Knowledge Retention

1. Knowledge Retention By: Li-Shen Chong

2. Knowledge retention is essential for companies in this knowledge-economy age. Knowledge enables companies to continue running and be profitable. Useful knowledge gives a company the competitive advantage and helps it stay at the top of the business. Knowledge Retention

3. What constitutes as knowledge? • Talented individuals or employees. • Processes and procedures to perform tasks within the company. • Trade secrets • Formulas or recipes • Consumer feedback on products or services • Expert insights, etc.

4. Why is knowledge retention important? • “Knowledge is wealth” – knowledge is the most effective source of being profitable in business. In this age of knowledge economy, knowledge is also power. • Increase productivity – employees spend most of their time seeking knowledge to help them complete their tasks. If knowledge could be found easily and accessible, employees could find solutions quicker, and thereby increasing productivity.

5. Why is knowledge retention important? • Effective knowledge utilization – enables employees to find the most effective tried-and-tested method to solve a problem instead of trial-and-error. • Product or service enhancement – customer complaints, suggestions and general feedback about products could be shared within the organization especially to design and development teams to help create products that better suit customer needs.

6. Why is knowledge retention important? • Knowledge sharing – employees all across the company could share activities and expertise of others. If a team has developed an efficient system, all employees could benefit from this knowledge. Employees also learn from the mistakes and failures of certain projects. Most of the time, employees within a company work on similar problems. By enabling knowledge sharing, each employee can avoid doing duplicate work or knowledge searching.

7. Why is knowledge retention important? • Knowledge creation – with an abundance of knowledge residing within a company, new knowledge could be created. Often, these usually encompass more efficient ways to solve problems. For example by incorporating a few methods together, a new piece of knowledge utilizes the benefits from each method. Knowledge creation would be highly difficult, if not impossible if a wealth of knowledge and a large group of experts and/or talents are not readily available.

8. Why is knowledge retention important? • Knowledge learning and transfer – most valuable pieces of knowledge crucial to learning are usually not documented such as faults, negative results, lessons learned and trial-and-errors. Important expertise and knowledge needs to be communicated, transferred and learned for a company to be effective. • Cost-savings – new employee training is expensive. By retaining talented people, the company can continue being productive. Also, if the company loses the only one employee who has certain knowledge, it will be expensive to search for someone to replace him or her.

9. Ways to retain knowledge • There are two main ways to retain knowledge within an organization: - • By extracting and documenting explicit knowledge. • By retaining talented people within the company.

10. Extracting and documenting knowledge • To retain explicit knowledge, extraction and documentation is the way to go. • Examples of explicit knowledge that reside within a company include recipes and formulas, processes and procedures, safety protocols, programming codes, troubleshooting guides, and etc. • Some companies have their employees fill out a questionnaire to describe their jobs and how they perform their tasks. The employees are expected to update the questionnaire periodically. These information are then documented and kept in a knowledge database.

11. Retaining talented employees • Employees are the backbone of any organization. • Employees are the ones performing various tasks to help the company reap profits. • As such, employees are the ones with the most knowledge about the work they do. • Employees are the most valuable assets for a company.

12. Retaining talented employees • Talented employees are very often being sought after by competitors offering higher salaries and better benefits. • Just extracting and documenting their expertise is inadequate – most of the knowledge that talented employees have are not easily extracted such as experience, heuristics and judgment. • Talented employees also hold a lot of knowledge that gives the company a competitive advantage such as trade secrets. Whatever knowledge that the employee brings out of the company could nullify the strategies that were developed to be competitive.

13. Retaining talented employees • Retaining talented employees takes more than offering a higher salary and better perks. • Employees now demand intangible benefits – stimulating work, flexible career options, personal growth, learning opportunities, career development and a corporate culture that values their work.

14. Ways to retain talented employees • Employ competency-based recruiting to improve selection effectiveness and increase employee retention. • Offer an attractive benefits package. • Provide talented employees with flexible career options. • Building a knowledge retention culture – shared sense of mission, trust and commitment most important. • Establish a corporate culture that emphasizes knowledge sharing and employee feedback. • Provide opportunities to explore different positions within the company.

15. Ways to retain talented employees • Support training, career development and succession planning – builds knowledge that professionals need to prepare for future roles. • Knowledge transfer practices – reviews, communities of practice, mentoring programs, story-telling, expert referral services, interviews and training. • Phased retirements – encourage retiring employees to stay on to mentor and train successors. • Programs to effectively utilize retirees – reemploy retirees as consultants.

16. Ways to retain talented employees • Provide special assignments to employees to give them opportunities to learn new things. • Rotate jobs and responsibilities to enable employees to develop and practice new skills. Another benefit is better communication and work relations. • Management must show interest in employees and their progress. On one hand, employees feel that the management cares about them and on the other hand, the management could better match them to the various jobs and opportunities thereby increasing productivity. • Reward talented employees well and regularly. As with most people who take pride with their work, employees value recognition almost as much as high pay.

17. Why the emphasis on employee retention over knowledge documentation? • Talented employees make excellent prospects as effective managers. • They are able to think analytically to address long-term issues. • They can resolve matters that demand instant attention quicker. • They have experience and expert insights that are not easily extracted and documented. • Innovation - experience in doing things the old way helps people find methods that enable them to solve problems in a new and better manner.

18. Building a Knowledge Retention Program • A primary reason to build a Knowledge Retention Program is to prevent knowledge loss. • Knowledge loss leads to a number of consequences – compromised growth strategies, reduced efficiency and costly errors, etc.

19. Knowledge Loss Three considerations in response to the threat of knowledge loss: • Determining how soon the knowledge will be lost. • Determining the type of knowledge (tacit or explicit and rule-based) – and whether it is extractible or must be directly taught. • Identifying topology - whether the problem is widespread in the organization, or localized within a department.

20. How to build a Knowledge Retention Program • Identify problem – create a team to assess the risk of losing critical and valuable knowledge and skills. Formulate objectives and brainstorm solutions. • Identify knowledge to be retained, and specify how and in which form – identify which employees have the most critical knowledge, define and decide central and critical areas of knowledge to be retained such as expertise, ideas, processes, customers, etc.

21. How to build a Knowledge Retention Program 3. Extensive planning and analysis – lay out the structure of the database which will store the critical knowledge, create the structure of the knowledge documents to be stored in the database. Defining the structure of the database that is most suited to the needs of end users and the organization is most important – two major approaches can be used, either hierarchical tree structure that enables easy browsing or a direct query.

22. How to build a Knowledge Retention Program 4. Define Knowledge Retention process and the role of employees to capture and manage critical and valuable knowledge – identify goals to achieve through knowledge retention solution, identify role models and creating a knowledge retention management team. 5. Integrate and build up knowledge retention solution – essential to have proper definitions prior to designing the solution itself.

23. How to build a Knowledge Retention Program 6. Customize database, create knowledge documents and establish rules and protocols for the entire system – configure system based on organizational needs, configure user settings, set up security levels, and do ample testing of the system. 7. Release system for organizational use – after making necessary changes and system has been beta-ed several times to minimize bug problems.

24. How to build a Knowledge Retention Program 8.Encourage the use of information technology that is built into the system to enable knowledge capture, sharing and reuse – e-mail discussions, documents, searchable database, video conferencing, etc. 9. Supervise and assist in feedback and transfer of knowledge – conduct training sessions to help users familiarize with the technological tools and system, conduct surveys to help collect feedback from users and if necessary, fine-tune the system.

25. Conclusion • Knowledge retention proved to be essential within any organization. • There are many benefits to retaining knowledge within an organization. • The process to go about knowledge retention is lengthy and complex. • A diverse team must be created to oversee the project. • Many factors must be taken into account when planning for a knowledge retention system.

26. Conclusion • Careful planning and systematic implementation is required. • Training and feedback are also essential. • Top management must provide a lot of support for the system as well as for the employees to make use of the system. • A knowledge retention corporate culture is needed to make the program successful. • Among the more prominent values to foster are trust, commitment and sense of missions, goals and strategies that are consistent with company values.