NON-IT SOLUTIONS 

Despite great efforts that Nestlé is already making in gathering tacit knowledge, the Swiss company seems more focused on the outside world than the inside one.

Under the control of Contact Center Director there are agents that spend most of their time in report issue trend from the customers. How many Smarties there were in your tube, what degree of brown was the chocolate covering your Kit Kat, what kind of animal let you think the glass of milk you drank yesterday: these are all question which Knowledge Managers are really interested to. And which they take really seriously, because are this kind of data, with the specific tools to analyze them, that can give to a business the power that the awareness of the tacit knowledge of the customers take with us. The power to set up the products and the whole business on the customers. The power to sell more. And in the end the power to have more profit. 

On the other hand, within the company, Nestlé has still some possibilities to increase its capturing and sharing of knowledge. The main tools that we want to suggest are cognitive mapping and reward system.   

Cognitive mapping means make as clear as possible the knowledge within a company. This process implies that every employee has the possibility to say what he know (or, at least, what he think he know). What somebody consider only an ininfluent information, can became a big resource for the whole company. To say own knowledge is the first step to be aware of self-knowledge: and let employee know what they know, allows the company to have within itself more knowledge.

And if this method is applied to all process and stuff, even the smallest and less important, there will discovered a lot of misunderstandings. The tacit knowledge that make the company works will became explicit. Matching employees’ proper ideas and correcting mistaken concepts will create a better situation for the daily work of everyone. And the same process has also a great advantage in let all employees know who of their colleagues is very skilled in some knowledge. Next time they will need an expert on the Philippine’s biscuits market, within the Marketing department they will choose Tim, the new guy: during the creation of the map he has very good idea about this topic; other colleagues discovered this was the theme of his bachelor assignment. 

Reward and recognition schemes are a very effective tools in increase the employee participation to the processes of knowledge management, first of all to knowledge sharing. The idea behind this system is very simple: employee will show behaviour that improve knowledge sharing if they know that these kind of behaviours will mean for them reward or recognition. The process is linear: the worker makes an effort, his performance (every time he share knowledge with colleagues) makes him have some benefits, the benefits lead him to satisfaction, than to commitment to the company.There are of course different kind of reward, divided through different benefit and different kind of performance. We suggest to Nestlé to adapt individual payment by result. Despite this scheme ignore the fact that several positive process are result not of individual but team efforts, personal reward can lead employees to feel free and to work a lot to build their own future within the company.Public recognition, as annual award prices, medals, plaques, certificates, help the employees to feel satisfaction in his work-life, and this leads them to feel loyalty to the company.Despite all these positive consequences, reward-recognition scheme can also have some risks: the biggest  concerns the evaluation of the performance which bring reward with it. If is only the local supervisor that take the decision, the system can be source of dissatisfaction. If the employees themselves are responsible for colleagues’ reward, there is the possibility (more concrete than you can imagine) that their choices are lead more by feeling of friendship than by actual behaviours.