Knowledge workers – lawyers, doctors, consultants, designers and anyone who “thinks for a living” – comprise just over 25 per cent of the country's workers, but provide a disproportionate value to the economy. If Canada is to compete successfully in the global economy, managers need to create and foster a work environment that encourages knowledge workers to innovate, powering the Canadian economy for the future.
While industrial age management styles may have said that conversations by the water cooler are time-wasters, a knowledge work perspective sees this as valuable time being used to share experiences and may even be the most productive part of an employee's day. In addition to valuing informal communication, “conversations by the cooler,” Intel also takes a deliberate approach to knowledge worker productivity by studying social networking and improving work processes based on the results.
In 2003, Tom Davenport was a key contributor to Intel's Information Work Productivity Council study. The study identified what companies are doing to improve knowledge work productivity and concluded, among other things, that a company's best performers were proficient at building effective knowledge networks on the job.
The study identified three groups – those that were unaware of the issues, those on the road, and those, like Intel, that got it. The most important thing people can learn from “those that get it” is that increasing information efficiencies will require an intentional focus on remedies that address uses or behaviours common to segments of their knowledge work force. In so doing, the positive impact on knowledge worker outputs and increased innovation can be astounding.
And while individual expertise is necessary to becoming a top performer, it is not sufficient; the individual knowledge worker is a fundamental producer of value in the information economy, but they often work in teams and are members of informal communities critical to how they learn and uncover new opportunities.
The best performers know where the pockets of expertise exist within the enterprise and seek out a short list of well-connected people that will give them access to knowledge in other business units and often upwards into the corporate hierarchy. These social networks, he says, are not about using people to get ahead, but rather a conscious part of learning and finding opportunities and are always reciprocal.
Not only do successful knowledge workers work well with each other, they are adept at using technology to keep the right information at hand to manage their “full plates.” Companies are beginning to think of social networks and employee communities as tools to drive knowledge distribution and reuse. Social networking technologies that encourage conversations across business units and between employees and consumers are taking root in leading corporations like Intel, where blogging creates fresher, active, executive communications. Wikis are also used to capture expert knowledge and force people to rethink the old concept of documents with a beginning and an end.
Having Intel company president Paul Otellini blog was key to legitimizing the technology to other executives and senior managers. “Blogging at Intel” offers employees a chance to express their opinions and to learn from the responses of others in the company. Blogging is just one step into what some at Intel call the “engagement funnel.”
Further research by the Intel IT department uncovered that, apart from participating in tens of thousands of conference calls and electronic meetings per week, Intel employees were frequently members of three to 10 teams seldom co-located with their teammates. Intel identified different employee work profiles and sought out activities that could be made more efficient through IT solutions like electronic meetings.
But before rolling new IT solutions out globally, Intel establishes control and test groups to confirm the efficiencies and the Canadian office is often a test group for new IT solutions, such as Groove networks, bridgeless conferences, and other collaborative tools due to its comfort with the tools and willingness to provide feedback.
There are many tools available to knowledge workers today, but very few knowledge workers are immediately experts at using them to manage personal and work information environments. We agree that workers need help integrating these tools and fitting them into their work processes. Without assistance from their employers, the growing number of workers who feel overwhelmed by the amounts of information they receive will only increase.
Organizations that have invested in knowledge work improvement have seen impressive gains. Even some countries, such as Singapore, Taiwan and Ireland, are focusing on preparing workers for the knowledge economy. But Canada won't become a leading player in the global knowledge economy unless both public and private sector organizations make the improvement of knowledge worker productivity a priority.
Doug Cooper is country manager, Intel of Canada. Tom Davenport is president's distinguished professor in management and information technology at Babson College.
