“Build it—and they won’t necessarily come” is one of my favorite sayings about knowledge management tools. Fancy technology makes zero difference if no one uses it. For KM to make an impact, it must make sense to end users, solve problems they care about, and draw them in.
Elevations Credit Union and Shopify have both positioned end user needs at the heart of their KM efforts. I talked to Caroline Thompson, KM consultant at Shopify, and Sawyer Hamilton, knowledge base administrator at Elevations Credit Union, about how they ensure KM provides the solutions and support employees need most. Below is some of their advice about improving the KM user experience. If you want to learn more, you can see them both next week, speaking at APQC’s 2022 Process and Knowledge Management Conference May 11–12 in Houston.
Involve Users in KM Scoping and Problem Solving
The first step in developing a user-oriented KM practice is clearly communicating that KM wants to work with users, rather than dictating or promoting solutions to them without their input.
The KM team at Elevations Credit Union routinely poses questions to managers, front-line workers, and support staff to determine KM focus areas. “We ask, what’s your ideal experience in our knowledge library? How do you access your knowledge and get the tools to do your job every day?” Hamilton said. Most recently, the answers led KM to focus on restructuring knowledge resources to make them more accessible. “People didn’t like to go in and use knowledge because they couldn’t find it or get to it easily. Now our goal is to make everything more organized, so people know exactly where to go.”
Shopify’s KM team combines stakeholder feedback with an iterative development approach that allows the organization to break daunting KM challenges into manageable pieces. “It helps to really examine the problem before getting into complex solutioning,” Thompson said. She recommended approaching KM work as an experiment, where you come up with a hypothesis you want to test and a minimum viable solution to test the hypothesis. “Working with folks in that way removes some of the intimidation and overwhelming feeling,” she said. “The problem doesn’t feel quite as huge.”
Make KM Simple and Accessible
Both Shopify and Elevations have ambitious KM strategies, but they make sure KM is accessible to individual users and supports their tactical knowledge needs.
A great example is the “Get Organized” initiative that Shopify’s KM team launched to take advantage of the back-to-work and back-to-school feeling at the beginning of the year. “In January, we get more questions from the business to help them organize their files, go through things, and just have a tidy up,” Thompson said. The goal was to help people with their personal KM, without them having to know what KM even is to participate. Users could sign up for an in-person support session on a specific task, such as how to organize their Google drive, or they could watch a one-minute video that featured a productivity hack. The hacks were simple enough that people could perform them while watching the videos. “By the time you’d watched it and followed along, you’d actually made a change to something in your digital organization, and it would make life easier for you,” Caroline said.
In a similar vein, Elevations Credit Union realized it needed to simplify the KM user experience to build buy-in. The organization had implemented a new platform based on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, but people weren’t warming to it. “It was really helpful as a collaboration tool, but as a delivery tool, people hated it because it was arduous and new and there was no training on it.” KM reverted to more basic delivery mechanisms—such as Word documents instead of pages for procedures—because people were more comfortable with them. “We changed our approach to use technology as a tool to create more people interaction,” Sawyer said.
Listen, Coach, and Support
Whatever the KM team delivers, it must be accompanied by a robust two-way training and communications approach that makes users aware of what’s available while gathering and applying their feedback.
The Elevations KM team has begun emphasizing training, aided by the team’s move to sit within the learning and development department. Hamilton said the focus on educating users has created excitement across the workforce. “We get to show everyone in the company: this is the value of knowledge, this is the process of turning information into usable knowledge, and this is how we can deliver that to everybody.”
Part of communication involved getting to the bottom of user issues, especially around search. Hamilton likened people’s experience with the old search to “jumping into the ocean with a raft with no paddle.” Talking to staff helped KM realize how those frustrations led to negative experiences for both staff and customers, but the conversations also built internal support for KM. When users felt heard and realized that KM genuinely wanted to improve their work experience, they suddenly were more on board.
Thompson highlighted the need for personalized coaching to drive KM adoption. She explained that, when users encounter problems with a KM tool, they often request a change to the technology. When working with such users, she tables her preconceived notions about why they can’t get the KM toolset to work for them. “You have to actually listen, hear their frustration, and try and see it from their point of view,” she said. Once users open up and you fully understand their perspective, you can collaborate on more targeted solutions. “When you get into the problem with them and you’re watching what they’re doing, you see things you might not have seen had you not listened to them.”
Measure User Sentiment
When asked how KM can show users it is providing value, Thompson made one final suggestion around measuring user sentiment. She said that, when KM is working with a business group on a migration or improvement project, it helps to gather a baseline metric for user sentiment. KM then can repeat the same measurement two or three months down the road to see if end users feel differently about KM, the tools available to them, or how knowledge is organized.
“I don’t think we focus enough on measuring how people feel,” she said. “I like getting into the emotions of things, and I think that speaks to people quite a lot.” If users perceive an improvement, that is usually a good sign that people are using and getting meaningful value from KM.
Listen to a podcast of my conversation with Sawyer Hamilton and Caroline Thompson here: Aligning KM with Business Needs and Daily Work.
You can also learn more about KM at Elevations Credit Union in Transforming Content Management at Elevations Credit Union and at Shopify in Integrating KM into the Flow of Customer Support at Shopify and Culture Strategies for Knowledge Management with Dana Tessier.