Claire Fletcher, the founder of Splendid Consulting, offers her expertise on knowledge management in the digital workplace. In her discussion with host Rob Ryan, she delves into the intricacies of information sharing, the influence of corporate culture, and the necessity of knowledge governance in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Claire provides valuable insights on how to establish efficient, adaptable, and forward-thinking knowledge ecosystems within enterprise organizations.
Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the importance of knowledge management and the challenges and opportunities that digital workplace leaders face in optimizing knowledge flow. Claire offers practical advice on getting started with Knowledge Management initiatives, ensuring that listeners are equipped with the strategies needed to enhance organizational learning and adaptability.
From this episode, you'll learn:
The significance of Knowledge Management in the digital workplace and its impact on organizational success.
Key governance strategies to maintain the integrity and accessibility of knowledge.
Practical steps for digital workplace leaders to improve knowledge dissemination and collaboration.
Tactics to foster a culture that values and leverages knowledge effectively for innovation and growth.
Tune in to unlock the secrets of transforming your digital workplace through effective knowledge management. For more about Claire and Splendid Consulting, please visit: https://www.workwithsplendid.com/.
Welcome, Claire! Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
From the sound of my voice you can probably tell I am not from here. I am English, but I live in San Francisco, and have been here for about twelve years now. Six years ago, I started Splendid Consulting, and we just celebrated our birthday which seems impossible to me since it’s all gone so quickly. I wended my way into this field; I’ve been a librarian, a business analyst, an intranet manager, and a knowledge manager before I became a consultant, helping people set up communities and intranets. I’ve been a customer of those technologies, as well as a vendor of those technologies, so I have seen both sides.
When I started Splendid, I thought most of my work was going to be related to community. That had been the case initially, but now knowledge management has come back into fashion. It’s something I did a lot of work on probably 20 years ago now, but it has become a thing again. I don’t think we ever solved those problems the first time around because they are difficult problems to solve, and they still exist and cannot be simply tackled by technology alone. So that is coming up as an issue for people and what I’ve been working on most recently.
For those who may not be familiar with knowledge management, particularly within the enterprise and digital workplaces, can you explain a little bit about what knowledge management means in the context of the digital workplace and why it’s important?
You could spend a whole career deciding what is information management and what is knowledge management, and there are people out there that do. But in the context of the digital workplace, I just describe it as helping connect people to the information and expertise they need to get things done. If you’re at enterprise scale, that can be surprisingly difficult because people tend to be quite siloed. It’s making sure that people have what they need to get their work done.
In terms of knowledge management, one of the challenges we hear about is that digital workplace owners may not necessarily know that knowledge may live outside of a knowledge repository, or library, etc. How do you end up educating them on where to look or how to begin to solve for these challenges?
It’s definitely an issue because the desire is often to implement a tool or platform that will solve all of these problems for you and it doesn’t work that way. There are a couple reasons behind that.
The content maybe doesn’t even exist. People talk a lot about finding knowledge and discoverability but actually sometimes it’s just not written down, it’s in somebodies head or too complex to be written down or too context dependent. The answer may be different depending on which task you’re talking about or industry you’re working in. It is really complicated.
People don’t always want to share their knowledge. Or they don’t feel safe to share if they may be working on something where there is not a definitive answer. There is a lot of psychology around it as well.
Sometimes you need to work beside someone to pick up their knowledge. It’s not always as simple as being able to ask someone a question and having them answer it. Sometimes you might need to be an apprentice and observe how they do something, or work alongside them, or work in a community of practice to pick things up.
Knowledge management is never going to be “here is a tool, we’ve filled it with lots of information that will solve all of your problems.” It’s difficult for people to understand that and it’s particularly difficult for executives to understand that because they don’t really have a knowledge management problem. If you’re in the C-suite and ask somebody for something, it tends to arrive smoothly, you’re not going to hunt around the organization to find that stuff. I think it’s a difficult problem to explain when people really want to just install something and have it fix all of their issues.
One of the things you mentioned when we first started was that knowledge management looks like it’s coming back into fashion again. When you started Splendid the focus was community.
It’s remarkable even to this day that some organizations will not trust us, their employees, to talk to one another, but the fact that knowledge management has come back into fashion, why do you think that’s coming back to the forefront?
I think people are beginning to realize how costly it can be. It’s difficult to put a price tag on knowledge management but really, employees are out there spending a lot of time trying to even figure out which system things are in, or which department owns information.
That’s not the way people’s brains work. They want to achieve a task or get something done. They don’t want to have to figure out who owns what. This is a simple example but one of the things I worked with a client on was helping people get their expenses signed off. There was a training video from IT on how to use a system. There was a process document from finance on what you could and could not claim. There was a matrix from somebody else as to who had sign off limits for what. There is nothing that said, “you are an employee, and this is your POV and I am going to guide you through it.” Because these departments were providing their little piece of the picture.
That is not the way employees think and it is not what they need. They need someone to put them at the center of the experience and help them get stuff done.
Such a common story. So, no one was looking at the employee's perspective and understanding what their intent was and what was their hopeful outcome to bridge that from their shoes.
Yeah, and I think the thing that I have seen crop up a lot is people being in siloes and different departments own different parts of a process or task or knowledge. Most processes that knowledge workers are involved in are complex and probably span the whole of the organization. There tend to be drop off points when it moves from marketing to sales or sales to customer service. There is nobody really taking that holistic perspective and saying what does the person who is doing this need. There are all these handoff points and sometimes there are just gaps between them. People get lost in those gaps and it wastes time. It’s also super frustrating for people. I did some work and I think we interviewed about 50 employees on knowledge management issues and by the third or fourth set of interviews we were referring to ourselves as knowledge management therapists because people were so frustrated by these issues, and they really wanted to vent about it and get it off their chest. It really bugs people; It ruins their workday and bogs them done and the result is they are very frustrated.
We oftentimes talk about digital friction as being a challenge to employees and organizations as a whole, app overload, information overload, digital distractions etc.
The employees that you interviewed through those focus groups, did they know they were having a problem? How much of that sat consciously and did you have to poke, and suddenly it came out of how much pain and challenge this is?
They definitely knew they had a problem, but they didn’t know how to quantify it. So, when we started asking people “how often do you think you spend time working on duplicate things that you find someone else was also working on?” or “how much time do you spend looking for things?” They weren’t able to articulate it that way but the minute we started asking questions about how easy is it for you to find information, or a person, or share information, then it all came roaring out. People genuinely get frustrated by this, and I think it affects how much they want to stay in a workplace. If they’re having a terrible time and it’s hard to do anything, it really does impact retention. If it’s just too hard they’re going to go somewhere else where they are not battling to do their job every day.
I think I heard the statistic somewhere that just keeps coming up over the years which is that knowledge workers in particular waste over 60% of their time looking for information, app hopping, moving through the digital workplace. That’s all wasted. No one wants to feel that they wasted this part of their life working and waiting.
And it’s expensive right? It is expensive but you can’t really stick a price tag on it because its nobodies responsibility. It doesn’t really stick to a particular task in your time tracking or a particular budget holder. It’s across the whole organization but it’s costly.
How has that transition to remote work impacted the strategies for knowledge management?
I think it has made it a front and center issue. If you are remote, you have to be a lot more explicit and articulate your questions. So, if I am sitting next to you and I overhear your phone call with an angry customer, I hear your side of the conversation. If you hang up and need to ask me a question, I have already heard your side of the conversation, I know the context and understand where you are. We don’t have to establish all of that. If you are sending me a message in Slack you’ve got to start from scratch and explain everything, which is quite difficult to do. I think everyone is allergic to picking up the phone these days, but conversation is a lot easier than typing. But being around each other is easier. You get a lot of ideas and just context. You pick things up in person as well. Especially around the workplace. It must be hard for new hires these days to learn from their peers when everyone is distributed this way.
And I am all for remote work, I am a huge fan of it, but I do think you have to be very intentional about how you express yourself. One of the things we’ve talked about is working out loud where people are happy to share work in progress or even tell you what they are working on. That’s harder to do online unless you are really intentional about it. I actually work with a client where they have a channel for this. Where they are literally all day are commenting “I am working on xyz.” It’s a lot of information but really keeps people in touch with one another. I think it is difficult to scale at an enterprise level, but you could certainly do it with your team or with your peers who are in a similar role to you. It’s not something that comes naturally to people.
I am sure with that example it’s also the approach, right? At face value that could be seen as micromanagement. But depending on the culture and how it’s applied it could be successful. Is that what you saw?
Yes, it’s definitely not about wanting to know what you’re doing, it’s about collaborating. If you tell me you’re meeting with a person I might share that I met them last week for such and such an issue. It’s about recreating a little bit of what happens naturally in an office, virtually. I know when everyone went remote there was an idea from senior leaders that there wasn’t going to be any more innovation because people weren’t running into each other at the water cooler to share amazing ideas. People don’t share amazing ideas at the water cooler, but they do share snippets and tidbits of information and I think finding a way to bring that back to virtual work is going to be really important.
I wanted to ask you about some of the common challenges. We talked a little bit about the culture with leadership but what are some of the common challenges organizations face with managing the flow of information and knowledge within the digital workplace.
What are you seeing today? What were you seeing 5-10 years ago? Are they the same?
A lot of it is the same. The technology for finding things is immeasurably better, but there must be something for you to find. I always say content is king, a lot of this stuff isn’t there and that might be instructions or processes but it could also be lessons learned or retrospectives when you finish something . Doing this stuff is difficult and time consuming, but it saves you so much time later on. But the content has to be there, and accurate, for you to be able to disseminate it and for people to be able to profit from it.
The other thing that people are super weird about is people like to share work in progress via email or Slack, but when you say “This is great I love this can I publish it” they’re like “woah wait it’s not ready for primetime”
I think that’s an issue – this fear of it’s not quite finished so it could be wrong and I don’t want people to see this until it’s all polished. That becomes an issue.
Also some of the basics. A lot of the organizations I have worked with have really struggled with their basic data like who is on this team or how many employees do we have. You’d think that would be an easy question to answer but apparently not. Quite often the people directory is an absolute mess so if you are trying to serve information to people based on their role, level, or responsibilities, you can’t really do that unless you have accurate information about them, and it is surprisingly common for people not to have that. Even org charts. People are touchy about org charts, partly because they change quite often but partly because maybe there is not much confidence in the data. People don’t really talk about that much and perhaps I shouldn’t talk about it here but it is really common, particularly the larger the organization, I think.
One of the really good examples i saw was in a really large organization, 100K+ employees globally, that was working through some thorny issues, big projects, and programs. They had some very senior program managers who were dealing with extremely difficult projects. They were busy and senior, so getting them to write things down was difficult, but there were many lessons learned that were not being shared, and people were seeing common problems pop up repeatedly. We solved that with a community of practice. It did eventually rely on technology but it relied initially on getting them all together for a couple of days so they could meet each other and trust each other and be comfortable talking about issues or problems.
Sometimes people feel very vulnerable to say, “this went horribly wrong” and so they don’t want to talk about it. So, we fixed that initial issue of making sure that you can trust these colleagues and then we gave them a place technology wise where they could share resources or ask each other questions or even see who’s been working on which type of program and call them up and ask me to talk them through how they did something. I think for all of the knowledge management work I’ve seen successful it’s always a mix of the people and the content and the technology, it’s never just one thing.
So you ended up trying to model the paradigm of community first in live scenarios to humanize it, and then bring it virtual. Is that what I am hearing?
Absolutely. I think if you try to start these things off virtual with people who just don’t trust each other it will take longer to get things done.
And these individuals were already in different offices?
Yes, all over and primarily working with clients.
One of the best tools I’ve ever seen for knowledge management challenges is when I was working at Jive. We used our own product, and our instance of it was called Brew Space, and it had everything that you could possibly want to know becuase poeple were extremly open about what they were working on. Everything got stashed there. I used to receive very few emails when I was working at Jive because everything was happening in Brew Space. It was incredibly successful because everyone was there and everyone was participating. I think one of the things we struggled with to get clients at that level was that it was always difficult to get everyone 100% in there. I miss it to this day because it was so easy to find what you needed, and also find a group to vent about your dislike of cilantro if that’s what you wanted to do, or find out if a client had a particular challenge with a use case and how have others tried to solve it in the past. It was often ridiculous, and very human, and very funny, but it was such an incredible institutional memory.
It was a breath of fresh air, I remember if you didn’t participate with Brew Space, the social intranet, you were going to get called out. My inbox has never been as low as it was because it was only external really. Emails between myself and some clients and perhaps some spam lists. Everything else happened within Jive, it was amazing.
I think one of the most amazing things about that is people were ready to say here’s my content I’m still working on it but feel free to suggest changes. The first time it happened it was really jarring – I posted a work-in-progress deck I was working on and somebody got in contact with me and said “I think you should change this,” and I was a bit put out. Once you get used to working that way though it’s just so much better. You are gaining expertise and input from people but you do have to be open to it. It’s a difficult thing initially to say “I am working on this and feel free to have at it.” You have to trust the people and they have to be nice about it as well. I think one of the things that is difficult with virtual is tone. Sometimes if you’re sending something that could be perceived as critical, read it out to yourself in a sarcastic tone first because it’s possible that that is the way it gets interpreted. So just test it out to see if the way that you send it out is the way it’s going to be intpereted.
I have never heard that tip but now I can’t wait to apply it because I have been accused of being a little contextually tone deaf over text.
I don’t think that’s a you problem, I think it’s a people problem. Because nobody knows the context you’re sending it. Unless maybe you’re typing in all caps and you’re mad, but nobody is sitting with you so even if you know you’ve got good intentions the person receiving it might not. I do use that one quite a bit.
I’m slightly obsessed with governance and it’s not a sexy topic. People aren’t really keen to talk about it but it’s where the rubber meets the road. As soon as you talk to people about who is going to own or maintain this, people get a bit antsy. People are very happy to invest in a project to document something or collaborate on something. That’s probably fine for a month but what happens to it when things change a few months down the line? You have a very limited amount of time with people before they lose trust in what you’re providing. You can create something fantastic but if someone finds your material three months later and it’s wrong, they are not going to trust you anymore. So, governance is key, and it’s very difficult with technology because very often this stuff gets given to IT. IT might be great at getting the technology up and running but they don’t necessarily know the people who are using it, what they are trying to achieve, how comfortable they are with technology. You have to tackle this with people from across the organization because otherwise it just becomes “oh that’s a technology system,” and that is not how people work. They are not trying to use the tool just to use the tool, they are trying get something done and use the tool to achieve something.
From budget perspective, it is really difficult because people don’t tend to quantify how much it costs if people are losing 16% of their time on this stuff. It’s not written down as a line item, but it does cost a lot of money, and I think having a cross-functional team managing this is the best way to do it. But it is hard because where does the budget sit for these types of things? Sometimes it’s in comms because it’s about communicating. Sometimes it’s IT. Sometimes it’s elsewhere. My favorite place that I've seen people run knowledge management from is Business Operations because they tend to have a purview over everything. Not every organization has a business operations team, and it can be kind of difficult to corral people to be invested in tackling this problem rather than just saying we’ve got the system, you own it, you deal with it.
Where have you seen successful initial implementation of knowledge management programs? I imagine it must begin with optimizing a specific pattern of activity? What has been your approach to guiding these types of conversations?
That’s absolutely the way that I have seen it be so successful. People have a particular process in mind that they know isn’t working or is causing issues for their customers. Looking at it from a process perspective. For example, if you have customers who are all having issues with one product you need to be able to gather all the people involved in that. It’s not just a support ticket. You might need to involve the product managers or the customer success team who know the context. So, it’s looking at the business outcome we’re looking to get here and then look at it from that perspective because it never belongs to just one team. If it did it would be much easier to fix. I think all the knowledge management programs I have seen have the flow of this is the process we’re trying to fix, and we’ve got all the key stakeholders involved to tackle it together. Otherwise, you have a lot of pieces of information that don’t fit together. You must have that willingness to work across teams and not just say “oh we wrote some documents go look for them in the repository”
Good luck.
Yup, good luck trying to find it. Often one team uses Confluence, another uses Jira, another use Microsoft Teams. That’s a common problem as well.
It’s a huge issue. Particualrly, when people were able to sign up for freemium and so you would have these tools popping up around the organization that nobody had sanctioned, probably weren’t meeting security requirements, and everyone got embedded in their own little area. It’s really difficult. And I love what you said about patterns because that’s really the important thing.
I sound like a broken record but what are we trying to achieve? What are the outcomes we’re looking for? What are the common work patterns here? That is the way people think and get work done. They don’t think in terms of tools. The more places you give them to go, firstly it’s confusing to figure out where this stuff is. Secondly, every time I hop from one place to another, I’m losing context and it’s jarring, and it wastes time. The more tech rationalization an organization can do the better, but if you can put something over that that will help people just get things done, outcome focused not tool focused, that’s much better because meeting people where they are is much better for them. It’s never a technology problem, its people, technology, and content.
People ruin everything. It’s costly at the end of the day if you’re having to accure all that tech debt.
It’s really costly. Also, I’ve done a lot of work with people on this where even cataloging their tools is difficult. A lot of times you must go to procurement to figure out what you’re getting billed for and a lot of times they’re like “I don’t think we own that.” Yeah, you do, you’re paying for it.
Sometimes it’s just tricky cataloging these things. But then when it is 4 different tools for one need then you have to approach it from a requirements perspective and say to people. What do you need to do? I know you love this tool and you don’t want me to take it away but is it actually meeting requirements? And not all requirements are equal. Yes, you may use it and even love it, but if it doesn’t meet our security requirements you can’t use it.
People get passionately attached to tools it’s strange.
Are they attached to the tool or attached to the budget?
I think they’re attached to the familiarity of the tool. The logic of “I've learned to do it this way, it works for me, I don’t want to have to learn something new”
I totally get it. I was working with someone once eand there were two different parts of the organization and one was saying “we have to use Confluence, this is absolutely brilliant” and the other part of the org was saying “I hate Confluence, it’s the worst tool I’ve ever used you'll never get my team to use it.”
How can two teams within the same organization have such different perspectives?
I think a lot of the time it’s “I joined your team and you trained me to do this process iwth this tool and I shouldn’t have to change it becuase of them over there”
It’s really tricky.
Where do you see the future of knowledge management heading over the next 5-10 years particularly with the introduction of AI and machine learning hopefully assisting users in finding their content?
I am always a bit cautious about making predictions particularly now because things are changing so fast. I think AI has gone from something that was very technical and for geeky people who loved AI and now it’s in everyone’s daily life. I think it will be enormously helpful to people but again, sounding like a broken record, the information has to be correct. It will be really great helping people get things, but the things they get need to be accurate.
I don’t know if you saw the recent Air Canada story where a man was chatting with the bot on their site and needed to get a ticket for a funeral. The bot told him to just book the ticket and they’ll get him a bereavement refund later. There was no such thing as a bereavement refund and Air Canada did not want to have to pay that to him. They have just been asked in court to do so and the chatbot has disappeared from their site. I think content has got to be correct. But it will become much easier.
An example from a while ago, pre-covid so we were in-office, but they were doing a big office move consolidating people from 3-4 different offices to one. They set up a chatbot to answer a lot of the questions because there were so many of the same quetsions people were asking again and again but the context was slightly different so the chabot was really helpful.
One of the things I would like to see with AI and virtual developments is maybe a third space for people to be in. I’m not a fan of the metaverse but we’ve talked quite a bit about content. If I am able to be at home but listen to my colleagues conversations if I want to, or shut it off when I want to have focus time. There’s got to be something there that can help bridge that gap between we’re in the noisy office and I can’t get anything done to we’re all at home and it’s really quiet but I have no idea what’s going on. I’d love to see something to bridge that gap but I don’t know what that looks like.
There is certainly a space for that. More transparency as it fits the teams. Closing out here, what advice would you give to digital workplace leaders and application owners who are looking to improve the flow of discovery?
I would say focus on employee experience, not who owns what. Reach out to your employees and find out what their experience is. Cosplay as an employee because you as a leader maybe don’t have the same issues as they do. Do the research and watch how somebody does a task or navigates challenges. Then use that to solve because if you’re looking at it from any other perspective there is always going to be friction, there will always be a gap for the employee. I think that’s the first thing.
The second thing is meet them where they are. Try to make things as smooth as possible for people instead of making them think what do I do know? Where do I go? Where do I find this? Oh I don’t have a login for this?
Try to make things as smooth for employees as you can. Their job isn’t supposed to be using technology. Their job is getting a customer to renew because they’re so happy, or design a product, or write beautiful marketing material. It isn’t figuring out how to use a tool.
Where can folks go to learn more about yourself?
Find me on Linkedin – I do have a website but Linkedin is the best place.
