Communication, collaboration, and employee platforms at KMWorld 2023

Experienced KM practitioners from TechnipFMC led KMWorld 2023’s session, “Communication, Collaboration, and Employee Platforms,” to share their tips and techniques for engaging employees across the globe and the digital landscape.

Kim Glover, director, internal communications, global, TechnipFMC, jumpstarted the conversation by defining engagement, explaining that “engagement is the special magic for collaboration and communication on employee platforms.”

There are three key elements for engagement in a digital ecosystem:

• Planning: Map out where you want to go and how to get there
• People: It’s first, foremost, and always about people
• Putting it into play: Deploy, update, leverage, and evolve

Tamara Viles, knowledge management project manager, knowledge management, TechnipFMC, emphasized that “you have to plan where you’re going in order to truly get there.” She further explained that while planning is always important, it is even more critical in the digital age. These are some best practices that Viles offered for the “planning” phase:

• Begin with the end in mind: What are the objectives?
• Remember to be “fit for purpose”
• Use a change management strategy
• Know your audiences
• Determine the value proposition for each
• Positioning is critical
• Use the right channel mix
• Build in ease of use

“Keep it simple; we don’t have time for unnecessary complexity,” said Viles. “Familiarity might bring people to the table.”

Glover argued that people are at the cross-section of planning and action that prompt success; engaging and empowering people are the key to effective communication and collaboration. She then illustrated the critical success factors of the “people” phase:

• Secure and leverage visible executive sponsorship
• Empower champions, early adopters, and influencers
• Empower people to DIY
• Work adjacent disciplines to co-create the outcomes
• Leverage the knowledge of the internal customer and their stories about “where they live” (digitally)
• Make it all happen with your agile, versatile, tech-savvy, culture-wise, and high EQ team

Doug Green, director, corporate communications, digital and operations, TechnipFMC, explained the “putting it into play” phase, offering these critical success factors:

• Always have a call to action
• Gather and act on feedback
• Encourage and utilize success stories to build buzz
• Deploy “in the flow of work”
• Be ready for the unexpected and need to pivot

Green presented an example for the action phase, explaining how they created “a one-question survey on the homepage of our site that asked, ‘Did you find what you’re looking for?’ I’m very impressed and surprised by how well that it has worked.”

Engagement can be as simple as the aforementioned example, deployed in the flow of work that doesn’t disrupt or cause chaos. Glover further emphasized that this simplistic addition is an example of “listening, digitally.”

Knowing what the employees need—and when—enables organizations to develop unique tactics that spur adoption of collaboration, communication, and employee platforms, according to Viles. Tactics will need to target the knowledge needs of each identified group and can be applied to a variety of roles—reuse, and therefore, familiarity, is key. 

KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 6-9, with pre-conference workshops held on November 6.

KMWorld 2023 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Enterprise AI World, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.