Onboarding, Training, and Retaining Knowledge Managers

Providing tools that enable effective KM is another way to improve the performance of KM initiatives and the retention of those who manage them. Bloomfire’s platform supports KM by automating repetitive tasks, organizing information, and removing redundant, outdated, and trivial (known as ROT) data, allowing users to have confidence in enterprise content. Company data indicates that more than 90% of users report enhanced satisfaction and improved productivity after implementing Bloomfire. “It is difficult to get everyone in a large organization to adopt a single system,” explained Anderson, “but our new category of Enterprise Intelligence allows knowledge owners to keep their content in the current platforms, while leveraging the Bloomfire engine to curate it, clean it, and push it back out to the tools employees use every day.” Making the workers’ jobs easier makes the knowledge manager’s job easier as well.  

The availability of KM platforms that provide a range of metrics to measure outcomes is another important part of the ecosystem. Organizational goals should be tied to measurable outcomes so that knowledge managers can assess the degree to which their initiatives are contributing to enterprise performance. In this respect, the organization needs to have an infrastructure that collects and analyzes critical data.

Managing the Lifecycle

Organizations can get some help throughout the employee lifecycle from HR platforms that assist in the recruiting and assessment of potential candidates, onboarding, managing training, and employee engagement and performance. BambooHR was founded with the goal of taking complicated and time-consuming HR processes and streamlining them to make them simple.

The platform pushes out job applications to the leading online recruiting sites such as Indeed and ZipRecruiter, aggregates the candidates’ applications for open positions, and helps narrow down the applicants based on key attributes that were defined by the managers listing the positions.

Employees get documents to read, review, and sign once an offer is accepted. The onboarding capability automates the customizing them for specific jobs. “Once the applicant has signed, various tasks can be scheduled,” said Wende Smith, head of people operations at BambooHR. “These may differ depending on the state where the company is located or the regulations associated with particular job functions.” In the case of a knowledge manager, a detailed organizational chart might be provided as part of onboarding, or a list of IT systems that are in place. “Pushing out information early in the employment lifecycle helps the employee hit the ground running,” she added.

Essential to knowledge managers is quick integration into the corporate culture. “We have multiple avenues to integrate and engage new employees,” Smith observed. “We also now offer AI-powered assistant features like Ask BambooHR, which help answer questions about data contained within the platform and surface experts across the organization.” For example, to assist the knowledge manager in gaining an enterprise-wide understanding of organizational functions, SMEs in certain areas could be identified and the activities of different departments explained in detail. Analytics are a key component of Bamboo HR. Geared toward non-technologists, reports are available for employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and performance, among others.

Metrics on employee engagement and satisfaction can also offer insights to knowledge managers who want to assess an employee’s willingness to share information. These capabilities could be used by a knowledge manager to better understand internal resources or identify training needs that would help support KM initiatives.

According to the BambooHR survey First Impressions Are Everything (bamboohr.com/resources/data-at-work/data-stories/ 2023-onboarding-statistics), organizations have just 44 days to influence an employee’s decision to stay long term, an important outcome since acquiring and onboarding a new employee costs between $7,500 and $28,000. Coincidentally, 44% of new employees regret their decision to join after the first week, and about 1 in 4 actually cry during that first week. Many things need to go right in order for the organization to find, engage, train, and retain good workers.

Knowledge managers serve a vital role in creating a productive and welcoming workplace. The more an organization can do to facilitate the stability and performance of the knowledge manager, the better off both will be.