Shifting from Tribal to Structured Knowledge at Personio
A story of how Personio Customer Experience is executing their own internal content strategy by introducing a Knowledge Management framework.
No One Succeeds Alone
This is a story of collaboration. I’d like to open this reflection by saying that Knowledge Management is not an individual effort. No one can succeed (nor survive) in organizing chaos alone. Stephanie Barnes’ title on LinkedIn is Chief Chaos Organiser. I found this self-definition brilliant, and it is indeed what we do in Knowledge Management!
My Knowledge Management Journey at Personio
When I joined Personio, as the first Knowledge Manager, I was hired to standardize and enable search of key product and internal information for the entire CX department. I was aware that this would be a challenging ride. It’s impossible to assess the status of an internal knowledge base without having access to it.
During the interview process I asked a few targeted questions to determine whether this would turn out to be an interesting challenge. One of them was: “Do you have tribal knowledge in Personio?”. The answer: “What is tribal knowledge?” I immediately realized I could have a great impact in restructuring the existing knowledge and in shaping the future outlook of the information architecture of that Knowledge Base (KB). Challenge accepted!
The expectations were high, but since day one it was pretty clear that everyone in Customer Experience (CX) had a stake in the success of the knowledge management program. To give you some context, Knowledge Management serves a broad variety of teams in CX, namely: Customer Service, Professional Services, Customer Growth, Customer Success, CX Academy, User Education, Community Engagement, and Quality Management. All of these teams work in distinct but coordinated ways to help each Personio customer maximize value. Capturing knowledge from all these teams on how they tackle every single contact is not an easy task, especially if they are not involved in the decision making process.
Coming from a very structured Tech environment, I was used to working with content standards (a style guide), templates (prototypes of articles), and a taxonomy (classification system). All the efforts were coordinated by a Change Management team, and a number of stakeholders (QA, Corporate Training, Process improvements, Product) were involved in the decision making process. In Personio there was far less structure and, at different points in time, I had to wear all these hats!
I created content standards and templates for the internal KB from scratch, which helped CXers write high quality structured content faster. I was able to select and buy tools for Confluence, our Knowledge Management System (KMS). I designed and developed KM trainings and trained the CX organization on KM standards. I contributed to the rollout of a product and non-product taxonomy consumed by cross-functional roles in different departments. Classifying the types of issues Personio users are facing is crucial for several reasons, but mainly it’s important to us to understand where we can improve our product or our content. Additionally, I gathered the requirements for a dashboard that displays traffic in the KB, which allows us to constantly monitor the healthiness of the Knowledge base. I contributed to the creation of the KM OKRs. I set up an intake feedback channel via Jira and since it was opened (October 2021), we received 167 requests, which led to almost 400 edits! Beside all these things, I also contributed to hiring and ramping up a team of 3 amazing Knowledge Editors that are supporting me in scaling up and expanding the KM program. As predicted, this has indeed been a crazy/amazing ride: never a dull moment in Personio!
The Biggest Challenge for Knowledge Management
So far, the most challenging part of this journey has been to build up trust amongst the teams we are serving. Even if everyone in the department was onboard and saw the benefits of a KM approach, this involved changing ways of working, and change is never easy. Everyone in CX was involved, to some extent, in the content production plan for internal knowledge articles. Everyone contributed in organizing and keeping their knowledge up to date at the best of their capacities. Given that knowledge management was only a secondary task for most CXers, most of the articles did not follow KM best-practices, lacked structure and ownership, were outdated and therefore not always reliable, and full of friendly but overwhelming emojis 🤔.
Taking ownership of the knowledge management function is a long process. Imagine if you’ve been doing something for a couple of years and someone would suddenly come in and would just say “leave it to me.” My current approach is “let’s do this together.”
I trained roughly one-third of the CX organization on how to create and update knowledge articles based on our current Confluence functionalities and our content standards. I enabled them to own this piece of work and, to maintain an acceptable level of consistency throughout the KB, asked them to submit their articles for revision to the KM team. By doing so, we were able to capture tribal knowledge, we are avoiding bottlenecks, unnecessary backlogs, and frictions.
Shifting governance, mentality, and behaviors are some of the most challenging tasks a professional can encounter in a work environment, and KM is not exempt from this reluctant feeling.
Personio’s Vision for Knowledge Management
Looking ahead, we are defining big plans for the Knowledge Management team. We want to take ownership of the macro templates creation and their localization process. This will help us provide a uniform support experience across languages, and speed up resolution time. We are also thinking about implementing guided workflows for the most complex topics, but our main goal will remain the same: increase the reliability of the internal knowledge base.
We need to win over the blind trust of our audience (CX), and they need to see the benefits this approach brings them, for instance making searchability faster and easier. They need to be sure that what they are reading is accurate and they can use the information to support our customers towards the resolution of their issues. This is a long journey and, as I mentioned earlier, no one can make it on their own.
My vision for KM is to connect knowledge gaps. Technology should support knowledge sharing, collaboration, and continuous learning. People are working together with a sustainable mindset, taking care of themselves and others to come into their organizations. I am delighted to work for an organization that fosters this model, and I am sure that we are going to be able to scale our operations holistically and knowledge management will have a key role in achieving success. We are not quite there yet, but we are all invested and we are all working towards reaching this goal. After all, knowledge is power! And KM is a crucial empowerment tool to make everyone in CX able to perform their best work with our customers.
