Knowledge workers are very different from the industrial laborers and the farmers who came before them. The workers of both the Agrarian and the Industrial Ages primarily toiled with their hands, applying skills and becoming experts in a relatively fixed and simple body of knowledge learned on the job. Once trained, their acquired knowledge and skills remained essentially constant throughout their work lives. Knowledge workers, on the other hand, participate in a substantial amount of formal education before they even begin a day of work. Their knowledge is evolving and complex and much of what they learn in their initial education is obsolete in less than five years. Consequently, knowledge workers are constantly involved in formal and informal venues of continuing education.
Unlike industrial laborers and farmers whose trade and expertise is generic and standard, the know-how of knowledge workers is highly specialized. As a result, the typical knowledge worker knows more about the fabric of her tasks than her boss. While workers were often taken for granted in the Industrial Age corporation because their skills were easily transferable, Digital Age managers need to cultivate partnerships with their workers and treat them as highly valued volunteers if they want to retain their specialized knowledge.
Knowledge workers don’t need to be tightly managed because they are very capable of “connecting the dots” between their activities and those of their co-workers once they understand the framework of what needs to be done. When they have this understanding, they are more likely to be fully engaged in their work because their efforts are more directed by what they are working toward rather than whom they are working for. Full engagement happens when workers are allowed to manage their own work and to independently connect with the purpose of their contribution. Unfortunately, in extensive polling with approximately three million workers over the last 25 years, the Gallup Organization has found that only 29 percent of American workers are engaged in their work. The remaining 71 percent are either not engaged, or worse yet, actively disengaged. In fast changing times, no organization can expect to keep pace with only 3 out of 10 workers engaged. This means that as companies come to terms with the new demands of the Digital Age, one of the greatest challenges facing managers today is how to increase the full engagement of knowledge workers.
While managers may be tempted to drive greater worker engagement through improved top-down communications, directives and pronouncements rarely make a difference. Corporate knowledge can no longer be restricted to the elite few and doled out in carefully scripted communiqués. The only way to increase the engagement of knowledge workers is for managers to embrace the new reality that, in the wiki world, everyone has a need-to-know and everyone needs participate in the creation of the company’s value.
