In recent years, the distributed workforce model has emerged as a workplace competitive advantage, leveraging technology to engage top talent independent of geography. This approach has many advantages, including access to global talent pools, cost efficiency, and increased organizational flexibility. However, it has also introduced unique challenges. We have heard from our clients that knowledge sharing, information transfer, and collaboration grow increasingly difficult for their employees to do successfully. Quality of information varies widely, as does the ability to find it, slowing down and clouding the decision-making process.
In this blog, I’ll share with you why effective Knowledge Management (KM) practices play a pivotal role in enabling your distributed organization to thrive. I will also give a preview of how effective KM practices facilitate and successfully ensure the creation, sharing, and utilization of high-quality information and knowledge across dispersed teams. This allows the flow of business to continue smoothly and sets organizations up for success when planning for advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Enhanced Collaboration and Communication
As a leader or member of a distributed organization, one of the primary reasons you may be interested in building and maintaining an effective KM experience is to enhance collaboration and communication. In a distributed environment, team members often work across different time zones, cultures, and languages. Often, knowledge is exchanged on a person-to-person or small network basis; employees have access to information because of who they know or where they’re located. This informal, ad-hoc way of sharing information is not scalable.
Effective, modern approaches to knowledge transfer exist and can be custom-fit to organizational needs. These approaches, especially when supported by content and process governance, ensure that valuable insights, best practices, and lessons learned are captured and consistently accessible to all team members. This fosters a sense of connection, cohesion, and shared purpose, reducing the impact of challenges posed by physical separation and leading to better business outcomes.
We have seen these benefits firsthand. In one example, the National Park Service (NPS) realized that they needed to connect their volunteers and employees from across the country. EK designed and launched Communities of Practice which connected experts in various NPS topics across the country. The result is a connected workforce who are able to easily find one another to leverage and build on each others’ knowledge.
One of EK’s clients instituted Communities of Practice to connect volunteers and employees from across the country. This program has helped experts locate and connect with one another for simplified sharing of information.
Knowledge Capture, Retention, and Learning Culture
Many clients have expressed their concerns about the risk of knowledge loss when employees leave or transition to other roles. Effective KM programs facilitate knowledge retention by capturing both explicit and tacit knowledge, ensuring that critical knowledge and information is preserved and available to current and future employees, ideally at the point-of-need. This can and should be infused into any organization’s learning culture.
Combining the power of enterprise learning and effective KM ensures that the exchange of ideas and information is not static and unidirectional; instead, structured and accurate information is captured easily and flows freely amongst all employees. A frequent misconception is that only new employees benefit from the knowledge of older, more experienced employees, but this simply isn’t the case. A planned, structured approach such as Communities of Practice, solid enterprise search inclusive of collaboration tools such as Teams or Slack, or even Job Shadowing for exchange of information between employees strengthens every employee’s ability to respond to new challenges as employees build upon existing knowledge and develop new strategies and solutions to novel challenges. When captured and stored appropriately, the cycle can begin anew. This is a great application for any learning organization to own and foster.
A planned approach for exchange of information between employees strengthens every employee’s ability to respond to new challenges, allowing employees to build upon existing knowledge and develop new strategies and solutions to novel challenges.
Quality, Consistency, and Findability of Information
We also hear that maintaining quality and consistency across processes and procedures has become increasingly challenging for our clients, especially those with dispersed teams. Effective KM helps address this challenge by standardizing processes, documenting procedures, and disseminating guidelines across the organization. The most successful programs have systems and processes that are designed and built to complement the flow of work, not disrupt it. At the same time, ensuring content is accurate and can be trusted is paramount. We recently worked on a Business Management System for a globally distributed client, where critical control process documentation is housed. In this instance, our research allowed us to reasonably estimate that this system could potentially contribute nearly $1.5 million per day in reducing revenue loss through well-structured, accurate, and easily located content, should a mechanical failure occur elsewhere in the organization.
This value underscores the need for governance of content collections. In this client’s case, they are subject to certain regulatory requirements, but they also have stringent requirements of their own. Their governance model exists to ensure that content is structured and maintained to meet all of these requirements.
We estimated that one client’s Business Management System, a knowledge repository of critical business control documents for employees around the globe, could potentially contribute nearly $1.5 million per day in reducing revenue loss through well-structured, accurate, and easily located content.
Efficient Decision-Making
Decisions made within a distributed organization rely heavily on the information available to decision-makers; for example, accurate and specific equipment specifications or manuals easily accessed in the case of an equipment failure. This concept applies equally to executives, who need current and accurate data to make timely and impactful decisions. Effectively applied KM principles provide a structured approach to capturing, organizing, and presenting relevant content and data, which in turn can enable rapid and well-informed decisions. This can minimize delays caused by the need to gather, validate, and cross-check scattered data, reducing the risk of inaccurate decisions caused by faulty or missing data. This level of agility is essential in today’s fast-paced business landscape, where saving a small amount of time on routine tasks can translate into significant cost savings at scale.
Furthermore, as organizations look to the promise of AI to assist in decision-making, it is critical to remember that knowledge-based AI efforts will utilize the content that it has available. If the knowledge content that is available is missing, inaccurate, or duplicative, there is a strong likelihood that the AI results will be consequently skewed.
Effectively applied KM principles provide a structured approach to capturing, organizing, and presenting relevant data, which in turn can enable rapid and well-informed decisions. This becomes critical for organizations considering AI implementations.
Risk Management and Compliance
EK has worked with a number of heavily regulated clients who have unique needs dictated by diverse regulatory environments that require strict adherence to legal and ethical standards. Effective KM that reflects a structured approach to documenting and disseminating relevant regulations, policies, and procedures can assist these clients in managing risks and ensuring compliance. When supported and promoted by the learning organization, leaders can ensure that this information is proactively presented or provided at the point-of-need. This not only reduces the risk of non-compliance, but it also enhances transparency and accountability across the organization, even in geographically dispersed teams.
The Business Management System instance discussed earlier is a prime example of how structured and regulated content can be effectively disseminated across broadly distributed organizations. When combined with access management data, this type of content can be specifically delivered to the right users at the right time—based on geographic location, job role or job level, etc. Again, when paired with standard learning organization tools like Workday Learning or other LMS’s, compliance tracking can be more easily monitored and managed.
Effective Knowledge Management reduces the risk of non-compliance, but it also enhances transparency and accountability across the organization, even in geographically dispersed teams.
Conclusion
To conclude, the importance and value of effective Knowledge Management for distributed organizations cannot be overstated. This organizational model is expected to remain popular, and lack of action in ensuring you are employing effective KM techniques will have far-reaching business impacts.
By ensuring truly effective KM implementation, distributed organizations can navigate the challenges of their unique environments and unlock the full potential of their diverse teams. This, in turn, will lead to long-term organizational success.
Are you wondering if your distributed organization has a truly effective KM program? Enterprise Knowledge has the experience and tools to fully assess, diagnose, recommend, and implement an effective KM environment in diverse—and distributed—organizations of all sizes. Contact us today to get started.