Using listeners to capture tacit knowledge at Tata Chemicals
By Dr Devsen Kruthiventi, Dr Milind Gajjar and Bharat Awasthi.
How tacit knowledge is captured in a company where employees with a wide range of skills and languages produce an even vaster range of products.
Established in 1939, Tata Chemicals Limited (TCL) is the world's second largest producer of soda ash, with manufacturing facilities in India, the UK, Kenya and the US - but the company's products cover a huge range of chemicals, from fertilizers to branded, iodized salt.
In India, the company has three manufacturing facilities, in Mithapur, Babrala and Haldia. Each plant specializes in different types of chemicals and the employees of each facility read and write different languages (predominantly Gujarati at Mithapur, Hindi at Brabala and Bengali at Haldia).
Because of that diversity, TCL's workforce represents a huge pool of tacit knowledge, with some employees offering as much as 40 years' hands-on, real "anubhav" (a Hindi word used to denote experience, understanding or realization).
In addition to in-house "anubav", more than a hundred retired employees that reside in and around the townships surrounding the plant still have much to offer in terms of enriching these goldmines of tacit knowledge.
And, in common with other manufacturing organizations, capturing and leveraging that tacit knowledge in employees across all grades is seen by senior executives as a key factor for future growth.
It's a major challenge for the company's KM systems. Most systems of this kind attempt to capture employee knowledge pertaining to a specific domain of organizational interest. But at TCL, it's recognized that every employee has much more to contribute than simply their specialized knowledge in a particular domain. In fact, the sum total of their skills, interests and experiences is seen as vital to the process of developing a rich organizational knowledge base.
For example:
- An experienced soda ash kiln operator will notice the color of the kiln stack when he enters the plant, and based on his observations, he's able to make predictions about the success of a particular job and the general health of the kiln.
- In the soda ash maintenance group, it was observed that a particular make of pump tended to wear out quickly, due to exposure to high temperatures and the various chemicals with which it came into contact. Based on this realization, TCL switched to a different make of pump with a much longer lifespan.
- Leaks from water chambers used in the manufacturing process were causing instrumentation used to measure gas flow to malfunction. Modifications were made to resolve the problem.
These examples show that there are useful "knowledge nuggets" across the workforce, regardless of hierarchy. Such important observations, heuristics and learnings must be captured and refined, systematically and continuously - but in addition, they should also be shared and disseminated across TCL.
In order to do that, a KM initiative called "TITLI" was launched at TCL in 2005. The project name TITLI (the Hindi word for butterfly) was chosen because the diversity of colors of the butterfly and its role in cross-pollination was seen to embody TCL's KM ambitions. The TITLI program is intended to facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas, experiences and learnings and to embrace the varied hues of each individual's perceptions in the form of "anubav", or stories, as its core inputs.
In fact, storytelling on subjects that are relevant for the business is at the heart of TCL's KM initiative and to address the issue of capturing knowledge from all levels of its workforce, TCL's KM team launched a "Listeners Program" as part of TITLI.
Aims of the Listeners Program
TCL believes that it's essential to involve people in KM in a way that encourages them to take ownership of individual KM projects. The aim of the listeners program is to create involvement, engagement and participation throughout TCL and make all aspects of capturing, sharing and seeking knowledge effective.
Two issues are seen to be of the utmost importance in creating that sense of involvement: first, that the contributor of knowledge feels that they're listened to and second, that they feel comfortable and uninhibited about sharing their valuable experiences.
As employees have come to realize that the tacit knowledge captured really makes a difference in terms of solving day-to-day problems and enhancing productivity, their engagement and participation has increased. Likewise, both contributors and listeners are recognized by TCL for their insights and inputs.
Listeners, in particular, are perceived as "change agents", who bring about the necessary shifts in culture that allow knowledge capture, sharing and reuse to flourish.
With the company spread across different locations, it was foreseen that employees would find it easier to share their experiences in their local languages, so support would be needed to help them write it down. With that in mind, listeners listen to stories from employees across the hierarchy, document the experiences in a standard story-capture format and then submit this to the KM team for review.
It's then made ready for reuse by other TCL employees, so that the next time a similar business-critical situation arises, knowledge workers can tap into time-saving, relevant information. This means that issues can be resolved quicker and to a higher quality standard.
Accepted and refined stories are constantly converted into "knowledge nuggets", and systematic dissemination of these "K-nuggets" have become regular features in various KM platforms across the company.
Appointment of listeners
Listeners are recruited and appointed on a purely voluntary basis. It was felt that, rather than "push" people into the role, "pull" needed to be created if the initiative was to prove sustainable. All employees were first briefed about the program and the planned role and responsibilities of the Listeners, before the nominations process commenced.
Each nomination is evaluated according to a set of criteria deemed necessary in a good listener, among them trust, empathy, credibility and so on. Listeners are nominated across all work levels, since the most important criteria for selection is the personal contacts and successful working relationships they can demonstrate with their colleagues.
The effectiveness and popularity of this approach is clearly shown by the fact that, today, almost one-third (30 per cent) of TCL employees have enrolled as listeners.
Employees approaching retirement are mapped by a few listeners, to create a memoir of the professional learnings that they've amassed during their careers.
The listener role
All listeners are taken through a training program to build upon their understanding of key TITLI concepts and to improve their grasp on the specific skills that the listener role involves. During the two-day training program, they experience a packed schedule of hands-on exercises and practical demonstrations, and as a sequel to this, they attend regular refresher workshops with other listeners.
Being a listener isn't seen as an additional responsibility, but as an opportunity to learn more from experienced employees with high levels of functional competency. It's a chance to enhance their own learning, develop better interpersonal effectiveness and connect more closely with colleagues.
So it's no surprise, then, that TCL's listeners are highly motivated, as reflected in the following comments:
“I feel that the listener's role is critical. We collect the key and critical information and this information is developed into reusable knowledge.”
“I feel we've been able to solve many of the problems in the plant and at the same time it's helped me in my personal life on a day-to-day basis. There's a sharp change in my behavior, too. I feel very happy about this additional role and responsibility.”
“The listeners and the contributors spent time together and came out with good output in terms of knowledge, saving to the company, reduction in the number of breakdowns, increasing productivity and reducing incidents in the plant.”
The TCL KM team has also implemented a program of Reward & Recognition (R&R) for listeners. Based on their performance, Gold, Silver and Bronze awards are presented to the best listeners by executives at the most senior levels in the company.
Overcoming challenges
Initially, it was noticed that a few employees were reluctant or even unwilling to share their knowledge. This was tackled by spreading more awareness about TITLI and the listeners program and maintaining the drive from among TCL's senior leadership team. However, much of the hard work in winning these people over was done by their colleagues, who shared their own positive experiences of participating and the successes they'd achieved as a result.
Another challenge was the fact that, during translation from one language to another, some stories became diluted or distorted. In response, a review stage was added to the translation process to reduce these risks.
In addition, as the initiative took off, it became increasingly difficult to refine and distil "K-nuggets" from the huge quantities of stories that were being submitted. As a result, screening has been introduced, in which stories are rated on their impact - that's to say, whether they've contributed to process improvements, cost savings, the development of new capabilities or changes in standard operating procedures (SOPs).
All stories that have a rating above a given threshold are taken to the next level of refinement and distillation, to become K-nuggets. Those that achieve particularly high ratings for ease of replicability, applicability to TCL and learning value are converted into case studies and published quarterly, thus helping end users of knowledge to quickly identify knowledge practices that might be replicated in their own departments.
The R&R program has also been modified accordingly. From awards being made for individual contributions, the "TITLI Doot" awards criteria now include the number of stories collected; the number of stories accepted; specific contributions in the areas of health and safety, customer service and process improvement; and the impact of stories.
Some concluding remarks
Over the years, the listeners program at TCL has matured to become a practice in which all new employees actively participate. The program now also encompasses the responsibility of capturing knowledge from retiring employees, capturing innovations and also the reporting of knowledge reuse across the enterprise.
The concept of listeners has been very effective in TCL's journey towards making KM "a way of life" for its employees, embedding KM within the workforce as a whole. In fact, the program has been accepted so enthusiastically that all new recruits are now encouraged by heads of functions and their reporting managers to become listeners themselves. This has not only helped individual employees to highlight their experiences at TCL, but has also created a culture where knowledge flows uninhibitedly across all work levels.
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