It's always a tough job for service companies to hire and retain qualified workers. For any professional services company, employees are the chief assets. When an employee quits the company, it amounts to a major loss for the company. This loss is in terms of immeasurable expertise and knowledge draining out with an exiting employee. Moreover, it has a negative impact on the quality of service the company provides to its customers.

Ketchum, one of the world's leading public relations agencies with a global client base, too went through this bitter experience. A few years ago, this New York City-based company was struggling hard to retain experienced employees and institutional knowledge. However, instead of getting bogged down by the crisis, the company turned to Knowledge Management (KM) to minimize the loss caused by increased employee turnover.

Ketchum launched an intranet portal, myKGN that served as a knowledge-sharing environment for 1,300 employees spread across its offices in USA, UK and Germany. This KM system indexed and stored all the important document files of Ketchum. It had all the employee information like expertise, clients and projects handled. It also stored a client list with the details of work done for each of them. Such facilities are common to any usable KM solution. What distinguished myKGN from the then prevalent KM solutions was its emphasis on the employee self-service concept. Thus, Ketchum's KM system made knowledge sharing part of everyone's responsibility.

Ketchum decided not to form an exclusive KM team for updating myKGN knowledge base. Instead, the KM system required each employee to sort out files, uplink them and fill in various relevant information. The system, therefore, was introduced to the employees by communicating its benefits and demonstrating how it could be used. A whole week was thereafter set apart for the employees to populate the KM system. However, the KM initiative did not stop here.

After the initial work, the employees were expected to continually update the information. Getting employees to adopt the new KM system in their daily work was not easy. Adopting the KM system required a culture change and hence had to be backed by proper motivators. Ketchum, therefore, made the participation and contribution of employees in knowledge sharing an important criterion of their performance evaluation. This made the KM initiative an ongoing process, accommodating future expansions and modifications to the knowledge base.