KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
2
When an employee signs an Employment Contract, what the company is purchasing is his acquired knowledge not his hands-on experience on the job. The employee is not obliged to advance or acquire more knowledge although he would gain experience once he joined your company and this is reflected in his salary.
The company bought this employee's past knowledge using it presently in the company without planning for what to do or maybe required in the future (six months to a year from the date you hired him). A Knowledge Management policy should be a requirement in any business no matter the size of it in its strategic planning and not left to chance.
Also the Personnel Department in their selection process ignore undocumented and tacit expertise but employ on the historic criterias of a Resume/CV which doesn't really say much about those other qualities that the candidate might possess and a two page A4 sheet of paper wouldn't suffice for assessing the potential of a candidate in the area of how they manage knowledge themselves and how they could apply it towards a company.
As stated the "...challenge is to create an environment where talented individuals are more engaged, productive and satisfied than they would be elsewhere creating a virtuous cycle in which the best people stay because the best people are there. That sort of business is usually one that is investing heavily in structural and relationship capital..." (2)
If an staff member is dutifully answering his correspondence it is assumed he is hard at work for the company regardless of any value he is supposed to be generating for the business. But an employee who is reading a book at his desk is frowned upon as a waste of company time, even if the book happens to be about business or a report on the industry etc.
A company which says it has a knowledge policy but discourages reading or even talking business with others in the company is sending conflicting signals to employees.
In any organisation learning is a vital requirement "...it requires the use of a vocabulary that is not exclusive, but one that makes sense to the hard-pressed line manager [as] learning is a continuous process rather than a set of discrete training activities. This would mean making efforts to inculcate learning into all business activities and producing evidence to show that this has occurred..." (3)