Every Friday, we prepare for you a short digest with news covering subjects related to employee engagement, collaboration, organizational culture, knowledge sharing, leadership and the future of work.
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Here’s this week’s brief:
“As information moves across so many…
…different people, it gets atrophied, and there’s a selection bias that occurs every time someone is listening and saying, ‘I think this is important, this is what I’m going to pass on.’”. This kind of information sharing — typical for so many companies today — wastes a lot of talent, says Paul Leonardi, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. He continues “We end up in a situation,” he says, “where we have very complex organizations that are hiring smart people who have tremendous amounts of knowledge and insight in particular areas, who just don’t get the opportunity to share that with one another very often or directly.”. Leonardi’s goal is to figure out better ways for employees to share knowledge and information. The goal, he says, is to help employees know what and whom their colleagues know — so that they can move more quickly and smartly in all their work. Read the interview with him conducted by David Kiron The Unexpected Payoffs of Employee “Eavesdropping” for MITSloan.
Knowledge workers spend about 2/3…
…of their time deep in concentration, defining problems, taking in information and synthesizing it into actionable knowledge. They spend the remaining 1/3 of their time sharing that knowledge in meetings with colleagues or external partners. However, 36% claim that meetings diminish their personal productivity. The causes for this include poor meeting management (51%), lack of decision making (32%) and lack of follow-up (31%). One of the practical superpowers that make knowledge workers incredibly valuable to any organizations is sharing what they know. Knowledge superheroes understand that sharing knowledge, rather than hoarding it, is in their best interest and the organization’s. They know that the more knowledge is shared, the more is created – and make knowledge-sharing a routine part of how they work. Read more from Jabra’s latest blog post, It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Knowledge Superhero!.
The mix of hard and soft skills it takes…
…to get hired change as quickly as business does. Good help is hard to find. At least that’s what one-third of hiring managers say, and the talent shortage isn’t just in technical fields. Good sales reps, managers, executives, and financial professionals are among the most difficult to find, according to a 2015 survey by Manpower Group. Sought-after people have a good mix of hard and soft skills, and those skills are always changing because today’s business climate is in constant flux. And one of the skills it will take for 2016 is strong communication: “”A lot of times degree programs and employers focus on the hard skills, but then end up with employees who do not know how to work with other people or can’t communicate a complex thought in an effective manner,” Daniel Alexander Usera, career consultant and professor at Arkansas State University says. “Although STEM degrees will continue to be in high demand, those skills are not as impactful if the person can’t function in a team-based, information-sharing context.”. Read Stephanie Vozza’s post Eight Career Skills You Need To Be Competitive in 2016 for FastCompany.
Keeping the skills of your workforce…
…up to date is one of the HR trends of 2016. Talking with over 60 international HR experts, discussing their ideas and predictions for the year ahead, P World tried to understand what the future holds for HR professionals around the world. Our favorite is that of Anne Morrison, Chair, British Academy of Film and Television Arts: “Many companies immediately turn to an external training firm but it is worth thinking about the expertise and experience already in your company and how you can tap into this for the benefit of the rest of your staff. Your younger employees, for example, probably have knowledge of social media which an older generation might struggle with, reversing the traditional hierarchy of skills. Harnessing this peer to peer learning can be an efficient and cost effective way of increasing skills, and the knowledge transferred is likely to be relevant because it is delivered by people who understand your organisation’s culture”. Read the rest in 9 trends in 10 HR Trends You’ll See In 2016 by Kosta Petrov for Huffington Post.
There’s little exciting in KM as it has long…
…(although serviceably) been defined, as the industry has long conceived it. Industry’s idea is that an enterprise can beneficially manage knowledge by a) storing and organizing documents and providing a search function and b) cataloging employee abilities and facilitating collaboration. But in Seth Grimes’s opinion, this approach ignores the information inside documents. It ignores enterprise-relevant knowledge and expertise that resides outside an organization’s boundaries, out in the wild-and-wooly online and social universe. Christian Buckley, a long-time KM industry participant, writes that “The problem with knowledge management (KM) is… a user experience that fails to align the needs of the complex, non-linear playback mechanisms of the human brain with our systems of record.” In order to build the next generation KM platform, he believes one of the solutions to be improving the distribution of knowledge and ideas, quickly and seamlessly. Read Seth’s post Time to Bring Knowledge to Knowledge Management for CMSWire to learn more on the subject.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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