Combating Tribal Knowledge In The Workplace

1351 Words3 Pages

Introduction

Many companies experience the challenge of tribal knowledge. This is when members of a business have internal knowledge of how to properly perform a task in order to produce a product or service (Brownell, D. R. , 2017). The knowledge is often learned by veterans of a business out of necessity and may or may not be passed down over time to new employees. Operating in this fashion can become inefficient and pose a threat to companies who may lose key individuals or are expanding rapidly.

Within our organization we experience the challenge of tribal knowledge daily within various departments. For example, there are times where a customer may place a time sensitive order for a custom product, but the process to perform this task …show more content…

R. , 2017). This document will propose a research plan to identify how problematic tribal knowledge is within the organization and the departments that are most impacted by the threat. The results of this research can then be used to intelligently deploy a corrective action plan and begin the process of addressing the issue.

Problem Statement

It is suspected that tribal knowledge within our organization is becoming an issue and decreasing efficiency in the workplace. We feel this way because as employees have begun to leave the company due to various reasons, there has been a noticeable uptick in situations where existing employees make comments such as “we don’t know how to do that, person X used to be the one that we sent those tasks to”. This results in numerous inefficiencies such as:

Employees “pointing fingers” at who should own the task.
Management needing to determine who is best to learn the task.
A learning curve for the new assignee to “figure out” how the previous employee completed the …show more content…

His study was fueled by the a passion to understand why, with all of the digital tools available to humans, was there a perceived constant recreation of material that had already been created in a previous project of the organization. What he found was what they called the “data explosion” (Bilello, P. A. , 2012) . In very simple terms, this is the result of businesses becoming mature in learning how to produce data at a rapid rate, but not organizing the data properly for reuse by others within the organization.

The research also uncovered a similar problem at the 135 year old company Bissell Homecare Inc. For over a century, the company had been operating in what it thought was an efficient manner. Their model was simple; as someone new is hired, as senior teaches them what they do to perform the job, the individual then teaches the next employee and so on. This model appeared to work until they began to expand their manufacturing rapidly overseas. Bissell then launched a simple yet effective program called Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) (Bilello, P. A. , 2012). In this model, the problem of tribal knowledge was essentially eliminated. They trained employees to use the model which essentially redirects the knowledge transfer from employee to a knowledge base that can be reused by everyone instead of direct employee to employee knowledge transfer only. The

More about Combating Tribal Knowledge In The Workplace

Open Document