Chapter 13: Summary And Conclusions

Overview

Leveraging the intellectual assets of the organisation continues to be a key strategic concern for many business leaders and should be one of the top priorities for HR.

New markets, new ways of doing business, together with new organisational structures to support these broader changes, all call for a greater focus on managing knowledge. The survey findings reported in Chapter 1 on how seriously organisations are taking knowledge management, indicate that this is moving higher up the strategic agenda for business, and now for the HR community too. However, this has not been the case to date for HR. Indeed, HR have come under criticism for not being more proactive in the knowledge management arena. This is despite the fact that managing ‘know how’, which if we unpack this is about managing and getting the best out of knowledgeable people, maps directly onto HR’s core competence.

The need to get a better handle on managing knowledge has more of a direct impact on some types of businesses than others. In high-tech businesses, as well as in consultancies, it is easier to see the link between managing knowledge and business results. After all what these types of organisations are selling is their ‘know how’ – no ‘know how’, no sale, or certainly no repeat sale.

However, managing knowledge is now moving higher up the strategic agenda in other business sectors. Public sector organisations, for example, are under pressure to become more performance orientated, which includes adopting a more customer-focused approach. This requires a different mindset, skills-set and way of working. Collaborative working and partnership working are now more prevalent within the public sector, bringing implications and opportunities from a knowledge management perspective. While partnership working can open up access to ‘know how’ and help minimise the risk factor of new ventures, to work effectively partnership working requires building relationships of trust. This is something that takes time to nurture and requires different behaviours.

There is another reason why knowledge management has moved up the strategic agenda – the war for talent. More and more organisations are finding it difficult to recruit and retain talented people, i.e. people with the skills, knowledge and attitude to create value for the organisation. Even though we are supposedly in some form of economic recession, some organisations are still claiming that they cannot recruit the talent that they are looking for. Given that knowledge is now considered the key business asset this does not bode well for business, the economy, or society more generally.

Perhaps what is more worrying is that certain knowledge resources are not being replenished. In the educational system, for example, there seems to be a fall in the demand for certain subjects, particularly maths and science. While this may not be impacting on businesses today, unless this situation is rectified, it may well have implications for the future as advances in science and technology lead to new business opportunities. The question is, though, to what extent should organisations be concerned about these broader trends? How should these be addressed in their knowledge management strategy?

Recruiting, developing and retaining employees has always been part of HR’s agenda, however, the implications of getting this wrong are now even greater. Without the right ‘know how’, organisations cannot compete in today’s increasingly competitive global marketplace, where customers are more and more discerning. Speed to market is now all-important, given that customers today are not prepared to wait – if one business cannot quickly supply what the customer wants, there are others all too eager to come forward.

In the downsizing era of the late 1990s and early 1990s many businesses came unstuck because of the approach adopted for streamlining the organisation. The practice of encouraging (some would argue forcing) individuals in their early fifties to take early retirement has back-fired for some organisations. What was overlooked was the longer-term implications of losing this valuable ‘know how’. In the Financial Services sector, for example, much of this lost ‘grey matter’ has now been re-introduced – mature customers want to build relationships with mature employees, with similar life experiences and values.

Other broader trends that are having an impact on recruitment and retention is the changing landscape of careers: boundaryless organisational structures are giving rise to boundaryless career models, which have different success criteria to that associated with traditional career models. Equally the quest to achieve a better work–life balance is leading some individuals, like the independent HR professionals referred to in Chapter 7, to work with organisations on a different contractual basis.

The prediction for the future of work, and the future workplace, is that organisations will become smaller, employing fewer people on traditional contracts. If this is the case, organisations will need to deliver their services through more contractual and partnership working. This will bring different opportunities and challenges from a knowledge management perspective, particularly given that trust is an essential ingredient for knowledge building and sharing. Developing relationships of trust in these networked organisations requires a different model of working and leadership style.

So what can HR do to help their organisation develop and retain its knowledge assets?

First it should start by helping the organisation achieve greater clarity about what a knowledge-centric culture looks like. In other words what are the essential characteristics. This book has outlined a number of core elements that exist in knowledgecentric cultures. These include: having clearly defined values and knowledge behaviours; permeable structures; fluid roles and responsibilities; energising workspaces; flexible ways of working, as well as facilitative leadership.

Second, focus on what really needs to change, in other words identify the key levers for change and channel resources into these areas. It isn’t possible to change everything at once, nor indeed is this desirable. Where it isn’t possible to make significant changes, consider re-branding existing practices. This will at least help reinforce the change message. Some examples drawn from my own research include:

From	To . . .
Newsletters	‘In the know’
Internal communications	Knowledge communicators
Librarians	Information Managers
IT	Information Resources
Internal job vacancies database	‘Oceans of Opportunity’
Training	‘Knowledge-pool’
Help Desk	Knowledge Hub

Of course re-branding, in itself, will not lead to change, however as part of a co-ordinated change approach it can help the organisation move forward.

Third, HR needs to re-visit its own roles and responsibilities relating to building a knowledge-centric culture. Some of the roles discussed earlier include: helping develop a common understanding of what managing knowledge means; addressing the blocks to knowledge sharing; helping teams experiment with new ways of working that can lead to enhanced knowledge creation and sharing; co-ordinating plans for the free movement of people, and hence knowledge, across the organisation, as well as developing the right form of leadership, i.e. leaders who see their role as being coaches and nurturers of talent, not necessarily the knowledge experts themselves.

Where HR has adopted the Business Partner model of working they are in a good position to spot any overlaps and gaps in an organisation’s knowledge base, as well as act as ‘knowledge connectors’. There is a strong argument for HR to be involved in all key business developments, even in situations where they may not initially appear to add value. This way of working will enable HR to remain in touch with business and organisational realities, as well as gathering information that can be used to develop leading-edge HR practices.

Fourth, help the organisation re-visit its assumptions about learning and how to facilitate learning in knowledge businesses. The old model of learning, where learning is seen as an activity that takes place away from the workplace, is gradually being superseded with other models of learning, particularly those based on social learning theory. The increased use of learning in Communities of Practice is an example of social learning theory in action in the workplace. Learning in communities has the added advantage that it leads to the development of intellectual and social capital. Social capital is the ‘. . . oil that lubricates the process of learning through interaction’ (Kilpatrick, Bell and Falk, 1998). But for the organisation to take full advantage of the learning that occurs in communities they need to reconsider what counts as productive work. In the knowledge economy work and learn are less easy to compartmentalise.

Fifth, HR needs to re-visit its core practices to ensure that these are aligned with the organisation’s knowledge management approach. This means revisiting practices relating to: recruitment and selection; induction; performance management; training and development; career management; resource management, as well as reward and recognition packages.

Sixth, HR needs to re-visit its own competencies to ensure that these are sufficiently developed to equip them for their new roles and responsibilities in the knowledge era.

Finally, HR needs to develop an interest, understanding and expertise in applying a broad range of tools (some technological) to help them deliver the organisation’s strategic knowledge management goals. As with their business colleagues, this will no doubt require HR to invest in its own development. The time has come for HR to demonstrate its true leadership capabilities and to role model the behaviours needed to survive in the knowledge economy.