Introduction
According to Schneider (2009, p. 73), knowledge is one of the most important factors in any organisation in the current society. With the increasing level of competition, firms are under pressure to have a knowledge management system that can enable all the stakeholders to share relevant information within the shortest period possible.
There has been an effort by many organisations to shorten the process of data collection, its analysis, and the storage of the information that comes out of the analysis. For this to be achieved there is need to have an effective data management system. Such systems would ensure speedy collection and analysis of data, and their stored within the organisation.
This efficiency in the management of knowledge would define success of firm and its ability to manage environmental forces. Understanding the core concepts of knowledge management is important in the current business environment. This research focuses on the core concepts of knowledge management by conducting a case study on human resource training at a McMulla Retailer Store in New York.
Case Study
McMulla Retailer Store has been very successful in the retail industry because of the ability of its management and its employees to change with changes that take place in the environment. However, the firm recently realised that most of its employees at the local stores are unable to meet the expectations of the clients who visit the facility.
In the past, most of these attendants ensured that the shelves were properly arranged in order to make them attractive. However, this trend has changed. The customers currently want engaging attendants who can tell them about new brands or improved products that can meet their needs in the best way.
This means that the attendants must be quick to identify customers who need their engagement even without verbally requesting for it. This has been blamed for the reduced rates of sales at this firm within the first quarter of 2014.
The training and development director at this firm was informed of this problem, and they realised that the problem was majorly because of the limited knowledge of the attendants. This case study focuses on the training programme that was organised by the management to address this problem.
The human resource management was able to realise that the information management system that was in use within the organisation was not effective enough. Employees working within the stores could not access relevant information that this firm had been gathering about the changing customers’ practices.
In the training programme, the first activity was to integrate a communication system within the organisation and train all the employees, especially the attendants, how to access and use the information within the organisation.
One area that this firm highly encouraged its employees to focus on was in the field of social media. Facebook and Tweeter are the best media that an organisation can mine data about the changing tastes and preferences of the customers. In fact, Wallace (2007, p. 117) says that firms can directly engage with its clients and ask them how they would want to be served.
Another area of training that was taken with the employees is on how to protect the intellectual knowledge of the organisation. Any strategic knowledge that has been created by the employees of the firm has to remain a property of the organisation, and every member of the firm should ensure that it is not stolen by rival firms.
It is important for the employees to use their own unique capacities to develop and effectively use their tacit knowledge in order to improve their performance. They can come up with unique ways of handling their tasks effectively in a way that other employees may not. For this to be possible, the management had to relax the policies that require a standardised behaviour when addressing various tasks.
The management must allow a room for creativity among the employees. It is only through this that the employees can use their special knowledge in various fields.
As King (2009, p. 84) says, explicit knowledge can be shared effectively among members of the organisation as a way of promoting their performance or informing them of new trends that are taking place in the market. Developing a free flow of such knowledge through data management system would be the appropriate way of achieving this.
The third area of training that the employees underwent was effective communication of employees of the organisation at different levels. It was realised that in most of the cases, employees of junior ranks found it difficult to communicate with the senior officers at this firm. The policy of reporting to the immediate supervisor was making the process of efficient communication even more complex.
When a message comes from one supervisor to another, Easterby and Lyles (2011, p. 54) says that it always get distorted because of a number of reasons. The supervisor may not like the information in its original context. For this reason, they would distort the information to suite their desires. It means that by the time the information would be reaching the intended audience, the original meaning would be lost.
In most of the cases, the information would never reach the intended audience. Communication is an important tool, and as Marsch (2010, p. 79) notes, it should always be treated as such. In order to address this problem that was raised by the employees, the human resource management unit developed a social networking system that incorporated all the employees.
All the employees were trained on how to access the system either through their phones or personal computers using a unique password. This enabled them to share any information with various departments without having to follow the bureaucratic system that had previously been in use.
However, this does not mean that the supervisors and mid-level managers became ineffective in receiving and transmitting information from superiors to the junior employees or vice versa. The new system was only meant to create a social forum where people would communicate easily within an organisation for the benefit of everyone.
During the training, the trainers were keen to determine the intelligence of the trainees in order to define the best training strategies. According to Al-Shammari (2012, p. 89), some learners have high capacity of grasping information irrespective of the manner in which it is delivered. On the other hand, some of the employees had limited levels of intelligence.
For this reason, they need to have a practical demonstration of what is taught in order to grasp the knowledge. Having this information in mind, the trainers organised two sessions of training. The first session involved training the employees in a classroom setting.
Using experts working for the organisation and other consultants hired for this purpose, the employees were trained on effective knowledge management within the organisation. They were also trained on the relevance of protecting the organisation’s knowledge management system as the employees of the organisation.
They have a responsibility to the organisation and all its stakeholders to protect the system from any access by individuals with malicious intentions. After the class work, there was a final session that was conducted on the training sites. All the trainees were subjected to on-site training process in order to enable them put into practice the theoretical knowledge they learnt in a classroom setting.
In knowledge management process that was carried out during the training process, it would be important to use Karl Popper’s Three Worlds Theory. The figure below shows Popper’s physical world, subjective reality, and objective knowledge.
During the training process, the reality of this theory came out very clearly in the three worlds. In the first word, there was the physical store that the trainees needed to know how they could improve its layout to appear more attractive to customer than it had been before.
In the second world, there was the training that was to be done by the outsourced experts on the supermarket attendants. In the third world, the trainees would have acquired the right knowledge and would be expected to apply it by improving the conditions o the stores.
The training process was determined to have a positive impact on the employees’ output. One of the factors that helped in improving the output of the employees was that employees were able to determine the importance of knowledge management within the organisation. They realised that information is an important component of an organisation that cannot be treated casually.
After the training, it was evident that employees made concerted efforts to share the information as a way of enhancing their knowledge in handling tasks (Dalkir 2011, p. 76). The attendants easily accessed the information collected from the field about the changing tastes and preferences of the customers.
Currently, the employees of McMulla Retailer Store at New York are more engaging with their customers than before. They are willing to spend more time with clients to explain various issues of brand and new arrivals. This will definitely improve the performance of this firm in the future.
Glossary of Key Terminologies in Knowledge Management Concepts
List of References
Al-Shammari, M 2012, Customer-centric knowledge management: Concepts and applications, Information Science Reference, Hershey.
Dalkir, K 2011, Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice, Elsevier, Burlington.
Easterby, M & Lyles, M 2011, Handbook of organisational learning and knowledge management, Wiley, Chichester.
King, W 2009, Knowledge management and organisational learning, Springer, London.
Marsch, M 2010, Micro-Bargaining as Enhancer of Knowledge Management: A Comparison between Mexico and Germany, Rainer Hampp Verlag, Mering.
Schneider, K 2009, Experience and knowledge management in software engineering, Springer, Berlin.
Wallace, D 2007, Knowledge management: Historical and cross-disciplinary themes, Libraries Unlimited, Westport.
Wilde, S 2011, Customer knowledge management: Improving customer relationship through knowledge application, Springer, Heidelberg.