Organizational Culture and Human Behavior

From microLINKS Wiki

If building a more effective learning organization would only be a matter of putting the right technology in place, the process would be simple. The BELO participants, who spent various degrees of effort on knowledge sharing technology, all recognized that technology alone is far from sufficient jason halek to improve KS&L processes. Changing the way a program or organization approaches and values knowledge and learning is a cultural transformation that can come about through continuous and gradual activities that produce evidence of positive impact and elicit changes in behavior of a few but influential individuals within the organization and outside (i.e. project stakeholders and similar organizations).

Becoming a more effective learning organization is not only a matter of resource allocation and strategic planning but also a matter of attitude, passion and coherence: a positive attitude towards the unknown, uncertainty and our fallibility; passion for learning, understanding, and discovery; and coherence between the attitude and passion of staff and the organization’s procedures and systems. In fact, human behavior and organizational culture were seen by each as much bigger obstacles than lack of technology. Knowledge sharing and learning Compost Bin is much more a matter of cultural and behavioral transformation than introducing new processes and systems. All BELO participants wrestled with these challenges and responded by employing various ways to motivate and accommodate staff to get involved in building a more effective learning organization.

Lessons Learned

Please do not make edits to the lessons and case studies below as these belong to the participating organizations. All comments and observations on the lessons, however, are highly encouraged, as are any additions.

Lesson #13 Identify ways to add learning and knowledge sharing into current staff activities without increasing overall effort required.

Before people can apply learning to improved practice, they first need to know where to store or find new knowledge and have time or incentives to start using it. Launching a new online portal does not automatically imply that staff will start using it. People typically only visit a limited number of websites on a regular basis, and it is hard getting them to visit (and keep visiting) a new one. In order to produce and use knowledge more effectively, to learn and work smarter, requires a change in mentality and behavior. Several BELO participants noted that there was significant resistance by staff to using new knowledge management tools. Initially, this resistance seems to stem from people being too busy to learn and try out new methods and not realizing what the potential benefits are. Even if people understand the value of knowledge sharing, they are not likely to engage in it much, unless they are given the time and space to do so. Staff frequently already have overloaded schedules and have no extra time to participate in knowledge sharing applications. People will spend time sharing knowledge when they know that somehow they will save time by doing so. At Freedom from Hunger, people put forth a lot of effort to make knowledge-sharing and the portal work because they felt that in the long run it would make their work loads lighter. When asked why they liked using the portal or why they uploaded documents to the portal, staff replied that they would no longer need to take time to email a document to the 15 people who requested it. Instead, they could simply respond to emails by saying, “It’s on the portal.” They found this to be a big enough time-saver to warrant that invested in uploading it. Practical Action designed procedures to minimize additional or parallel learning processes by integrating learning into existing jobs and by identifying key milestones or moments where reflection and meaningful learning takes place intensively. The question is not how to make someone learn but how to make learning attractive, pertinent and relevant for someone’s job. Learning has to be promoted in terms of the creation of appropriate conditions for individual and collective improvement of KS&L.

Lesson #14 For cultural change and a safe sharing environment, management commitment needs to be both strong and explicit, held in place by new policies and a formal governance framework.

In the end, the BELO participants felt, it comes down to a cultural change within the organization that needs to make knowledge management and learning a core part of its business model, something that can only be accomplished if there is strong push for KS&L by top management. Even with strong backing for KS&L by executives, PA noted, knowledge sharing (especially upward moving) can be hindered by power structures or staff’s perceptions or fears. For instance, someone in management might be interested in learning what effect a certain program has, but people in the field see the knowledge transfer as just another requirement from above. Moreover, there may be incentives to omit or distort important knowledge, because they fear it might reflect on their performance or lead to cutting funding for certain programs.

Lesson #15 Experiment with formal and informal incentives and find those most effective for your organization, staff and learning needs given the balance of workloads.

Providing informal incentives might be a way to get people initially involved in new KS&L initiatives, but it probably won’t keep them involved for the long term. Most BELO partners planned to go further and were considering or already incorporating knowledge sharing objectives in staff’s job descriptions and performance reviews. But that can only realistically be done if people can trade off existing job responsibilities for ones new or if the new activities make their jobs more efficient. Improving knowledge-sharing often means building learning into staff job descriptions by incorporating some new learning-centered task. ^[1] Additionally, incorporating knowledge sharing and learning measurements into annual performance reviews signals it as an organizational priority. Beyond reviewing performance on knowledge-related tasks in an employee’s job description, reviewers can also measure more subjective areas such as collaboration, contribution of ideas and time taken to share information with colleagues.

Lesson #16 Create opportunities for individual and group recognition and healthy competition, building off of staff momentum and fostering a learning spiral.

Changing a learning culture cannot be done overnight. Transformations, even if they are a total change of paradigm, need to be promoted through incremental changes and showing the people involved where the benefits are. Celebrate the smallest of transformations. Make people feel that changes in the perceptions they have about learning and the knowledge they produced is valued. One of the most powerful motivators in the case of FFH was recognition. FFHs’ knowledge manager implemented a “knowledge stars” program in which individuals who took time to use the portal, upload documents or share information with colleagues were recognized at staff meetings and in a monthly newsletter as “knowledge stars.” Similarly, CARE’s knowledge manager distributed certificates of appreciation from headquarters to practitioners through their country directors, accompanied by a letter detailing the specific engagement of the individual in a knowledge sharing focused task. This allowed the country director to formally recognize staffs in their efforts to demonstrate the importance of contributing to becoming a learning organization.

---

Notes

1. ↑ For example: documenting best practices, uploading documents to a web portal with strong keywords and metadata to ensure that information can be shared across time and place, participating in roundtable discussions, providing feedback to other projects or programs, posting experiences and ideas to discussion boards, wikis or blogs, writing a monthly or quarterly newsletter for distributing via email, capturing and posting meeting minutes, reading articles or participating in external events and writing review or summary to share with other staff, videotaping trainings, meetings or programmatic events, inventorying document stores, identifying useful documents that should be shared with the organization, and making them available via portal or organizational archive.

Return to Outline