Traditionally, human resources (HR)
has filled the role of technician¾as
recruitment, compensation, and
benefits specialists.
A quick perusal of current HR job postings
reveals that organizations continue to
define the HR role in this narrow manner.
Rare are organizations seeking to meet
the greater human resources challenge
facing organizations: training
development and
knowledge management.
“
There is a great opportunity for human resources
to expand its skill set,” said John
Crager, a senior adviser at the American
Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). “HR
can’t sit still. It must develop
knowledge management skills to enable better
recruits,
quicker training, faster integration into
the work force, and delivery of programs
to retain key knowledge workers. The pressure
is on, and it is not going away.”
In its years of knowledge management research,
APQC has worked with leading organizations
in capitalizing on knowledge management’s
bottom-line value. Although recruitment,
compensation, and benefits are still important
for human resources, best-practice organizations
have found that the additional focus on
knowledge management is critical to productivity
and
profitability. And they have demonstrated
that one valuable way to use knowledge
management is by reducing time to competency
for employees
with new job responsibilities, such as
newly hired or transferred employees.
“
Labor is typically an organization’s
largest investment,” said Crager. “Therefore,
the sooner employees are productive, the
greater the return on that investment.”
The New Role for Human Resources
“
Knowledge moves with people,” said
Crager. “Whether people leave through
retirement, mergers, turnover, or internal
job changes, ‘end-to-end knowledge
management’ is necessary to capture
and transfer critical knowledge from recruitment
to retirement.”
Impending trends, such as retirement among
baby boomers and shorter periods of employment
with a single company, will affect both profitability
and productivity. Organizations must take
action to retain valuable knowledge, and
APQC benchmarking research confirms that
human resources plays a critical role in
this effort.
Human resources’ traditional constraints
have relegated it to a staff designation
with little, if any, responsibility for knowledge
management. “This is a huge opportunity,” Crager
said. “Knowledge management is not
just for operations, IT, or research and
development¾its traditional domains.
Organizations need it in every place they
spend money, certainly including human
resources and sales.”
Although human resources has been traditionally
perceived as having little involvement
with day-to-day operations and profitability,
Crager advised that now is the time for
human
resources to rectify that perception and
expand its skill set. “HR is rarely
viewed as full members of the enterprise,” Crager
said, “but it can and should change
that. HR can prove its value very quickly
by gaining knowledge management skills
and putting these to work in operations
to maximize
expert input in developing new-hire training
and ongoing professional development.”
But human resources must be careful of
being seen as yet another support department
trying
to sell its wares, Crager advised. “It
must prove a short-term impact and build
its business case through effective training
programs.”
Whereas the old model limits human resources’ knowledge
activities to initial training and exit interviews,
APQC’s new model depicts more robust
initial training, as well as ongoing knowledge
identification, capture, retention, and transfer
activities through to the exit interview.
Initial training focuses on reducing time
to competency, and the ongoing knowledge
management activities consist of regularly
structured collection and transfer throughout
employees’ careers.
According to Crager, even the exit interview
has much opportunity for improvement by determining
what knowledge the employee is taking with
him/her and gathering employee feedback on
issues such as training effectiveness and
maintaining up-to-date skills, all of which
can be fed back into the training development
process.
Employing a Knowledge Management Strategy
Within Human Resources
APQC’s four-step knowledge management
strategy for human resources professionals
follows.
1. Identify -- Determine what knowledge is
critical for the success of the enterprise.
2. Capture -- Collect critical knowledge
using techniques such as interviews and best
practices submissions.
3.
Retain -- Store the captured knowledge
in a format where it can be easily retrieved
for use at a later time.
4.
Transfer -- Transfer through training,
apprenticeships, mentoring, and other opportunities.
As knowledge moves from explicit to tacit,
knowledge management efforts become more
people-centric than IT-centric. Thus, someone
or some function must be responsible for
identifying and capturing the knowledge from
experts. Human resources can fill this important
role.
Several approaches are used to identify what
knowledge to capture: senior management discussions,
interviews with employees changing roles
and subject matter experts, communities of
practice, focus groups, end-user/front-line
interviews, data on employee tenure and turnover,
and survey instruments.
HR can also be responsible for effective
knowledge retention and transfer activities
such as:
· After-Action Review/lessons learned,
· communities of practice,
· content management,
· expert locators,
· knowledge repositories,
· training, and
· mentor programs.
“
Knowledge transfer is a critical knowledge
management role for HR,” said Crager. “Experience
has shown that it can be the most challenging.
Organizations find that once they capture
the knowledge, they often lack a process
to incorporate it into training. HR should
seize this opportunity by taking responsibility
and accountability for this process.”
Best-practice organizations have demonstrated
their reliance on human resources to provide
this link between knowledge management and
the learning organization. For instance,
the World Bank and Xerox Connect each sanctioned
their human resources function to embed knowledge
sharing into new-hire orientation, training,
and leadership development. In another example,
Corning has tied its knowledge management
and retention efforts closely to organizational
learning, which resulted in a program that
links competency mapping and learning needs
assessment.
Programs focusing on competencies and learning
benefit both employees and the bottom line
through greater productivity, increased
satisfaction, and lower turnover. Although
some organizations
may believe workers are driven by only
extrinsic motivators (i.e., salary, stock
options,
and recognition and rewards), APQC’s
research is clear: intrinsic motivators such
as autonomy, time for own projects, and opportunities
for learning are significant drivers as well. “HR
helps influence these other factors,” said
Crager.
Reducing Time to Competency
Time to competency is based on the transfer
of critical knowledge from experienced individuals
to new employees that will allow effective
and efficient completion of assigned tasks
and duties. Reducing this time required for
knowledge transfer equates to a significant
reduction in turnover costs.
“
It is common knowledge that employee turnover
is a huge cost to an organization,” said
Crager. “But too many organizations
chalk this up to ‘the price of doing
business’ rather than looking for
ways to reduce them.”
In this effort, human resources’ goals
are efficiency and effectiveness. And reducing
time to competency can be easily measured,
according to Crager. “Organizations
can track the length of their apprenticeship
programs, which conclude with operations’ evaluation
to determine training effectiveness,” said
Crager.
According to Crager, the biggest challenge
is identifying the critical knowledge needed
for employees to perform a job. Again, knowledge
management tools can be of assistance to
human resources; specifically, knowledge
mapping can help to quickly identify that
critical knowledge.
Knowledge mapping is one of the skills
human resources needs in its expanded role;
and
it is one that can be quickly learned in
half-day training classes. “Knowledge
mapping hastens the process to capture knowledge
by ensuring HR targets the right experts
and uses their time wisely,” said
Crager, who conducts such training at APQC.
Experts,
he explained, are asked to prioritize the
critical things they do and knowledge that
would enable an employee to master the
job quickly and operate with minimal supervision.
Experts are also needed for later guidance
as human resources continues to refine
initial
training materials and build ongoing training
development courses.
“
Yet another benefit derived from capturing
critical skills required for each job,” said
Crager, “is the opportunity for HR
to focus on these skills in recruiting
and hiring, thereby allowing for additional
reduction
in time to competency by hiring the most
qualified candidates.”
Meeting the Challenge
Crager regularly asks organizations, “In
the next six months, will you be taking steps
to decrease time to competency using knowledge
management activities?” APQC research
indicates that a large majority of organizations
realize this issue is significant, but that
they lack help addressing it. And with downsizing
a common woe in today’s economy,
much knowledge has already been lost, and
uncertainty
exists as to what happens when employment
ramps back up.
“
Now is the time to focus on expanding HR’s
skill set in knowledge management,” said
Crager. “Once the economy picks up,
organizations will be dealing with a highly
mobile work force. Organizations should be
wary of getting behind the curve and going
down the same costly path again. With labor’s
tremendous costs, turnover is too expensive.”
Thus, human resources must embrace and
demonstrate knowledge management’s
value. Numerous benefits come through ongoing
knowledge capture
and transfer, and many can be quickly realized
through knowledge mapping and by reducing
time to competency. Redefining human resources
can allow the function to overcome the
knowledge deficits looming large for organizations
on the horizon. |
