Unbottled

David Lamy, the Director for Global HR Shared Services at Coca-Cola Enterprises, has a cute story that illustrates the changing nature of knowledge management.

One night, his daughter tells him she needs help with her Maths homework. ‘Of course,’ says David . ‘Bring me your book.’ His daughter looks at him askance: this is 2014, and there is no book.

David, a Frenchman based in West London, has spent a great deal of time thinking about knowledge. Over the last six or so years at Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), his HR Shared Services team has been on a tricky journey. The knowledge management aspect of that journey has been the trickiest part of all, and David admits that many of the ideas he had in the beginning have since been jettisoned.

‘As a manager, you need to swallow much of your pride running a project like this,’ he says. ‘Yes, you can guide the vision and provide direction. But never forget that, generally speaking, it’s the people that have the knowledge, not you.’

Knowledge vs. documents

Back in 2009, HR Shared Services at CCE began its transformation. It adopted, largely, an Ulrich model, and early results were good in some regards. In the first year the service centres resolved around 40,000 cases, many of which were closed quicker than ever before, and there was a successful introduction of online learning technology.

Staff metrics, however, told a more worrying tale. Turnover was high and engagement, performance and customer satisfaction levels were all low. ‘I don’t mind admitting that I was pretty unhappy at that time,’ says David .

But one thing that helped wrench staff morale and performance back on track was the knowledge management project. By reworking knowledge management, David and his team hit on a way of strengthening the team by creating better relationships between individuals, and countries, and by optimising the expertise of individuals that had been comparatively overlooked before.

But in the beginning, this was a project that focused on mechanics. And of course the main focus had to be – didn’t it? – documentation.

‘I used to think that knowledge management and document management were the same thing,’ smiles David . ‘That was my initial mistake. Because once documents are created, they’re just not up to date anymore.’

Instead of trudging through unwieldy official MS Word files, team members were creating their own records and guides they could update quickly and easily. ‘Of course, this was a real challenge to process consistency,’ David adds.

There was another big challenge, this time around localisation. Even common processes have to be applied differently in different countries, due to variations in culture and the law. Payroll in particular has to be considered on a country-by-country basis. The previous knowledge management regime was too centralised.

‘We needed to find a way of keeping consistency but tailoring knowledge where it needed it,’ says David , ‘and we did that by creating a transverse role that would help make knowledge fluid.’

Chatter matters

The role is called HR Co-ordinator – which exists to help teams deliver, up-skill and update knowledge, often across international boundaries. (Despite the name, these are senior roles. HR Co-ordinators at CCE generally have ten years experience or an HR degree.) The HR Co-ordinators are also crucial in terms of mobilising teams to find their own solutions to knowledge management challenges.

Those unwieldy documents were generally binned, and in their place the team adopted Salesforce’s Chatter platform. The platform – effectively a social medium ­– allows different membership profiles and so works on both national and international levels, allowing HR Co-ordinators and teams to jump between local knowledge and wider best practice as they see fit.

Local teams are also allowed to write on Chatter in their local languages – a change from the monolingual directives of yesterday. ‘We have very knowledgeable people with twenty years service, but they don’t speak English,’ remarks David . HR Co-ordinators will often translate important pieces of information into other languages for wider consumption.

Because Chatter is a short-form social medium, information now exists in shorter gobbets, and can easily be linked to the new ticket management system so it appears automatically whenever a query is lodged.

Other pieces of information were changed from dull text into video. ‘We turned one ten-page systems document into a video which lasts a minute and a half,’ says David . Video production was done in-house to keep costs reasonable.

Live chat ahead

The CCE knowledge management programme is still work in progress.

But early quantifiable improvements include increased engagement, a better and more malleable platform on which to share knowledge, and a more productive team structure. (In addition to HR Co-ordinators, David has also introduced a new tranche of Quality Managers.)

At the time of writing, the team is looking at developing the knowledge management platform so it can be accessed directly by employees. Part of this development will include a live chat facility.

Budgets are tight – when aren’t they – but David suspects he’s done enough to merit a conversation with his CFO about increased investment. ‘You can’t speak to your CFO about intuition,’ he says. ‘But now we’re looking at 10% turnover down from 35%, engagement at 80% and customer satisfaction at 98%, I think we’ve got enough to show what we’re doing is worthwhile.’

About the author

Andrew Baird

Andrew is the CEO of HRville. He is also Employer Brand Director of Blackbridge Communications, Editorial Director of Professionals in Law and an associate of The Smarty Train. Previously, he was the MD of TCS Advertising.