Onboarding, Training, and Retaining Knowledge Managers
In her present workplace, Ballard Spahr LLP, Kunkel is director of KM and is developing a KM system in a much larger environment—18 offices across the country with five major legal departments, encompassing 35-plus practices. The company recently migrated to a new document management system that helps support its workflow. “We are formalizing, centralizing, automating, and scaling our KM ecosystem,” Kunkel commented. “We have a robust project management office and are leveraging resources from other departments and also benefit from a large enterprise applications team.”
From a retention viewpoint, Kunkel sees knowledge managers as similar to other workers. “Workers need to feel valued and to see potential for professional growth. KM gets you exposed to many different areas, whether technology, process management, or some other aspect of the organization. We have a collaborative environment, and the KM team is viewed as a value-add group.” All these factors assist with retention.
Training Knowledge Managers
Providing training needed to fill in gaps can help both job performance and retention by enabling knowledge managers to do their jobs better. Training can be provided to corporations on an individualized basis or in classes such as those offered by the KM Institute (kminstitute.org) and APQC (apqc.org), which also offer KM certification.
“At the KM Institute, about 40% of individuals in our classes have been on the job less than a year. The remainder have been on the job up to about 10 years but may never have gotten formal training,” said Eric Weidner, director of marketing at the KM Institute. In some cases, attendees are “self-funded”; in others, their companies have sent them.
Hiring someone with certification does not guarantee success because many factors are involved, but it does ensure that the individual has a solid background in the principles and practices of KM. Keeping up with changes in technology is important, so ideally, the people who get hired will have knowledge of the latest tools. By supporting knowledge managers in keeping up with emerging technologies such as AI, organizations can enhance their overall performance and allow the individual to grow. Gaining proficiency in other skills, such as the use of storytelling to extract tacit knowledge, broadens the range of resources that support KM.
Ingredients for Success
As a side benefit, KM training programs often include advice on securing corporate buy-in for the KM program, which is essential for success. Buy-in includes not only funding but also providing access to the information and systems needed for KM initiatives, particularly to top-level executives. “The biggest barrier to retaining knowledge managers is the failure to give them access to the right people,” said Betsy Anderson, director of customer success at Bloomfire. “They should have one or more executive sponsors who are advocating for them and getting them into the C-suite. In addition, they need to be able to seek out individuals in departments throughout the enterprise to determine their needs. Otherwise, the managers quit because they can’t do their jobs.”
Knowledge managers need to be able to instill trust in people throughout the organization in order to persuade them to share information. “There is still resistance to sharing information, although that has improved over the years,” Anderson added. “Knowledge managers need to be skilled at interviewing and curious about how things get done, so they can set up KM systems that serve the organization well.” According to a survey by FlexJobs (flexjobs.com/blog/post/toxic-company-culture-warning-signs), a supportive corporate culture is highly correlated with employee retention; a toxic culture is a primary reason why people leave their jobs.