Slacker Manager

Make Your Employees’ Lives Easier Using Knowledge Management

by David Zinger on August 9th, 2008

This is a guest post from Aaron Stannard, who is the editor of Working Smarter, a productivity blog for managers and presenters.

The best thing a manager can do for his employees, in my opinion, is to make their lives easier by eliminating or simplifying tedious tasks that are not directly related to their employees’ job descriptions.

Here’s a list of some of those extraneous tasks that make employees frustrated:

• Being unable to determine who is responsible for certain projects or activities within a company;
• Not understanding key processes, such as how to file an expense report;
• Not knowing what is expected of them and not having any clear goals;
• Having to beg and crawl through the office asking for looking for key resources, like customer data and sales records;
• Being left out of the loop about changes until the day of implementation; and
• Lastly, not knowing whom to report to regarding specific activities.

All of these issues are commonplace in the workforce and they are a constant pest to both employees and employers; the most important thing to note is that all of these issues are solvable using knowledge management.

Knowledge management is a simple concept; take all of the specialized knowledge needed to run your organization and put it into one place where employees can find it. We use it at work and it saves me a lot of trouble.

So if you’re interested in figuring out how to use knowledge management to make your employees’ lives easier, try these five things:

1. Institutionalize Knowledge

The institutionalization of knowledge is a concept that I first came across when I was required to read sections of Built to Last: The Successful Habits of Visionary Companies when I joined a college fraternity.

Truly great companies take the knowledge required to perform any task within the organization and compile it into a canon, thus making the task of passing on that knowledge to new employees much more trivial compared to companies that don’t institutionalize knowledge.

Take my word for it – investing some time into putting all of your company’s specialized knowledge into one place is well-worth the trouble. Your employees won’t have to come and ask you where they can find information about X, Y, and Z if you build a robust knowledge repository and show them how to use it.

2. Clearly Define Responsibilities then Publish Them

The Org Chart is not dead, folks. Org charts are a useful planning tool for planning the structure of your organization, but using them to clearly define reporting structures is crucial too. Think about it – many of your employees are going to have to reach across departments in order to get their work done; sales guys have to talk to marketing guys, marketing guys have to talk to the IT guys, IT guys have to talk to the HR guys, and the beat goes on.

Do your direct reports a favor and give them a hint – publish an org chart with responsibilities listed on it. Let the marketing guys know which guy in IT handles pushing live content onto the company website, let the sales guy know which guy in marketing writes the copy for corporate resale, let the IT guys know which guy in HR is schedules the interviews.

If you can’t fit all of that information onto an org chart then you should still do something. When I interned for a Fortune 500 company a few years back I was able to actually search through the company intranet to find people responsible for very specific operations that were related to my work; that’s another solution if an annotated org chart won’t cut it.

3. Organize Work into Processes

Your work and your direct reports’ work should be organized into processes when possible. Processes make it much easier to train new employees and they also make it easier to measure the quality of results.

Have your reports document how they perform routine tasks and put it in the knowledge repository; many business processes don’t change all that frequently – personnel changes but processes shouldn’t. Having those processes documented in a knowledge repository will prevent newcomers from having to reinvent the wheel every time they need to do something routine.

Knowing that there’s a standard way to handle routine tasks, like filing an expense report, eliminates a lot of the guesswork for new employees and this generally makes for a much easier transition into the organization.

4. Invest More Time into Orienting New Hires with the Company Knowledgebase

One thing that employers should do more often is spend more time orienting employees with the company knowledgebase. You, the manager, will have a pretty good idea about all of the stuff that your direct reports are going to run into over the course of their work.

Give new hires some orientation materials which explain to them how to perform some standard routines within your business and, even better, how to use any knowledge management systems that your organization implements.

It seems to me that a lot of managers are comfortable letting their new hires figure everything out for themselves via trial by fire; I say “that’s wasteful” and ultimately, frustrating for those new hires. Instead, throw them a bone with some decent orientation materials.

5. Keep Stored Knowledge Current

Once you’ve made the investment of building a reliable knowledge management system then it’s important to keep that information up-to-date. A knowledge repository full of incorrect, outdated information isn’t much more helpful to your employees than not having a knowledge repository to begin with.

Have you and your direct reports spend some time to periodically revisit and update your company’s knowledgebase. Keep it up to date and make it easy for new hires and for direct reports with new responsibilities to find what they need to get the job done.

I think that the combination of all of these things will really make life a lot easier for your employees and training a breeze. Consider giving it a try in your organization.

By the way, my company uses Microsoft SharePoint for its knowledge management system and it works reasonably well. What knowledge management solutions have you tried? Are there some good practices for knowledge management that I left off of this list?

Photo Credit: books in a stack (a stack of books) by http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/1225274637/

Share This

Related Stories

• Why Trust is a Must in Management
• 13 of 30 Reasons Employees Hate Managers
• KNOW-NO: A learning know no.
• Put your problems on ICE
• 3 Signs of a Miserable Job

POSTED IN: management