Six ways KM supports organizations in the COVID-19 era
5. Engage employees in meaningful work
Another role that KM has taken on is ensuring that employees are tasked with valuable work, despite social distancing and other disruptions. This is happening on two fronts.
♦ KM has created opportunities for employees who can’t be fully productive. For example, consultants who can’t be on site with clients or scientists unable to work in laboratories have been tapped for activities such as knowledge mapping, expert interviews, or webinars that they might not otherwise have time for.
♦ KM has redeployed its own team members to meet urgent needs. For example, KM professionals have stepped in to facilitate virtual meetings and idea jams, coordinate corporate communications related to the crisis, and redesign learning materials for digital delivery.
Even though KM work is critically important, teams can strengthen their relationships by being team players and supporting their peers. In some cases, this means taking on work that falls outside KM’s normal scope. For example, Clawson said that some of her team’s work now involves “engagement with new partners and channeling that information to corporate communications. They use those details in media interviews and in letters to regulators and governments around the world to advocate for the free flow of medicines.”
6. Help the organization reflect and learn
Even while responding to the immediate crisis, KM teams are helping and reflect more broadly on enterprise processes. This remains a work in progress, but the pandemic is forcing leaders to think creatively not only about the work they need to prioritize but also how their businesses approach established activities.
For example, in addition to the typical after action review, one pharmaceutical company is encouraging employees to do a ‘before action review’ prior to starting certain tasks. Even though it might be a routine task they have done thousands of times, supply chain disruptions and social distancing mean that it needs to be done differently.
Frank-Hensley said that her team has stepped up during COVID-19 to make Swagelok’s lessons-learned process more robust. “We’re purposefully inserting ourselves into that process to help provide some additional benefits. In the past, there have been a lot of lessons learned that get captured but not implemented.”
One step the KM team has taken is to standardize the forms used to capture lessons across Swagelok. Araba said that the revamped lessons-learned process “really helps with documentation and making sure that when we go through the process we don’t go back to our old behaviors. I recently heard someone say they did something in 2 weeks that once took a year—so why did it only take 2 weeks now? And how do we make sure that when the pandemic subsides and the world is safe again, we can still work with the same speed and efficiency?”
The impact of COVID-19
We don’t yet know the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy as a whole, much less on enterprise KM. Work is likely to be more virtual moving forward, and executives have had a wake-up call to the risks of deprioritizing information systems and digital connectivity. KM teams that played starring roles in the crisis response are more visible enterprisewide and invited to more strategic discussions. But inertia is powerful, and KM leaders must fight to retain this seat at the table, especially as operations drift back toward their pre-pandemic normal. It is critical for KM to monitor changing knowledge needs, take steps to proactively meet those needs, and measure and communicate KM’s value to the business.