MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORKERS

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORKERS

• CHAPTER 15

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What Is a Knowledge Worker?

• Embodies experience, innovation, creativity, and
  transformation of experience into knowledge for
  leveraging products or services
• Transforms business and personal experience into
  knowledge through capturing, assessing, applying,
  sharing, and disseminating it within the
  organization to solve specific problems or to
  create value

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Personality and Professional Attributes

• Holds unique values
• Aligns personal and professional growth with
  corporate vision
• Adopts an attitude of collaboration and sharing
• Has innovative capacity and a creative mind
• Has a clear understanding of the business he is a
  part
• Willing to learn, unlearn, and adopt new ways
  that result in better ways of doing a job
• In command of self-control and self-learning
• Willing to grow with the company

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Makeup of the Knowledge Worker
Transformation process
IT Tools
Values
KNOWLEDGE WORKER
Organizational Culture
Personal and corporate experience
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Core Competencies

• Thinking skillshaving a vision how the product
  or the company can be better
• Continuous learningunlearning and relearning in
  tune with fast-changing conditions
• Innovative teams and teamworkvia collaboration,
  cooperation, and coordination
• Innovation and creativitydreaming new ways to
  advance the firm

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Core Competencies (contd)

• Risk taking and potential successmaking joint
  decisions with calculated risk
• Decision action takingbe willing to embrace
  professional discipline, patience, and
  determination
• Culture of responsibility toward
  knowledgeloyalty and commitment to ones manager
  or leader

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Business Roles in the Learning Organization

• Learning organizationan organization of people
  with ingrained commitment to improve their
  capacity, to create, and to produce what they
  want to produce
• Data and information are givens
• Since the 1960s, focus shifted from quantitative
  to qualitative performance-oriented value-added
  decision making (See Fig. 15.2)

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From Data Processing to Self-LearningA Trend
Algorithmic
DATA
Programmable
From Data Processing to Self-Learning
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Work Management Tasks

• Managing knowledge workers
• Searching out, creating, sharing, and using
  knowledge regularly
• Maintaining work motivation among knowledge
  workers
• Ensuring readiness to work, especially during an
  emergency

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Work Management Tasks (contd)

• Allocating effort and switching control among
  tasks
• Sharing information and integrating work among
  knowledge workers
• Hiring or recruiting bright, knowledge-seeking
  individuals
• Managing collaboration, coordination, and
  concurrent activities among knowledge workers

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Factors That Limit Knowledge Workers Productivity

• Time constraint
• Working smarter and harder and accomplishing
  little
• Knowledge workers doing work that the firm did
  not hire them to do
• Work schedule
• Motivation against knowledge work productivity

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Work Adjustment Model

• Ensuring the right match between the vocational
  needs of knowledge workers and the requirements
  of their jobs
• Achieving and maintaining match with the work
  environment are basic motives of human work
  behavior
• When the individual achieves correspondence, he
  or she can continue with future opportunities
  with the firm

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Work Adjustment Model
Correspondence (match)
Satisfactoriness (satisfactory employee)
Abilities
Job requirements
Promote
Transfer
Individual
Job
Fire
Retain
Vocational needs
Reinforcers
Job Satisfaction (satisfied employee)
TENURE
option
Correspondence (match)
Remain
Quit
NEW JOB
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Smart Leadership Requirements

• Assessing core competency of the firm
• Response to the firms internal shortcomings
• Vivid knowledge of the external market and the
  tricky nature of the competition in the
  marketplace
• Online response to the companys external
  environment
• Measuring the return on time

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Technology and the Knowledge Worker

• IT contributes to knowledge capture, information
  distribution, and information interpretation
• Ultimate goal of technology is to serve
  organizational memory and create a working
  environment that provides these conditions
• Knowledge worker expect to have technical
  know-how to access, update, and disseminate
  information from databases and knowledge bases

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Knowledge Workers Skills

• Technical skills and abilities
• Professional experience
• Soft traits such as a sense of cultural,
  political, and personal aspects of knowledge in
  the business
• Personal attributes
• Communication skills
• Educational background and college degree

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Role of Ergonomics

• Environmental issues
• Hardware issues
• Knowledge worker-system interface that
  emphasizes
• Minimum worker effort and memory
• Best use of human patterns
• Prompt problem notification
• Maximum task support

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Role of the CKO

• Maximize returns on investment in
  knowledgepeople, processes, and technology
• Share best practices and reinforce goods of
  knowledge sharing among employees
• Promote company innovations and commercialization
  of new ideas
• Minimize brain drain or knowledge loss at all
  levels of the business

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Role of the CKO (contd)

• Agent of change
• Investigator
• Linking pin
• Listener
• Politician

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CKOs Technical Skills

• Broad knowledge of business practice and ability
  to translate technical information at employee
  level
• Making effective use of technical and
  non-technical elements in KM design
• Knowledge of information technology, information
  systems, and how information is transformed into
  knowledge

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Key CKO Attributes

• Teaching and selling
• Communicatingspeaking the language of the user,
  mediate, and working with management at all
  levels
• Understandinge.g., identifying problem areas and
  determining their impact

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Factors Change Leaders Consider

• Focus less on problems and more on successes and
  opportunities
• Adopt an attitude that views challenges as
  opportunities
• Work on creating tomorrows business instead of
  hammering on yesterdays problems

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The Soft Side Always Wins

• Encourage every team member to create new
  knowledge in the interest of the project
• Help knowledge workers do their jobs
• Allow knowledge workers to participate in major
  company decisions, which can pay off in intrinsic
  and extrinsic benefits for the company and
  employees alike
• Encourage knowledge workers and employees to
  learn as they earn a living on a regular basis

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Incentives and Motivation

• Link incentives to a team approach, where team
  performance will determine size and nature of the
  incentive
• Use awards for teams as well as individuals for
  unique contributions
• Flextime allows the team to decide on when to
  work, when to quit, and so forth
• Monetary rewards, bonuses, and special prizes can
  be a hit with the winning team
• Publicize success throughout the firm

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORKERS

• CHAPTER 15