Companies grow and change over time. Employees come and go, businesses are restructured, projects are launched and completed. In the course of all these changes knowledge is gained – and lost. If knowledge isn’t tracked and available to employees then over time people lose their understanding of the businesss history or how they fit into the big picture.
The individual's capacity to acquire, retain, and recall knowledge is associated with their long-term memory. In business, corporate memory refers to the collective ability to store and retrieve knowledge and information.
Corporate (or business) memory spans all the repositories in which a company may store knowledge. This includes the more formal records, as well as tacit knowledge embedded in people, culture and processes.
Walsh and Ungson (1991) identify 3 stages in the process of building corporate memory:
1. Acquisition:
Corporate memory consists of accumulated information based on past decisions. This data isn't kept in one central location, but is divided across different retention facilities. Information is periodically added to business memory after each decision is made and the ramifications are considered.
2. Retention:
Past experiences are retained in 5 repositories:
3. Retrieval:
The memory of businesses can be retrieved manually or automatically. The latter refers to a straightforward, almost effortless approach to retrieving organizational memory, which is typically part of a pre-established sequence of actions. Controlled or manual retrieval refers to the deliberate attempt to access stored knowledge.
A large business without a well-defined continuity plan will lose market share and revenue as customers start buying from a competitor. But make no mistake, corporations are not the only entities at risk; in the public sector, the consequences of “corporate” knowledge loss can be dire.
The three key causes of corporate memory loss are:
1. Staff turnover
One of the biggest problems of corporate memory loss is employee turnover due to leavers, retirement, illness or death. Companies lose time and money filling open positions. It's estimated that each person hired costs $4,000 in recruiting expenses alone!
2. Knowledge silos
With hybrid working, the days of discussing business over coffee or lunch meetings in the employee lounge seem as outdated as the fax machines, but it also means some crucial knowledge is lost.
Not only does work take place outside of the workplace, but it's also increasingly common for specialists from outside the firm to handle certain business functions. Modern businesses frequently connect with a variety of people, including partners, vendors, freelancers and customers.
3. Data/information overload
What's worse: the constant noise in your head or all those notifications that keep popping up?
Information overload is a real phenomenon that prevents us from taking decisions or actions because we feel we have too much information to consume.
If you see knowledge as central to driving employee engagement and organizational productivity, and an opportunity to create a competitive advantage, you’ll want to read this e-book.
Corporate memory is a valuable asset for the business as it incorporates hard-earned insights, high-level experience and technical skills.
Corporate memory can only be applied if it can be accessed. To make use of it, businesses must have archives with effective retrieval systems and good memory recall among current employees.
Corporate memory can include:
Of these, institution-created knowledge is the most important. It’s the combination of data, processes, experience, expertise, values and information and it can span decades.
Explicit or tangible knowledge takes the form of documents, records and reports that can be stored and physically shared between people. Implicit or intangible knowledge includes personal stories, intuition-based learnings and skills that are more difficult to pass on to someone else but can be transferred via training or mentoring.
Here are a number of solutions that can help with corporate memory loss.
1. A fit-for-purpose intranet/digital workplace
Conventional company intranets have evolved from a static homepage to digital workplace platforms able to unlock hidden corporate value. One of the key ways to avoid information overload it to keep things simple, clear and relevant. Does your intranet or digital workplace platform support this?
Ideally your intranet should also serve as a digital workplace platform for company-wide communication and development, as well as a resource for comprehending and utilizing corporate memory to decrease repetition and promote invention.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could find the precisely the right expert and suggest them when the conversation with the customer begins? Imagine the time and effort saved in not having to come up with a solution from scratch.
2. Create a platform to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge
As mentioned above, there are two different kinds of knowledge: tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the larger entity as it comprises all of your employees' silent know-how. These concepts and procedures must be converted to explicit understanding as soon as possible - it needs to be standard practice!
The key is to create a culture that encourages people to share their ideas, and makes it easier for them to contribute their knowledge. The faster people can find information, the easier that information is to act on.
A couple of practical ideas are to encourage people to write internal self-help blogs, to create and contribute to internal wikis and to reorganize new employee training around a knowledge base, as basic job functions are often best taught on the job.
3: Use collaboration technology to increase meta-knowledge
Knowledge is most productively shared across departments when you bring individuals with defined specialties and credentials together. People are more likely to listen to each other when they have goods to trade and both are acknowledged specialists. Take the time to link department heads together to collaborate on tasks and encourage interdepartmental collaboration.
Collaboration technology facilitates this further. In a study by Professor Paul Leonardi from the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers found that collaboration technologies increase ‘meta-knowledge.’
Gleaning ambient awareness from passively observing communications between other co-workers and teams in a digital environment allows people to seamlessly learn where to get information or access files related to their work. After just six months of using a collaboration hub, workers’ understanding of ‘who knows what’ improved by 31%, and subjects increased their knowledge of ‘who knows whom’ by 88%.
4. Change the way teams are formed
Teams that come together dynamically, based on the mission, or project, at hand rather than a set hierarchy or org chart are powerful and driven. When working alongside people from different departments, people come to appreciate the value of having input from different specialties. And as collaboration leads to success, it fosters greater collaboration and success.
Loss of knowledge, however it occurs or is described, results in the business losing competitive advantage and power. Knowledge needs to be managed and retained effectively so that companies can grow and expand without losing their capability.
For those eager to explore further, a plethora of knowledge management blogs and ebooks are available, providing deeper insights and strategies tailored to various industries. Embracing KM is not just about keeping pace with the digital world; it's about leading the charge in innovation and efficiency.
My job is to shape the vision, strategy, culture and performance of ClearPeople. Other than being passionate about making workplaces more inclusive, I enjoy planning our next travel adventure or trying out a new recipe.
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