The Authentic Eccentric

About sixteen years ago (give or take a few days) I hired Tammy to work with us at the Kinko’s in Harvard Square (back when it was on Dunster Street, next to Herrell’s Ice Cream). She’s still plugging away making copies, although now she’s in Virginia. When Tammy started, Kinko’s offered black & white copies, spiral & velo binding, faxing, stationery products, Mac computer rentals and typewriter rentals. She’s seen the introduction of oversize prints, full color copies, digital printing, scanning, sign and banner services and a whole lot more.

Tammy with Paul Orfalea at the Nashville picnic (circa 1997? I lost track)

She’s also a walking and talking resource with tremendous knowledge of branch operations, project management and company policies. For a company that is long on complex equipment and short on training, the inability to copy Tammy’s knowledge and share it with others isn’t offset by her hourly contribution to bottom line profits.

Worse, what if she left? All those skills, all that knowledge - gone. What’s a company to do?

Blogs, I say. Yes - those same misunderstood webpages that are spawning like lemmings - but instead of all about what I did last night, how about here is what I do when X happens? These are the top 3 solutions to ink density on the color copier, here is how to place a service call or up to date notes on what shift change looked like?

Setting up private, member accessible blogs is one of the smartest ways to capture the knowledge of your human capital. When I used to manage teams, one of my biggest complaints was my inability to get 100% of my team working towards the same goals using the same (or at least similar) methods. No, I wasn’t trying to turn them into robotrons, but operationally, some things can really only work one way for many reasons, such as policies and procedures.

If I’d had a blog, I’d be able to post articles (like this one!) and team members could use the comment section to indicate they received the material. They could add to the discussion and improve it - the people actually doing the job usually know best how to do it, they just need to know that you want that input and that you’ll actually use it.

I could also categorize that information into subsections; the archiving feature allows for easy access and extending the blog with some custom plugins to track popularity, comments, page views and searches would tell me what people were looking for, which would allow me to spot train as needed.

My quieter, more reserved team members would find a new way to express themselves without having to shout over others. The easy ability to add photos, audio and video would give others a new burst of creativity and we’d be able to capture more, document more and share more easily with each other.

It isn’t tomorrowland and this isn’t a dream. Today’s leading companies recognize the value of the Tammy’s in their company and are capitalizing on the ease and simplicity of blog implementation to capture and leverage it throughout the organization.

What are you doing to capture the expertise of your team? If you’d like to discuss possible solutions, drop me a note and let’s chat.