Adoption and Engagement

The success of most KM initiatives depends on the participation level of staff members, and we know that the people element in KM takes high priority. Yet KM teams often focus their attention vastly on the operational aspects of their initiative and pay less emphasis to adoption and engagement strategies. Marketing campaigns and trainings are common for building awareness and developing skills, but they are not sufficient for the uptake and sustainability of a KM initiative. To succeed in an initiative, we need insights on the issues that work against adoption and engagement, and deliver strategies that have high impact and probability of success.

So what's adoption and engagement...
Adoption is ingrained in an organisation when people say "We need to do it". This can happen when management formalise a process, implement a policy or when a work task is dependent on the other. Adoption strategies are absolutely necessary in the early stages of a KM initiative when staff members are weary about its effectiveness and their desired behaviour. For example, "Are there people who will be responding to my questions in this new intranet?". In this case, an adoption strategy may mandate all discussions to take place on the intranet instead of the email. This example demonstrates the use of a KM policy to drive desired behaviours. It instills confidence in staff members that their questions are going to be answered because that is the place to do it.

When someone is engaged, we hear them saying "I can see why I should do it". An engagement strategy should help develop the intrinsic motivation for participation. For example, inviting experts to provide response to questions and ideas can help staff members see the value of participating on the intranet, and in turn encourage them to use the intranet for the same reason in future. We should work towards engagement because engaged people want to do things, as compared to adoption where people have to do things.

Concerns
There are mainly 2 sets of concerns that we need to tackle with regards to adoption and engagement:

1. FUD - Which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The term is first coined by Gene Amdahl as a disinformation technique to dissuade customers from switching to another competitor's product. Drawing inspiration from this, FUDs are reflected as a major cause of adoption issues. FUDs are significant in the small talks that take place in employees - sometimes at a fraction of a second - that dissuade them from adopting a new KM initiative.
   



2. Motivation - The lack of motivation is a major cause of engagement issues. For this, we can look at Daniel Pink's video where he talks about the problem with rewards and leads us to Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose as the drivers of personal motivation.
   
   
   

Adoption and Engagement workshop
A workshop is a good way to start the adoption and engagement process. It is best attended by a group of KM Activists or a task force, who have a vested interest in the success of the KM initiative. This workshop can take a day to complete and the aim is for people who are on the ground to think about:

• What would prevent people from participating in the initiative
• Why would people participate
• What ideas we could generate to improve the current situation
  
• How we can work on the selected ideas

Step 1 - Set the context
Provide an introduction to the participants. Tell them about:

• The objective of the workshop
• Motivation and FUDs so that they'll have a framework for reflection during the workshop
  
• Why giving extrinsic rewards is such a bad idea in KM. I find this short interview with David Gurteen summarises the harm imposed by rewards
  
  
  
  

Step 2 - Identify factors of non-participation
Ask each participant to write down the top 3 reasons why their colleagues would not participate in the initiative. Ask them to write each reason on a yellow post-it note with their initials on it.

Step 3 - Identify factors of participation
Repeat the process on pink post-it notes for the top 3 reasons why their colleagues would participate in the initiative.

Step 4 - Develop themes
Run an affinity diagram exercise to associate reasons of non-participation with reasons for participation. Label each group with a theme. MindTools shared about the Affinity Diagram method.

Step 5 - Brainstorm ideas
For new KM initiatives, we can make an assumption that the yellow post-it notes reflect the current state, and the pink post-it notes contains the desired outcomes that we are targeting. So this step requires us to brainstorm the various ideas that would transit us from the current state to the desired outcomes.

Ideas that are generated might apply to other themes. Duplication is fine and it may mean that the idea has a higher impact on adoption and engagement.

Step 6 - Prioristise ideas
After the participants have exhausted their ideas, it's time to prioritise them. I find this matrix useful in prioritising a laundry list of ideas. The recommended group size of this activity is 6 pax.

1. Hand each participant a hardcopy list with the s/no and ideas pre-filled in.
   
2. Tell them to score from a scale of 1 - 5 for both probability and impact, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the highest.
3. With all the participants coming together, go through their individual score for probability and impact for each idea. Come to a consensus for each of the scoring.
   
4. Tabulate the final score for each idea and shortlist the top 3 ideas.
   
5. Invite the participants to make a qualitative assessment and confirmation for the top 3 ideas.
   

Step 7 - Define the action plan
The next step is to translate the shortlisted ideas into concrete action plans that will result in the intended outcomes. I would start small here by focusing on one idea that the participants would want to work on. Try to keep the project team size small, so that we could simplify coordination and reserve the rest of the members to work on other ideas in future.

Conclusion
Adoption and engagement don't just happen, it requires thoughtful cultivation. This means adoption and engagement strategies require genuine investment and we should assess their inclusion for every KM initiative. Because at the end of the day, we shouldn't just be contented with delivering outputs, but rather, we should be celebrating positive outcomes.