What happens when knowledge gets stuck in silos
Managing knowledge and delivering learning in the hybrid workplace is critical, but can also be challenging. In a series of blogs we look at some of the main issues that often arise, and how that has driven us to design Slick Plus. Last time we looked at the damage caused by knowledge leakage. In this third article, we look at the knowledge silos that occur, especially in larger organisations. Have you ever had one of those nightmare calls where you’re speaking to customer services to get an issue resolved and you keep on getting passed from department to department? Nobody seems to know what the other department actually does and each time you get forwarded you have to explain the problem again…and then you end up back at the team where you started! Not only is this very frustrating but you’ve wasted valuable time listening to the same dreadful piped music. What are knowledge silos? This kind of bad customer experience is common in companies where knowledge silos are rife. There is where information, knowledge and skills across an organisation are not shared or accessible; instead, they are isolated and compartmentalized, leading to deep-seated issues, fragmented processes and yes, poor customer service. Knowledge silos lead to knowledge gaps where key groups of employees can’t access (or possibly completely unaware about the existence of) the knowledge they need to do their jobs effectively. In the case of the call, it’s unlikely to be the fault of the customer agents you spoke to. They probably did their best. But perhaps they’ve had no training to deal with your problem or may not have had access to a knowledge base where they could quickly retrieve the answer or to a system where they could ask a colleague, or find out who’s best placed to deal with the issue. What damage do knowledge silos create? If you think knowledge silos are bad for customers, they’re even more frustrating for the people who work there. At an individual level, they limit what people can achieve in their roles. They waste time trying to find information or knowledge that is siloed; even trying to find the right expert can be hugely time-consuming. There have been various estimates of how much time is actually spent on fruitless searching, with some research indicating that knowledge workers can waste almost as much as 25% of their working day, with time wasted even higher for senior executives. Check out our calculator to help you identify some indicators about how much this wasted time is costing your organisation. Knowledge silos and gaps are also a barrier to learning and development, where there are less opportunities to access the right skills and expertise. According to LinkedIn Learning’s 2023 Workplace Report, 29% of employees identify “opportunities to learn and develop new skills” as an important factor in considering a new job, one of the top five factors. And ultimately knowledge silos lead to a poor and ultimately frustrating employee experience, putting the brakes on achieving great results, limiting opportunities for personal and professional growth, preventing skills mobility, creating multiple examples of the duplication of effort and making it harder to connect meaningfully with peers. Why are there knowledge silos? Knowledge silos are endemic in medium and larger organisations. They come in all shapes and sizes: along location and geographical lines, across the organisational structure with different teams and divisions, across types of job such as back office and frontline workers, by different languages spoken, hierarchical, contractual, and so on. And if you thought the “what” sounds messy, the “why” is equally complicated. Knowledge silos form and are then amplified and strengthened for a number of overlapping reasons: Practical: practical reasons such as a lack of an overarching system or technology to share knowledge. For example, our customer agents on our call couldn’t access a centralised knowledge or collaboration system that could have supported them to resolve the issue. Structural: departments, functions, and teams often sit on their knowledge and what they are learning. Looking to our customer agents again, perhaps they are outsourced, working from home or located separately from the product team, and never get opportunities to learn about what other teams across the organisation actually do. This can be especially amplified if organisations are struggling to adapt to effectively manage hybrid, flexible and asynchronous workplace models. Cultural: an organisation’s culture and its sub-cultures can result in differences in attitudes to sharing knowledge, as well as a general reluctance to share – for example in very risk-averse organisations where there might be strict protocols around keeping information private. For instance, is your culture more ‘information is power’ or ‘knowledge is influence’? Political: sometimes leaders put the brakes on knowledge sharing initiatives for political reasons, for example due to disagreements or even rivalries created by internal marketplaces. All of the above conspire to make it difficult for an individual to share what they know, creating a multitude of knowledge bottlenecks and therefore missed opportunities. (We’ll be covering bottlenecks in more detail in our next blog.) Busting knowledge silos and bridging knowledge gaps But knowledge silos and gaps are not inevitable. This is not a wicked problem which is impossible to tackle. There are things that can be done and even moving a little bit in the right direction can make a significant improvement to driving efficiency, upskilling employees and improving culture, team by team, process by process, community by community.. Busting those silos and bridging those gaps doesn’t happen overnight but requires a holistic and strategic approach. At a high level here are some of the steps that usually need to be in place to move the need on removing knowledge silos. Recognising the problem and understanding its extent is important. This can kick-start the right conversations, create the momentum to improve knowledge sharing and help identify the tactics and interventions that will make a difference. Knowledge silos are partly cultural. Removing them requires behavioural change. Leadership and senior management influence employee
Tackling knowledge leakage in the workplace and how to stop it walking out the door.
Managing knowledge and delivering learning in the hybrid workplace is critical, but can also be challenging. In a series of blogs we look at some of the main issues that often arise, and how that has driven us to design Slick Plus. Last time we looked at informal knowledge. In this second post, we examine the damage of knowledge leakage caused by people leaving your organisation with all that they know, and what can be done to tackle it. In Ireland, a staggering 37% of all treated water is lost each year due to leaky pipes; it’s expensive, inefficient and not good for sustainability. Many organisations take a similarly leaky approach to managing their knowledge. Imagine all the knowledge that flows around an organisation that people rely on to get work done, carry out their role and deliver products and services. Much of this is informal knowledge that has never been captured and is locked inside people’s heads. The flow of knowledge from internal experts and those with more experience to people who are ready to learn is also critical for developing skills, professional growth, and employee engagement. But when those experts and more experienced colleagues leave your organisation all that critical knowledge and expertise that has been acquired over the years, quite literally walks out of the door, leading to knowledge leakage. How significant a problem is knowledge leakage? Knowledge leakage can be a significant problem, particularly for knowledge-intensive, innovation-driven industries such as engineering, medtech, technology and professional services, or where the workforce is ageing with many facing retirement. Many organisations are also trying to become more skills-based, trying to navigate ongoing skills shortages in a high speed high-tech world where work continues to evolve at a break-neck pace. In the 2023 LinkedIn Workplace Learning report, 89% of L&D professionals agree that proactively building skills will help them to navigate the future of work. Clearly that’s much harder when your skilled and experienced employees are taking their knowledge with them when they leave. While instinctively we know the damage of knowledge leakage, it’s quite difficult to quantify it. Here at Slick Plus we have a formula to calculate the cost of time wasted by employees as they search (with increasing frustration) for the information they need to get the job done. This is useful as an indicative cost that can be used in a range of business cases to assess the inefficiencies and expense of knowledge leakage in different parts of your organisation. However, much of the damage caused by knowledge leakage is intangible. But we can start to get some idea when we consider the high levels of employee turnover at most organisations; according to the LinkedIn Workplace Learning report, a staggering 92% of organisations are concerned about employee retention. How employee mobility leads to knowledge leakage Knowledge leakage happens because few organisations actually take a systematic approach to reducing it, but it’s also because of high levels of employee mobility. During the pandemic, the media pounced on the trend of the “great resignation” or the “great attrition”, commenting on the large volumes of employees voluntarily leaving their roles, with a variety of different reasons thrown into the mix, including a resetting of expectations around roles and career caused by lockdown and hybrid working. As hybrid and flexible work models now become mainstreamed, this irreversible trend may be contributing to continuing levels of employee mobility today. According to Josh Bersin’s recent HR predictions for 2024, at least 20% of all US employees change jobs each year. In Europe the situation looks equally fluid. Comprehensive research from McKinsey in late 2022 indicated that one third of European employees expected to quit their job within three to six months. Deeper analysis also suggests there is a longer-term trend of employees quitting that has been happening since 2009. Harvard academics Joseph Fuller and William Kerr attribute this to five factors: retirement, relocation, reconsideration, reshuffling and reluctance. Employee mobility is also not just about people leaving. Many companies are encouraging internal talent mobility through promotions and internal recruitment, helping plug skills gaps and reduce costs. For the likes of Bersin, such skills mobility is business-critical if companies are to remain competitive in a world with a shrinking talent pool. While technically that person’s knowledge hasn’t literally walked out the door, in practice by transitioning to a new role or location it is rarely captured and passed on, and essential knowledge remains hidden and untapped. There’s also a move towards shorter tenures which means knowledge leakage increases exponentially as employees go through a revolving door. Although some studies have shown that (certainly in the US) the median tenure over the past forty years has actually remained reasonably steady at around five years, anecdotally we see acceptance that shorter tenures are now more acceptable, if not the norm. There’s also a higher reliance on freelancers and contractors which helps plug skills gaps but makes it hard to retain that knowledge. A survey from Fiverr found that in the UK 96% of businesses work with freelancers, and that on average 21% of the workforce of UK companies are freelance. These figures are likely overblown, but in organisations who rely on freelancers, contractors and consultants, knowledge leakage will be high and mitigation needs to be in place. What can be done to stop knowledge leakage? Remember Ireland’s leaky pipes? Actually, something is being done about that. Thanks to a “National Leakage Reduction Programme the leakage rate is on track to reduce to 25% by 2030. Organisations can actively carry out their own knowledge leakage reduction programmes, and some knowledge management and learning teams are doing just that. People are way more complex than pipes. You can’t simply fix knowledge leaks by identifying the leak and then applying a fix. It takes an ecosystem-wide approach that combines elements such as culture, technology and human connection. How to stop knowledge leakage Knowledge Management (KM), Learning and Development (L&D) and operational teams have been carrying out tactics for
What is informal knowledge in the workplace and why is it so important?
Managing knowledge and delivering learning in the hybrid workplace is critical, but can also be challenging. In a series of blogs we look at some of the main issues that often arise, and how that has driven us to design Slick Plus. In the first part we look at informal knowledge and the important role it plays in organisational life. Do you have a Maureen from Accounts in your organisation or department? Maureen’s one of the unsung heroes of the workplace. She’s the go-to person who seems to know everything about getting things done. Fixing the creaking finance system that the IT function doesn’t seem to know much about. Remembering how the team dealt with a tricky situation with a customer seemingly lost in the past. Remembering stuff from years ago that provides a precedent or context for dealing with a tricky situation today. Maureen – or whoever that person’s name or department is in your workplace – is critical for organisations because she holds so much informal knowledge. Helpful people like Maureen always get asked for specific information, give input and provide a fresh perspective on overcoming challenges, unblocking bottlenecks or simply on what to do next. And it’s incredible how much everybody relies on her knowledge; when Maureen is on annual leave everybody notices. They also pray that the Finance system doesn’t get stuck on that screen it always seems to get stuck on. What is informal knowledge? Maureen’s amazing bank of informal knowledge has been built up over years of working in the organisation. But because she’s helpful and usually around to give an answer, much of what she knows has never been captured or written down as formal knowledge. There is no written manual, user guide, how-to-video, e-learning course, or even a simple blog post that has been codified in a way so it can be searched for that encapsulates what Maureen knows. In Knowledge Management (KM) circles, the informal knowledge that we walk around with in our heads is generally referred to as examples of tacit knowledge while formal knowledge which is written down, captured in formats such as video, or taught through courses is referred to as examples of explicit knowledge. Because informal or tacit knowledge has so much value, KM teams spend a lot of time and effort trying to capture tacit knowledge and turn it into explicit knowledge so others can learn from what people know. But as we will see, this is seldom straightforward and often quite complicated. The power of experiential learning One thing to consider about informal knowledge is that much of it has been gained through experiential learning. Consider Maureen’s knowledge about the finance system. That’s been gained from years of working with it on a day-to-day basis, but also in helping sort out problems like the screen-freeze. While she is likely to have been on a course on how to use the system, she may have never actually been on a trouble shooting course on fixing that issue. Instead, that critical knowledge has been gained by helping her colleagues over the years – effectively learning through experience or on the job. This knowledge is also context-specific as Maureen knows how the finance system works in her organisation, the multiple tweaks and add-ons that have occurred over the years, and so on. It’s fair to say that most learning professionals acknowledge that much of our learning is actually acquired through experience rather than through formal methods. The 70-20-10 model is a highly influential framework that has influenced approaches to organisational learning since the mid-nineties. It suggests that only 10% of what we learn comes from formal training, with 20% coming from social learning gained through relationships, and the remaining 70% from experiences gained on the job, often in overcoming challenges. There’s lots of valid criticism of the 70-20-10 model; but it still holds sway among many experts and as HR thought leaders like Josh Bersin have acknowledged, it does “make a point – that most learning does take place on the job.” The tip of the iceberg Because we all learn from our everyday experiences it means all of us gain informal knowledge in the process, complementing the knowledge we gain from more formal learning channels. Collectively, this means there’s a huge amount of informal knowledge floating around any organisation. In our own way, we’re all Maureens. While Maureen from Accounts knows everything about the finance system, she doesn’t know anything about the new CRM system – you have to ask Samir in marketing for that. And the best way to do social media? That’s Vickie. And generative AI? That’s Ludmilla who experimented with ChatGPT and was buzzing with ideas. In fact, it’s fair to say that formal knowledge that we have captured is far outweighed by the informal knowledge that we haven’t captured. There’s a well-worn but memorable trope that represents organisational knowledge as an iceberg, with the tip that’s exposed above the surface of the water representing the formal knowledge we have captured and learnt through formal channels. Meanwhile the huge mass of ice hidden under the water, two-thirds of the entire berg, is the informal knowledge that is effectively locked inside of people’s heads. The value of informal knowledge Informal knowledge plays a critical role in the life of organisations, but its influence and the extent to which we rely on it sometimes goes under the radar. But instinctively when we think about what any workforce knows, there is huge potential. Imagine if we could just capture a fraction of the informal knowledge out there to what could be achieved? We can improve processes, save time and improve productivity, support learning and development, even upskill everybody; we’ll be exploring some of these important aspects in greater detail later in this blog series. But also imagine what we lose when we don’t capture this knowledge. What happens when Maureen moves on to a new organisation or retires? KM teams know the potential value of capturing