In my last post, I wrote about a particular process for capturing “knowledge nuggets” from a community’s on-going discussions and toward the end of that write up, I described some ideas for the motivation for members to be involved in this knowledge capture process and how it might translate to an enterprise. All of the ideas I wrote about were pretty general and as I considered it, it occurred to me that another topic is – what are the kinds of specific objectives an employee could be given that would (hopefully) increase knowledge sharing in an enterprise? What can a manager (or, more generally, a company) do to give employees an incentive to share knowledge?
Instead of approaching this from the perspective of what motivates participants, I am going to write about some concrete ideas that can be used to measure how much knowledge sharing is going on in your organization. Ultimately, a company needs to build into its culture and values an expectation of knowledge sharing and management in order to have a long-lasting impact. I would think of the more tactical and concrete ideas here as a way to bootstrap an organization into the mindset of knowledge sharing.
A few caveats: First – Given that these are concrete and measurable, they can be “gamed” like anything else that can be measured. I’ve always thought measures like this need to be part of an overall discussion between a manager and an employee about what the employee is doing to share knowledge and not (necessarily) used as absolute truth.
Second – A knowledge sharing culture is much more than numbers – it’s a set of expectations that employees hold of themselves and others; it’s a set of norms that people follow. That being said, I do believe that it is possible to use some aspects of concrete numbers to understand impacts of knowledge management initiatives and to understand how much the expectations and norms are “taking hold” in the culture of your organization. Said another way – measurement is not the goal but if you can not measure something, how do you know its value?
Third – I, again, need to reference the excellent guide, “How to use KPIs in Knowledge Management” by Patrick Lambe. He provides a very exhaustive list of things to measure, but his guide is primarily written as ways to measure the KM program. Here I am trying to personalize it down to an individual employee and setting that employee’s objectives related to knowledge sharing.
In the rest of this post, I’ll make the assumption that your organization has a performance management program and that that program includes the definition for employees of objectives they need to complete during a specific time period. The ideas below are applicable in that context.
Not all of these will apply to all employees and some employees may not have any specific, measurable knowledge sharing objectives (though that seems hard to imagine regardless of the job). An organization should look at what they want to accomplish, what their tool set will support (or what they’re willing to enhance to get their tool set to support what they want) and then be specific with each employee. This is meant only as a set of ideas or suggestions to consider in making knowledge sharing an explicit, concrete and measurable activity for your employees.
Given some concrete objectives to measure employees with, it seems relatively simply to roll those objectives up to management to measure (and set expectations for up front) knowledge sharing by a team of employees, not just individual employees. On the other hand, a forward-thinking organization will define group-level objectives which can be cascaded down to individual employees.
Given either of these approaches, a manager (or director, VP, etc.) may then have both an organizational level objective and their own individual objectives related to knowledge sharing.
Lastly – while I’ve never explored this, several years ago, a vice president at my company asked for a single index of knowledge sharing. I would make the analogy of some like a stock index – a mathematical combination of measuring different aspects of knowledge sharing within the company. A single number that somehow denotes how much knowledge sharing is going on.
I don’t seriously think this could be meaningful but it’s an interesting idea to explore. Here are some definitions I’ll use to do so:
Given the above, you could imagine the “knowledge sharing index” at any moment in time could be computed as (for – I don’t know how to make this look like a “real” formula!):
Knowledge index at time t = Sum (i=1…N) of Wi * ( Mt,i / Bi )
A specific example:
- Let’s say you have three sources of “knowledge sharing” – a corporate wiki, a mailing list server and a corporate knowledge base
- For the wiki, you’ll measure total edits every week, for the list server, you’ll measure total posts to all mailing lists on it and for the knowledge base, you’ll measure contributions and downloads (as two measures).
- In terms of weights, you want to give the mailing lists the least weight, the wiki an intermediate weight and the combined knowledge base the most weight. Let’s say the weights are 15 for the mailing lists, 25 for the wiki, 25 for the downloads from the knowledge base and 35 for contributions to the knowledge base. (So the weights total to 100!)
- Your baseline for future measurement is 200 edits in the wiki, 150 posts to the list server, 25 contributions to the knowledge base and downloads of 2,000 from the knowledge base
- At some week after the start, you take a measurement and find 180 wiki edits, 160 posts to the list server, 22 knowledge base contributions and 2200 downloads from the knowledge base.
- The knowledge sharing index for that week would be 95.8. This is “down” even though most measures are up (which simply reflects the relative importance of one factor, which is down).
If I were to actually try something like this, I would pick the values of Wi so that the baseline measurement (when t= 0) comes to a nice round value – 100 or something. You can then imagine reporting something like, “Well, knowledge sharing for this month is at 110!” Or, “Knowledge sharing for this month has fallen from 108 to 92”. If nothing else, I find it amusing to think so concretely in terms of “how much” knowledge sharing is going on in an organization.
There are some obvious complexities in this idea that I don’t have good answers for:
In any event – I think this is an interesting, if academic, discussion and would be interested in others’ thoughts on either individual performance management or the idea of a knowledge sharing index.
My recent posts have been quite long and detailed with examples in terms of how we have been able to understand and analyze community membership and activity for our community of practice initiative. This post is less focused on numbers and more focused on a particular use of this data in a more strategic manner.
Within my employer, we have a (probably pretty typical) performance management program intended to address both career development (a long term view – “what do you want to be when you grow up?”) and also performance (the shorter term view – “what have you done for me lately?”)
We also have an employee management portal (embedded in the larger intranet) where an employee could manage details about their job, work, etc., including recording their development goals (and efforts) and performance (objectives and work to achieve those). Managers have a view of this that allows them to see their employees’ data.
As we worked to drive the communities initiative and adoption of communities of practice as a part of the corporate culture, one of the questions that commonly came up was, “How do these communities contribute to my performance? How can I communicate that to my manager?” That could be asked from the perspective of career development (how can my involvement in communities help me grow?) and also for performance (if I am involved in a community, how does it help me achieve my objectives that are used to measure my performance?)
These are all pretty easily answered, but in an objective sense, we found that managers had a challenge in talking with their employees about their involvement in communities and that part of that challenge was that managers did not necessarily “see” their employee’s community involvement (if they were not part of the same community).
Given that we now had our definition of a community member is and also what an active community member is, it seemed like we could provide some insight to managers from this data and embed that in the employee management portal.
As we were working through this, we found that there was going to be a new component added to the employee management portal labeled “My involvement”, which was intended to capture and display information about how the employee has been involved in the company at large – things like formal recognition they’ve received or recognition they’ve given to others (as part of our employee recognition program) or other ways in which they’ve been “involved”.
This seemed like a perfectly natural place in which we can expose insights to employees and their managers about an employee’s involvement in communities of practice!
So we had a place and the data – it became a simple matter of getting an enhancement into the queue for the employee management portal to expose the data there. It took a few months, but we managed to do that and now employees can view their own involvement and managers can view their employees’ involvement in our communities. The screenshot below shows the part of the employee management portal where an employee or manager can see this view (as with other images, I’ve obscured some of the details a bit here):
So, what has been the value of this exposure? How has it been used?
While this helps to make some of the conversations between manager and employee about community involvement a bit more concrete, we do recognize that this is still a very partial picture of that involvement. There are many ways in which an employee can be involved in and add value to and learn from a community that goes beyond this simplistic data. (I’ll write more about this “partial picture” issue in a future post.)
That being said, providing this insight to managers has proved very valuable to engender discussions between a manager and an employee about the employee’s community involvement – what they have learned (how it has effected their career development) and also how it might have contributed to their performance. This discussion, by itself, has helped employees demonstrate their growth and value in ways that otherwise could have been a challenge.
For managers, this gives them insight into value their employees provide that otherwise would have been difficult to “see”.
For the community of practice program, this type of visibility has had an ancillary effect of encouraging more people to join communities as I suspect (though can not quantify) that some managers will ask employees about the communities of which they are a member and (more importantly in this regard) the ones in which they are not a member (but which they might be, either by work focus or interest).
Overall, simply including this insight builds an organizational expectation of involvement.