- Your staff stop to complain, they come in and go back on time. They are very quiete in meeting. They do not critique ideas. They just say yes and stay out of trouble.
- Your staff stop to complain, they come in late and go back early. They want to be somewhere else. They drive Honda Accord to work and enjoy their vacation.
- Your staff oppose on every single change. Either quietly or loudly.
- Poor participation in organization activities. Number of turn ups are very low despite of interesting events laid out for them.
- Your staff change organization but not job. They even accept offers that is just equal to their current salary.
All above-listed symptoms are norm to organization who only focuses on short term gain of profit. But really, for organizations who claimed that they really care about people, cannot close one eye to these symptoms. Human, if not being optimized to their fullest potential, shall become the biggest factor to decreasing of productivity.
When there is not enough interactions to share ‘caring’ within organization, (in other words, ‘don’t care’ attitude is prevalent) , people tend to departmentalize their brain and heart from the people in the company they work with and their other lives.
Symptoms #1 & #2 show that there is really nothing interestesting happening in the work place and there is really no room for growth in the organization ; ‘I might as well invest my precious time doing other things i.e. moonlighting, direct selling, internet business etc. ‘
Check these two signals : 1. nothing interesting , 2. no growth
Normally organization will translate these signals to ‘we need a better career progression’ or ‘we need to reorganize’. However, to put in place more career options or higher career ladder means, organization has to prepare a bigger human resource cost centre. Reorganize in addition, will inject more stress from intensified unlearn and relearn activities. Wrong intervention, will not just impact money and time, but also have reverse affect to the people.
Knowledge Management has several solutions for this set of bad actors:
- Community of Practice
- Idea bank/Employee Suggestion scheme
- other very effective tools and methods (which all of the KM practitioner have been aggessively sharing for years now)
Really, KM is the blue ocean for Human Capital Management. If you want to know more on how to eliminate these bad actors via effective implementation of KM, do talk to us.
4 responses so far ↓
1 KK Aw // Jan 28, 2010 at 12:51 am
Jasmiza,
So what is your advise to Naguib? Care to share with us.
2 Naguib // Jan 28, 2010 at 6:11 am
Jasmiza,
Don’t you think they are more of HR and Leadership problem ( could also be the corporate goal, strategy problem as well) rather than a KM problem?
Why not look at the basis HR issues- performance measurment, rewards, recognition, career track, capability development, job rotations, challenging tasks rather seeing them from a ‘KM’ perspective?
3 Jasmiza // Jan 28, 2010 at 7:45 am
Naguib,
It has always been either leadership or/and hr problem, but KM has always been the answer to one of humankind issue pertaining to human needs.
Check Maslow’s Hierarchy for an instant..
KM is a solution, if its big then its a management if its small and application then its a tool..
But unlike other solution that focuses on lagging results or final outcome which straightforwardly related to dollar and sense, KM is a solution that gives more leading KPI rather than lagging.
KM changes not just behaviour and attitude, it shall also change mindset and value towards humankind.
PMS is a reward system. It is a system used to reward human that deliver results. But how to deliver result without knowledge?
Capability Development is the end result of Knowledge Worker.
Job Rotations need KM to support learn, unlearn and relearn.
KM is a challenging task. Its a tacit form of solution.
Since KM impacted the software of an organization, yes, it must come from the top management strategy and initiative.
We can say the above symptoms also routed from a ( ) corporate goal. i dont know what to write in the bracket. It can be good it can be bad. But top management who fail to understand the insights of KM, are the management who made that kind ( ) of corporate goal.
The answer can also be found when we ask, what is the difference between the old mindset top management (production era) with the new mindset top management (knowledge era).
We have yet to even understand what is dream management and wisdom management. But again, KM stays in the middle of all era transaction and evolution.
Thats why , at this point of time, i would like to relate most organization sicknesses to KM. I stressed out here, when we do not practice, correctly.
4 KK Aw // Jan 29, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Jasmiza,
Actually, the problem is that these organizations, process and activities are not properly engineered. As you are aware, the art and science of engineering is the application of knowledge and science to develop and build better systems and processes. Fortunately for us, some people are waking up and today we have disciplines like social engineering, genetic engineering, business process engineering, software engineering, systems engineering, environmental engineering and sustainable engineering. Soon, if it is not there, we will have human resource engineering, leadership engineering, market engineering, sales engineering, education engineering, tourism engineering, political engineering, medical engineering etc. People who do not have the slightest notion of engineering will be calling themselves engineers much to the chagrin of traditional engineers.
But joke aside, knowledge and KM are cross cutting issues across most if not all disciplines. Each disciplines bring with it is own theories, practices, culture, focus, methodologies, history, experiences and knowledge. IMHO, to subsume these disciplines under KM would not add any value but is in fact negative. KM should instead be developed to be used by these disciplines to help them progress in their own directions.
BTW, in a private project I am working on, we have identified over 225 disciplines and sub-disciplines and over 1,200 areas of specializations. How about that for starters? This does not include the pure academic disciplines and is a long way from being complete.
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