Learning is a lifelong process. We start learning as an infant and continue through all our life. The main reason why human race is considered to be the most intelligent species living is that we make experiences and are able to learn from those – no matter if they are good or bad. We draw conclusions. And: we are able to communicate in an intelligent way, passing our experiences on to other humans in various ways – in written form, via pictures and sounds, through actions and through speech.
Why do we do this? Because we learned that if we didn’t we were doomed to fail.
The same holds true for us as employees. In globally organized companies like SAP there often are several tens of thousands employees worldwide owning a tremendous amount of knowledge. Many of those companies own a long-grown, great culture of sharing knowledge - so does SAP. But nonetheless there are almost always two things which need to be optimized:
- The exchange of knowledge is often the reaction to a request for support or advice. But it should be proactive.
- And – even worse – it is mostly one on one, while the knowledge eventually shared could be of interest for many other colleagues as well.
Many companies forget about this or at least do not consider this being that much important. But it is. Sharing knowledge in a proactive and open way is sometimes perceived as very complicated and time consuming. However, this is not how it must be. There are plenty of easy ways to support employees in sharing their knowledge in a proactive way.
In this blog I will run a series of small posts to demonstrate the way we drive Knowledge Management in order to nourish and leverage our single and thus most important production factor - the employees.
Regards,
Jochen Gaydoul
