This year of 2020 has proved to us that the way of working does not escape this rule. If we were all used to a fixed job a few months ago, Covid-19 quickly taught us how to move that job home. More recently, with the return to the very conditioned office, we (re)interpreted a new concept — that of hybrid work.

In fact, it no longer matters where we are actually working. We can now be at the office, tomorrow at home, then somewhere else. With the increasing irrelevance of physical boundaries, virtual ones become more important. Today, nobody does without the technological tools that allow us to find colleagues, communicate with the team, develop work, collaborate around projects or participate in the most diverse internal initiatives.

These solutions are often made available without a clear purpose, are often dispersed across the organization, and in some cases inaccessible to most potential users. The poor use results not only from the unpreparedness of the final beneficiaries themselves, but above all from the inadequacy to the specific context of each organization, where internal structure, dynamics and culture are not taken into account.

If in some organizations the greatest difficulties may be related to difficult internal communication or productivity ratios, in other cases the priorities may be the development of a collaborative spirit within and between teams, the promotion of creativity or innovation, among many others.

Topics such as accountability and decentralization, such as proximity and participation, and the recognition and appreciation of people can (and should) be addressed in this very important window of opportunity to improve the organizational environment, that is, incorporated in this rapid adaptation to the ‘new normal’.

It is therefore very important to face the transition in a holistic way, defining from the outset the main daily challenges faced by different types of employees, whether or not they already have a digital job.

In fact, front-line workers, who normally do not have an exclusive computer (such as in person attendance, cleaning and maintenance services, factory production, transports and logistics, etc.) should also be considered in this effort to train the entire organization, whether they are internal employees, external consultants, freelancers or other partners.

It is therefore crucial that the digital transition strategy of the way of working is inclusive, reaching all employees, regardless of their function, profile or location. The modern work solution to be adopted should therefore not only be simple to use, but also allow mobile access through the devices of the employees themselves, without compromising the necessary high security standards (considering that we are in an integrated environment of the information systems of the entire organization).

The effort required for this training is fundamentally for managing change, since the cost of technology has been falling significantly. The business model itself has evolved with the needs of the market and, today, a ready-to-use platform for modern and digital work can be hired as a service, the price of which is indexed to the actual use (eg number of employees), with no initial investments or any other hidden prices (infrastructure, corrective, preventive or evolutionary maintenance).

In any case, the biggest cost will always be to remain anchored to old-fashioned processes and not take advantage of this golden opportunity to digitize the workspace. After placing the topic on the organization’s internal agenda and defining the governance of the project, the team of ‘ambassadors’ should be as transversal as possible, incorporating elements of internal communication, human resources and IT.

The old intranet will quickly give way to a truly productive, collaborative and creative virtual-social space, representative of the organization’s culture. The benefits will soon be visible.

Originally published at Jornal Económico on November 30, 2020.

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As the past few weeks have shown, digital transformation is all the more accelerated the greater the external pressure for change. The simple need to survive in a new world has created an amazing wave of adoption of ‘new’ ways of working. Years of promoting operational efficiency, optimizing processes, reducing costs, or increasing quality, have failed to instill the remote and collaborative work practices that we have seen in recent months.

We have long had the tools necessary for distance work, but its advocates were a timid minority. This crisis proved that the modern job post is based on knowledge and no longer has a defined physical territory. It is anywhere. In the company or at home, in an office, on a balcony or in a garden, in a large city or in any remote region. Our new workplace it is digital and connected, open to the global and sharing space.

For this reason, knowledge is today the most volatile asset, the most sought after and the one with the most liquidity, but also the most globalized and the most difficult to retain. In this era of knowledge, business platforms that promote internal and external communication and collaboration, which are able to (dis) involve employees, aligning multidisciplinary teams and work groups around collective projects, are particularly relevant. individual interests and company priorities.

The great challenge now facing organizations is the retention, management and use of knowledge generated, frequently and irremediably lost when people move (interdepartmental changes and exits). These disruptions are striking, with very significant impacts on productivity.

The increasing volatility of talent – which will be accentuated by the widespread use of distance work – may aggravate this problem if solutions are not adopted quickly that allow to leverage the growth and valuation of the person, as an individual and professional, namely stimulating their autonomy, development , involvement and accountability.

With the greater physical distance from people, there is also the need for (re) alignment with the company’s own values ​​as well as the strengthening of the spirit of collaboration and openness at different levels (team, department, company, group).

Therefore, it is important to stimulate the permanent agility and innovation of people, namely in the generation of new ideas in a collaborative and transparent way, particularly useful in the current context of adaptation and transformation, in which fast and innovative solutions are sought for the pressing problems of everyday life. , following clear processes and the highest ethical standards.

Motivating leadership and management systems governance Adequate information will ensure the decentralization of information management with respect to its timeliness, reliability, veracity, authenticity and security.

Today, technology allows the capture and availability of content (anywhere, anytime) in multiple formats (text, audio, image, video, etc.), adapted to the specific context (eg. onboarding, new project, etc.) and the profile of each employee. Functions such as categorization, segmentation and cataloging will naturally appear in a living ecosystem where institutional communication can coexist with spontaneous and informal channels. This will speed up the necessary initial traction, enabling internal evangelization, and keeping the organization’s culture repository updated and expanding.

As Darwin explained, the companies that will be here tomorrow will not be the strongest today or those that have the most intelligent people. They will be the most agile, those capable of capturing and interpreting information, generating knowledge and evolving with their own context, reinventing themselves. And this innovation will be all the more precious as it brings together and impacts the community. What is certain is that employees and other stakeholders they will be excited to overcome the new challenges they are constantly faced with.

Originally published at Jornal Económico on July 28, 2020.

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We live in a time when information technologies are widely consolidated in the day-to-day life of companies. We all spend a large part of the workday in the virtual space, interacting with the machine (s), whether in business support solutions, in communication systems (intranets, extranets, internet, emails or chats) or productivity tools.

With the increasing digitization and automation of routines, the simplistic optimization of business processes advocated in the previous industrial revolution (lower cost, less time, greater quantity) has long ceased to be decisive, especially in mature markets. Today, it is not enough to have consistent data and updated information to make timely decisions. We need to transform them into knowledge capable of generating value.

Intangibles such as creativity, diversity and independence of employees enhance the production of this added value, especially in uncertain and highly competitive contexts. It is therefore essential to bring business experts to the strategic definition, inviting the “operational” ones to incorporate assertive and positive contributions. In other words, those who can contribute more and better to the improvement are, at the same time, the main beneficiaries of the same improvement.

From these human interactions oriented towards specific purposes (and clear for all involved), where each one shares their respective knowledge (theoretical and experimental), emerge a collective knowledge higher than the sum of the individual numbers (however brilliant they may be).

The daily use of techniques for sharing the knowledge and individual experiences of a group that interacts with each other requires plans for adoption with the teams. Prepared moderators facilitate change management, systematizing and accelerating these same collaborative processes, which converge in the generation of collective intelligence.

Today, agile management methodologies such as scrum they are better suited to complex, highly unpredictable operations, using emerging technologies, and where fast deliveries are expected.

This technique, which promotes communication between the team, shows that the solutions built ongoing and collectively among all members of the team, they achieve better results than traditional management (which typically uses rigid, exhaustive, time-consuming and hierarchical planning).

Other methodologies, such as design thinking, aim at innovation by solving problems and identifying opportunities for improvement. This, too, is a systemic, collective and collaborative process, which begins with observing everyday life, passes through the generation of improvement ideas, and ends with tests through proofs of concept. It is normally applied in situations where specific, personalized and high quality solutions are desired.

At a time when much is said about artificial intelligence, I believe that innovation and differentiation are achieved fundamentally through human intelligence, elevated to the power of the community. Because more than programming algorithms to interpret variables, automate processes, and return results, the differentiating value comes from focused collaboration, in specific time and context. Each case is different, and has its own moment.

The use of collective business intelligence (resulting from cooperation within and between teams) is feasible with decentralized leaders, based on networks and, therefore, distant from traditional hierarchical structures.

Visionary, inspirational leaders with a high capacity for mobilization and aggregation, will leave these change management processes to their own multidisciplinary and competent teams, able to understand the challenges and opportunities. This increases the levels of commitment, motivation and accountability of the individual and the group. The results will soon appear. And they will surprise the most skeptical.

Originally published at Jornal Económico on December 24, 2019.

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In an economy where the only certainty is the uncertainty, only knowledge is a sure source of competitive advantage. So, when markets change, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, products become obsolete very quickly, successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate them profusely throughout the organization and quickly incorporate them into new technologies and products.

The Importance of Knowledge

Knowledge creation is a system through which organizations acquire, organize and process information with the aim of generating new knowledge. One of the most cited people in this subject is Ikujiro Nonaka, whose theory explains the creation of organizational knowledge in a structured and detailed way. This author defends three types of knowledge:

a) Explicit knowledge, a kind of formal and systematic knowledge, which can be registered (expressed verbally or graphically) and therefore easily communicated or shared;

b) Tacit knowledge, an informal knowledge, linked to the senses, to individual perception, to the capacity of corporal expression, to convictions and to different perspectives. For that reason, tacit knowledge is one of difficult transmission;

c) Practical knowledge, which is based on the phenomena of human action, especially through the dialectic examination of opinions.

The ability to create companies’ knowledge is not due to their manufacturing capacity, access to capital, or cooperation with customers, suppliers and the State, but rather to the capacity and expertise in “creating organizational knowledge” as a consequence of uncertainties and market crisis, which force continuous innovation and, inherently, the creation of new knowledge.

The Knowledge-Creating Company

For organizational knowledge to be created, it is necessary to convert tacit and explicit knowledge through processes that allow the “amplification” of individual knowledge in the organization, through social processes between individuals, namely:

• Socialization: conversion of tacit knowledge into tacit knowledge – sharing of practical and direct group work experiences, generating shared knowledge;

• Externalization: conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge (actions that can be understood by others) – creation of perfect knowledge through dialogue, collective reflection and use of metaphors and analogies, generating conceptual knowledge;

• Combination: conversion of explicit knowledge into explicit knowledge – systematization of concepts into a knowledge system, through combining, editing and processing within the teams in order to form new knowledge, generating systemic knowledge, but not expanding the already existing knowledge base;

• Internalization: conversion of explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge – incorporation of explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge, internalizing the new explicit knowledge shared in the organization by individuals, which occurs through “learning by doing”, verbalization and mental models, generating operational knowledge.

Although knowledge is created at the individual level, the individual must convey this information to the organization, otherwise it will be lost. In this process of creation, storage and dissemination of organizational knowledge, some characteristics must be considered:

• Figurative language and symbolism to explain the inexplicable, such as the use of metaphor and analogy to express intuitions;
• The sharing of personal knowledge in organizational knowledge, such as through group discussions, dialogues and discussions;
• Ambiguity and redundancy, leading to the emergence of new knowledge by encouraging frequent dialogue and communication, creating a “common cognitive basis” among employees.

Some Easy Daily Practices to Create Knowledge

The organizations that introduce knowledge management in their daily lives show distinctive characteristics that favor innovation and continuous improvement. For example, CREATE IT provides an organizational culture of incentive for the practices of creation and dissemination of knowledge to be effectively operationalized. Here are some examples:

• Project-area: Virtual space dedicated to each project where documentation (e.g. text documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, diagrams) is placed for sharing and collaboration between the team. This repository follows a standard logic and structure for the various projects for easier navigation. Being accessible by any collaborator (not just the team of the project), the documents can be consulted and worked simultaneously and remotely, in a true collaborative spirit.

• Tech-shots: Ad-hoc internal training sessions where technical topics are presented. They are organized and presented by the collaborator who intends to disseminate internally new tools, technologies, processes, projects, or innovations recently applied in specific contexts. They typically occur in sessions from 30 minutes up to 2 hours, and the success only depends on the motivation of the trainer and attendees.

• Wallace: Bank of hours for consumption at the discretion of each employee, and is normally used for training and R&D. All employees must present a summary of the created knowledge to all the team twice a year . This presentation is followed by a short debate opened to the audience and a proposal of the investment areas for the next semester. As other initiatives, all these presentations are also available on the intranet (including the video recording of the presentation, debate and proposal).

• Role-play: An internal program of role-play sessions where certain skills – hard and soft skills – are trained simulating real scenarios. The promoter typically uses practical cases that have occurred recently in his real-life job context (e.g. the client postpones an important meeting at the last minute, the team is not aligned with the client agenda). These initiatives can be developed individually or in workgroup, being highly effective as a practice of diffusion of knowledge. Team role-plays can take on a gamification dynamic, which further elevates levels of motivation and retention of knowledge.

• Interest-groups: Creation of informal and specific groups by areas of interest. They are totally agnostic to the organizational structure of the company, and regardless of the profiles of the collaborators or their technical background. In these groups prevails the sharing of thematic knowledge. Their members usually distribute some news, experiment new tools and technology, diffuse new processes and disseminate innovations and their results. The repository allows you to search over past posts and experiences.

• Skills directory: Repository of projects, competencies and certifications per employee, so any person can easily find colleagues having the knowledge intended for certain contexts. It is a tool that facilitates the identification of key people by areas of knowledge, encouraging sharing within the team. In other words, it is a “Knowledge Marketplace”, which brings demand closer to the offer available.

In addition to these practices aimed at generating internal knowledge, CREATE IT employees are also encouraged to share their know-how externally, namely by promoting webinars, posting articles on the company’s blog, and engaging in community events (as speakers, organizers, supporters or participants). CREATE IT also promotes internally a set of other people-centered knowledge creation programs, such as onboarding, mentoring, and coaching. We can explore it a bit in future posts.

Smart Tools to Retain and Spread Knowledge

CREATE IT knows that the preservation of data and information is very important for the retention and conversion of knowledge. This applies both to management and technical areas. Therefore, the company applies much of its energy to the use and optimization of the tools capable of raising this crucial asset to new levels of creativity and innovation. Here are some examples:

• DiggSpace is an internal communication portal based on SmartPortals, taking advantage of Office 365 features. DiggSpace provides a means for organizations to easily share information, make teamwork easier, collaboratively develop projects and facilitate bottom-up communication. With DiggSpace the company promotes productivity and knowledge sharing and encourages efficiency, thus strengthening the sense of belonging, collaboration, involvement, commitment and sharing among all employees.

• SmartPortals is a platform for portal development thanks to its extensibility, making it ideal to support solutions that integrate with our clients’ systems. Based on Umbraco CMS, an open source content management technology, SmartPortals allows content managers to work in an agile way. It also supports several types of information, due to its scalability characteristics.

• SharePoint is a Microsoft web-based collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but it is highly configurable and usage varies substantially among organizations (eg. web portals, intranets, content management). Microsoft states that SharePoint has 190 million users across 200.000 customer organizations.

• Office 365 is a line of subscription services offered by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft Office product line. The brand encompasses plans that allow use of the Microsoft Office software suite over the life of the subscription, as well as cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) products for business environments. All Office 365 plans include automatic updates to their respective software at no additional charge, as opposed to conventional licenses for these programs where new versions require purchase of a new license.

• Teams is a platform that combines workplace chat, audio and video base conference call meetings, notes, attachments and all that relates to digital team work. The service integrates with the company’s Office 365 subscription office productivity suite, including Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, and features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products. Microsoft launched the service worldwide on 14 March 2017.

Conclusion

At present, there is an increasing relevance of knowledge in organizations, from the daily operation to the long-term strategy. It is the most important intangible resource of modern and agile companies, being commonly presented as the major factor of competitive differentiation, and basis for innovation. It transcends, therefore, the importance of capital itself, of natural resources, or of labor.

Knowledge management raises the potential of an organization, providing important competitive advantages, minimizing risk, and maximizing success rates in a globalized market. Organizational knowledge is built under properly organized and oriented management and innovation processes, which allow and encourage the circulation of knowledge, and motivate employees to share experiences, inside and outside the boundaries of their organizational structures, based on mutual trust and respect.

The biggest challenges with this attempt are the barriers created by the organizations themselves, making it difficult to disseminate knowledge and information, namely: the organizational culture itself, lack of a favorable environment for sharing, non-committed and non-aligned managers, and teams not properly involved in business processes.

So, organizations should focus on actively promoting the sharing of knowledge, being it tacit or explicit, creating environments and offering tools favorable to the free circulation of different knowledge sets. This results in higher agility and better processes and outcomes, through the incorporation in the daily work of each employee and the innovative learning obtained through sharing.

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