The pandemic made heroes out of KM programs that had the three “P”s in place before the shutdown:
- Processes to manage content, share knowledge, and collaborate
- People embedded in the business to rally and support remote work
- Platforms to enable content management, search, and collaboration
More than 80 percent of surveyed KM leaders say employees relied heavily on KM in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. Furthermore, 58 percent say KM challenges became a bigger drain on employee productivity given the unprecedented disruptions. During that time, any weak “P”s, in our KM and work processes became glaringly clear. Fortunately, people, stepped up to fix or work around them.
That same “can-do" attitude is still alive now. There is still time to grant your KM program a much-needed boost. During the pandemic, leaders invested heavily in automation and machine learning. This gave us a productivity boost, but it could be eroded as more people in low-productivity service jobs return to work. (Note: the US economy added almost 560,000 jobs in May 2021 alone.) Putting people back to work is exciting and the right direction…let’s just do it productively. Having seen the value of investment and robust KM, many leaders are open to investing more. Now is the time for KM and process improvement professionals to make the case for investment for a ramped-up, post-pandemic level of productivity. But we need to direct the money for processes, people and platforms where it will do the most good.
It’s Time to Ask These Important Productivity Questions
Here are some of the questions that could guide your investment strategy for 2021–2022 and beyond.
- What productivity measures matter to me? To my boss?
- What wastes time and hampers productivity? How much?
- What can KM and process management do to help productivity in a meaningful way?
- Where does the most critical knowledge reside? Are we at risk of losing it? Or, did it already walk out the door with the rash of layoffs and retirements, requiring new ways to backfill
You might ask “Why is measurement at the top of the list of questions to investigate?” For two reasons: first, it tells us what matters to leaders and employees. It is always easier to “ride the horse in the direction it is already going” which in this case means what already has attention. Second, what matters may have changed from pre-Covid times. For example, the concept of “productivity” is broader now that it includes more than efficiency. (In my recent blog, Productivity Reimagined for the 21st Century | APQC, I made the case for considering sustainability, diversity and knowledge as part of the “output” of an organization.)
To understand where the biggest productivity gains lie now, APQC is addressing the important productivity questions above and more in a 15-minute survey running right now. We want to know how you think about productivity and all the things that make you more, or less productive. We’ll use that data to better advise our members about productivity enablers and measures they should put in place—and the time sucks they should help employees avoid.