to account for employee needs.
- The differences between knowledge management practices in a consumer packaged goods firm vs. an architecture firm.
- How she finds the balance between information overload and open exploration and knowledge sharing.
Tune-in Here
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Show Notes
- Laura Pike Seeley on LinkedIn
- Laura Pike Seeley's articles on Reworked
Show Transcript
Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Siobhan Fagan: As baby boomers retire, they’re taking decades of hard-earned knowledge with them. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing is one of the best ways to keep that knowledge in house — but how do we make it work without adding to workplace noise and burnout?
Which is why we’re talking today with Laura Pike Seeley. We’ll discuss how to create the culture and mechanisms that make this possible, and how she balances these practices with people’s need for focus time.
Laura manages the knowledge management program at HKS Inc, a global architecture firm specializing in sports projects, like the SoFi SuperBowl stadium, and in the health sector.
My name is Siobhan Fagan. I’m the editor in chief of Reworked and it’s my pleasure to welcome Laura to the show today.
Welcome to the show, Laura!
Laura Pike Seeley: Thank you so much. It's a thrill to be here.
Siobhan: Part of the reason why I wanted you on the show, Laura, is the fact that a lot of people look at knowledge management with a specific technology point of view.
And I love that you bring this breadth of, you're taking in so many different things and encompassing the entire employee experience while also working within this technology area. I'm jumping ahead, but I want to see what people get wrong about knowledge management and working in knowledge management. Like what would you say if there is a big one that people get wrong, what would that be?
Laura: Great question. I think KM efforts can fail, and often do, when they neglect the human and the cultural factors. A common mistake people make, not just in knowledge management, but in organizational development work overall, is thinking that you can simply introduce a tool or technology and just magically transform the way people work, right? If I've said it once, I've said it hundred times, this is not field of dreams. Just because you build it doesn't mean they will come.
Flashy tools, no matter how well designed, are not automatically going to be adopted if they're not integrated into the culture or aligned with real work processes. This is true not just of technologies, but of programs and initiatives overall. So when at all possible, we want to meet teams where they are. We want to find, enable, optimize, and make visible the positive behaviors that are already taking place in their current flow of work.
There's just no overstating the importance of buy-in, both from leadership at all levels, but also the teams impacted, the importance of discovery and grassroots support. And ultimately, without leveraging proven change management frameworks, even the most advanced, coolest looking KM systems or any kind of system, could be ignored.
Siobhan: Let's dig into HKS. You talked about how you enjoyed this subsect of knowledge workers and how it's kind of different. So I'm wondering when you are doing knowledge management in this organization, how is it different from knowledge management in another organization that's perhaps more text-based?
Laura: There are probably a lot of ways to answer this.
I kind of want to answer it in a way that's unique to my own professional experience. Before I was at HKS, I was at Fossil Inc. and that's a company most people know for watches and leather goods. They're in the smart watch market now. But I spent six years working with fashion and product designers. And so it was interesting now to begin working with a whole new typology of design thinkers.
The scale and the pace of fashion and product design is pretty short, right? The design cycle actually gets shorter consistently every year. They're very focused on personal expression and on trends and on balancing those concepts with brand principles. So knowledge exchange and consumption on the product design side of Fossil really centered around trends and ever evolving consumer preferences. Working with architectural and interior designers really was a whole new ballgame. Again, we only have 1,600 people on staff, but we really do have an outsized impact on communities and the planet and the environment. When we're doing our best and our highest work, our firm really is creating projects that have human health and well-being, sustainability and equitable development built into our design ethos. So with trends in consumer behaviors and across industries, it's important to understand to serve our clients, our design work is really grounded.
Think about it, the results of our work can last decades if not more, right? So the quality management work we do, it's foundational, it's critical to life safety. Risk is carefully managed. Regulatory, legal requirements, they're abundant. All of those truths make KM important from a process and business operations perspective. At HKS, KM infrastructure and data teams can and often do work in tandem to improve project workflow and to minimize that risk.
But given all of that, I wouldn't be the first person to say that the AEC industry is slow to adapt or can be slow to adapt and to innovate. Risk aversion, the scale of the projects, the conservatism of our clients, volatile markets, etc., they all work to make change both super important and something that we have to carefully manage. Learning from what's been proven in the past and leveraging that to consider the most fruitful paths forward, is one important aim of KM anywhere, but it's really critical for AEC firms.
Developing a culture of learning, questioning our assumptions, openness to change, is something that I think all architectural firms have to approach mindfully, and we've done amazing things in that area at HKS, I think.
Siobhan: So when we look at a day in the life of somebody working at HKS, what does knowledge sharing look like? What kind of forums? You mentioned earlier that you are working with SharePoint, but what other formats are you exchanging this information in? Is it just all in one place? Is there tacit knowledge exchange on top of the explicit or?
Laura: I would love for it to be in all one place. Right? So hard. Communities are really important in HKS. We have several champion networks that connect and facilitate the exchange of knowledge through live sessions. So live sessions are really important, but also through two-way communication tools like email distribution lists, Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage communities. Ideally, we would have a unified approach from a common toolkit, and that's something we're working on.
But I'm always careful not to disrupt successful existing practices. We are currently exploring what resources best support these groups and our overall communities of practice strategy. I do have some examples of this in action. Our urban and community design enthusiasts, they meet to share best practices through project pinups. Our JEDI champions, that's justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, they meet monthly for presentations and discussions on equitable design practices. They can also use the JEDI Cafe in Viva Engage to exchange news and ideas asynchronously.
We also host event series that really help to encourage knowledge sharing. We have something called the monthly innovation conversations. And that's where we really talk about how we're blurring boundaries across our business units, our practices, and our sectors. And we really focus on curiosity and purpose there.
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One recent session featured a cognitive neuroscientist who was talking about urban design's psychological impact. And another highlighted how one of our teams partnered with a client to figure out how they could reduce harm in the supply chain. These sessions foster two-way dialogue and are open to all of our employees.
Viva Engage is gaining traction. There really was a period where Yammer was kind of cast aside. It was nearly abandoned in favor of Microsoft Teams. And while I think Teams is great for functional silos to work discreetly, we're encouraging Viva Engage for more open and collaborative practices.
I'm really cautious about disrupting anything that's already been adopted and is working well, even if I don't think it's ideal. But one success we do have is our company-wide standing Ovation Channel. This is in Viva Engage and we celebrate our project wins and our media mentions.
Our goal now is to build a culture that encourages more visible questions and open ideation within the digital workplace. Some other things we encourage is for employees to share knowledge by writing blog posts. So people who have attended a conference can write SharePoint news posts that summarize their takeaways and that's visible to everyone.
We do have a mentorship program that's run by our professional and organizational development team that actually allows our mentees to search for mentors by the mentors self-identified skills. We still have have work to do in fostering a culture of open curiosity, but I feel like these efforts really are lighting the way.
Siobhan: You've got all of these people who are sharing all of their knowledge. But at the same time, you raised this earlier, you're very cognizant of the interruptions that a lot of these tools can create and wanting to both do the deep work and also build these connections through the natural knowledge sharing. So I'm hoping that you can talk about how you approach that challenge.
Laura: Absolutely, that is a big concern for me. It's one that I think should hopefully be important to anyone who's working in employee experience, digital workplace, KM, internal comms and so on. And for me, it boils down to this, ultimately, two things can be true at the same time in our modern workplaces. One, information overload undermines our ability to focus and two, innovation does require exploration. We need deep work.
We need to allow people to be heads down, to be productive, to be given space, to tune out noise, and to do what they do best and love most, especially for introverts and for people who are extremely specialized. Working in this way is critical to their sense of purpose and satisfaction at work, and even to their comfort and their mental well-being. Consider that the purest definition of an introvert is that they're an individual who tends to be more sensitive to sensory input and you'll start to see why deep work is so appealing to many of them.
But this is difficult to achieve in the attention economy, and by attention economy, I mean this idea that human attention is a scarce and valuable resource that we have to control and capture. Within an organization, leaders with the best of intentions are often competing to capture the attention of the employees with the goal of guiding them down certain mental or behavioral paths to say nothing of what happens outside of an organization in our day-to-day lives, right?
So this is a problem for introverts, yes, but also for all people who have been hired to use their specific skill sets to achieve specific goals. But even introverts and people with deep specialized skill sets can't work effectively in isolation, let alone folks who are more extroverted, who crave input and newness. People want to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. This is key to employee engagement, they want to continue to learn and grow. And most people, I think, understand that we're smarter in the aggregate than we are alone and that knowledge exchange is really important to innovation.
So we're really talking here about connection and community. And I think naturally some people are going to value focus over connection and vice versa. And I don't think it's just an extrovert or introvert divide. There are a lot of factors that can influence how insular or how open someone feels at any given time.
But as KM practitioners, we have to help promote the balance between the two as we are designing these workplace experiences.
Siobhan: So how do you go about this at HKS? How are you kind of doing that? And are you using technology to sort of help there? Because I can see how technology can go both ways. It's the one that's actually creating these pings and notifications, but it also can be an aid. Can you talk about that a little?
Laura: Digital workplace design is critical here, right? Most of us spend an enormous part of our day working within the digital workplace and the tools that it connects us to. So this environment can be full of flashing lights and distractions, or it can be an environment that guides you through the noise to find the connections and the ideas that matter most to you. And I do have my own list of practical approaches for protecting focus in the way you design connection mechanisms. And I can offer some examples of how we employ those at HKS.
Siobhan: That would be great.
Laura: One of my favorites are knowledge hubs.
I want to take a moment to shout out our knowledge delivery system because I'm really proud of it. Our formalized knowledge is really well managed in something called the Insight Center, which is intranet based. And this is where people can browse our internal knowledge network, externally and internally produced case studies, research reports, event recordings on and on.
Employees here can also access our collections of design strategies. So strategies dedicated maybe to active design or energy use reduction. And we have a really modular building block approach to knowledge delivery. Each resource is treated discreetly and is tagged in really robust ways. And this is one of the foundational patterns of our intranet. And that means people encounter resources in their knowledge explorations when they're addressing challenges in the flow of their work.
So let's say, take the design of stairways to encourage use. When we do this right, we're increasing physical activity, reducing operational energy usage, we're encouraging certain circulation patterns. If you're trying to meet any of those goals and you're a designer and you go to the Insight Center, you're going to be presented with that strategy based on our approach to tagging and surfacing content. What this means is that when I find, or anyone finds, a great resource about how to make stairs more attractive and popular, I don't have to blast it out to all of our designers because it's there for them when they need it.
Now, would it be a disaster if I sent that out to everyone? No. And there might even be some benefits to doing so, but you have to weigh that benefit against the cost of distracting your teams, giving them more noise to wait through in their workday. Another favorite for me is just knowledge share meetings and how we manage those. So obviously these are structured, synchronous platforms for people to share valuable knowledge and learn from their peers.
So at HKS, we try to do this in regularly scheduled sessions. We try to avoid one-off sessions that can contribute to that meeting creep. We try to give everyone an idea of what the meeting purpose is and keep the topics in scope. But we have an event explorer, and that's where people can go back and watch recordings and browse presentation decks after the meeting has occurred. I love this solution, and so do our employees. It means that if someone is in the flow of work and they don't want to disrupt that, but they don't want to feel like they'll miss out if they choose to skip the live session, they can go back, they can watch the recording, read the transcript. They can fast forward through the recording and find what matters most to them. They can watch the recording on 1.25 speed if they prefer that. I prefer it.
This is a good example of how technology can help balance connections and focus effectively by meeting people where they are. And so during these live sessions, we'll see people put in the chat, is this going to be on the internet? Just making sure.
Just a few other principles I wanted to mention, allowing users to control their notification settings and tools like chat and forums and email, using audience targeting measures, your corporate email newsletters and your internet homepage, are really good places to keep this in mind. Your London employees don't need to know about a potluck in LA, vice versa. Our internal comms team really keeps this in mind. And just ensuring that content is fresh and relevant is really especially important for the internet homepage and content.
Because remember, static is noise. So you want to have an established cadence for all of those updates. And finally, at HKS, we also offer training and resources in support of best practices, things like sending emails mindfully, using and respecting do not disturb settings in chat, being attentive to those community guidelines, just to name a few.
Siobhan: I love this whole idea where you're balancing things, you are doing both push and pull knowledge management, where people can control their own adventure. One of the things that does come up sometimes, and I don't know that you have this problem at HKS because it doesn't sound like you do, is how to encourage people to share their knowledge? Do you face that challenge at all? And if so, what advice do you have for others who are dealing with the same problem?
Laura: I think this is something all organizations deal with. And it's really a cultural challenge first and foremost. And before we're asking people to share their knowledge freely or to work out loud, we have to make sure and find out if they already are, right? Maybe we don't see it. And if they're not doing it, why aren't they? And our KM team has started using these six sources of influence framework, from a book called "Influencer, The New Science of Leading Change," that we really like.
We started by identifying the underlying beliefs that reduce adoption of knowledge share efforts, or really a lot of different efforts. And the opposite, pro-social belief. We didn't start just with HKS in mind, we kind of thought broadly. So this might look like someone saying, I don't see the point in sharing, things are fine as they are. The pro-social opposite is, I'm part of a community that's making a difference. In the long run, if we all share, our jobs become easier and our work becomes better and more satisfying.
They may think sharing is too much work. I'm busy and I'm tired. We want them to think sharing is simple. It occurs in the stream of my work. It's happening in tools where I'm already operating, right? They may think knowledge sharing isn't valued by the organization enough to divert my attention from other things. We want them to think, sharing my knowledge can help my career, leaders pay attention to what I'm sharing, it's important to the organization and to my advancement. And finally, one that I think is really important is, if I share, people could criticize me.
And the pro-social opposite of that would be when I make myself vulnerable, people respond with kindness. They make themselves vulnerable too. So if you can identify the types of underlying beliefs that might be present in these scenarios, that can help you start to brainstorm solutions to address them. So at HKS, we understood that one challenge is that people feel too mired in project work to really be innovative and to sit and spend some time with their thoughts.
The research incubator is led by our enterprise research team, and that was one response. The research incubator has been profiled and recognized by Fast Company. It funds teams who want to explore a research idea that can lead to innovation and project work. For example, last year, a group of people worked together to explore how automation could impact master planning efforts, and there was another group looking at how we could implement embodied carbon reduction into our project process.
So this program allows teams, often from different silos across the organization, to really come together to address challenges and explore those moonshot ideas.
Siobhan: I love what you brought up, though, about finding people from different teams who are potentially working on sort of the same problem maybe from different sides or something like that. Do you find other ways to connect people in that way so that you're not sort of reinventing the wheel across different teams?
Laura: I think in matrixed organizations like ours, there's opportunity for that because they might be connecting as members of a practice. They may be connecting as people within an office or within their role, maybe they're a project manager or a job captain. I think there are ways for people to come together. I think it can be hard. I think in a lot of matrixed organizations there tends to be these major silos that form. And I would say here, it's around our practices.
So getting people to share ideas across practices is something that we're working on. And I think this is a good example of how we can do that. think our champion networks are another good example of how if you're in our sustainability champions group, you could be from any group and you may be talking about well-being and how materials that promote human health are really important to your group, and someone in another practice may hear that and learn about a new material they might want to implement.
Those are some of the ways that's happening. And I think that can be a challenge at organizations to get across those silos, but it's definitely worth it.
Siobhan: Do you see knowledge management's application at an individual level? is there a way for people to practice it by themselves within an organization? What do you think?
Laura: I really like this question. It might help to start with a key definition of knowledge management. There are a lot of ways to think about it. This is just mine. KM supports effective decision-making, decision-making about how we work today and how we plan for the future. And it does this by making it easy to discover whatever is needed for those decisions, people, communities, tools, platforms, documents, AV materials, data and dashboards.
And I think we do all certainly do this on an individual level. And if we don't, we start to feel it, right? Thinking about taking your own meeting notes, using personal KM tools like Roam, Obsidian, or Notion, organizing your email inbox or creating a structured folder for your documents. And we all have our own naming conventions for our files, right? These are individual KM practices and they're critical.
The importance of collaboration can't be overstated. Again, I believe we're all smarter together than any one of us alone. And this is a key aim of KM, ensuring that good ideas don't remain isolated, but can spread throughout the organization.
However, creativity and clarity often come not just from direct face-to-face collaboration, but from that individual exploration. It's about tying together disparate ideas that we've encountered through work and learning. And KM at the individual level supports this kind of deeper asynchronous work just as it can also facilitate working out loud.
I think, ultimately, everyone plays a role in effective knowledge management. Whether you're sharing questions, formalizing knowledge, consuming it, organizing your own, you're doing knowledge management work.
Siobhan: I love that. I appreciate all of these answers.
I want to hand the mic over to you, if there's anything that we didn't cover in the conversation, any sort of last bits of advice that you would share with people out there who are potentially facing challenges with their knowledge management practice.
Laura: We have really started to think about helping people talk about the way individuals and teams work. We're working on a template right now where people can come together at the start of a project and use tools to help say this is who I am. I am someone who is a little bit risk averse. I am someone who likes to do my own work before I come together to brainstorm or the opposite, maybe I'm very direct communicator and you should know this about me in advance.
Using tools to understand yourself first and then to be able to communicate that to the people around you as you're collaborating, I think is really invaluable. It's something I'm really excited about because organizations are made up of individuals who are also unique and interesting.
And the way we approach work and consume knowledge is also unique and individual. Being able to understand that about yourself, your own neuro-type, your own preferences, and to be able to communicate that I think is something that's really important. I think this has implications for KM and also things like professional development and just the way we work together. I think we all have a lot to do, or a lot of work to do, in listening and thinking about how we work and also how other people work, and how we can meet them where they are. So that's something that's really important to me too.
Siobhan: I'm so glad I opened it up to you because that's a great note to end on.
Laura, thank you so much for joining us, for sharing a little bit of your knowledge and your insights. I hope to talk to you again to see what else you're up to at HKS.
Laura: Thank you so much, Siobhan. I really enjoyed this.
Siobhan: If you have a suggestion or a topic for a future conversation, I'm all ears. Please drop me a line at [email protected]. Additionally, if you liked what you heard, please share Get Reworked with anyone you think might benefit from these types of conversations — word of mouth marketing is the best marketing anyone could ask for. You can find more coverage of related topics on reworked.co. Thank you again for exploring the revolution of work with me, and I'll see you next time.
