Last month, APQC published its newest KM report, Engagement and Participation for Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration. In the report, our research team outlines 17 best practices for engaging employees in KM and encouraging them to embrace KM tools and approaches. For me, the most fascinating finding in the report is the extent to which the best-practice organizations link KM participation to career progression.
We’ve known for a long time that organizational culture plays a huge role in how employees respond to KM. If the predominate culture suggests that individual achievement is everything and helping colleagues is a waste of time, then a knowledge-sharing initiative will probably have a hard time getting off the ground, no matter how much money the organization invests in slick technology. But the best-practice organizations in this study take it a step further by making participation in KM approaches an opportunity for competency development and a prerequisite for career advancement.
The first part of the equation is making KM a vehicle for skill and competency development. If employees see knowledge sharing and collaboration as tools that help them learn and grow professionally, they are more likely to become active participants. For example, ConocoPhillips and Fluor have designed their communities of practice to be clearinghouses for technical knowledge, “how-to”s, and learning opportunities. The organizations maintain that, without participating in communities, employees cannot perform their current jobs effectively or gain the skills and experience needed to advance. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland has a similarly close relationship between KM, learning, and career advancement. The Bank’s KM team took lessons learned it had collected from experienced bank examiners, categorized them, and mapped them to levels of knowledge required to move up in the bank examiner career path. To progress to the next career level, examiners must demonstrate proficiency in these lessons learned.
The second part of the equation involves forging explicit links between knowledge contributions and promotion. A good example of this is Computer Sciences Corporation, which has defined career paths for specific roles. Each career path has 10 levels corresponding to an employee’s overall experience and knowledge. The assessments used to determine an employee’s level consider standard factors (e.g., years of experience, projects, teams managed), but they also look at the employee’s community contributions, mentorship, and though leadership. Basically, if you aren’t participating in KM, it is much more difficult to advance. The model is the scaffolding on which the organization hangs KM value for employees.
The third and final part of the equation is leveraging KM roles as opportunities for employees to build their reputations and become more widely known across the organization. When KM responsibilities are handed out as rewards for rising stars, that tends to build interest in the KM program and increase overall engagement. Fluor accomplishes this by selecting high-potential, low-level engineers to fill knowledge manager positions inside its communities. Community knowledge managers are responsible for maintaining technology, ensuring content is accurate and relevant, sharing success stories, and monitoring whether questions are answered. After a year or two in this position, knowledge managers become highly sought-after as project team members because they have been exposed to so much content and have made so many connections across the organization.
There’s a lot more on the relationship between KM participation and career advancement in the full report, which you can download from our Knowledge Base. If you want the CliffsNotes version, check out the study overview.