Knowledge At Work

Unlock your company’s true potential by eliminating knowledge work waste that’s hiding in plain sight. Back in 1987, Nobel laureate Robert Solow quipped, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This costly condition soon became known as the “productivity paradox.” Why does it persist today? Why do knowledge workers spend a third of their days on needless correction, avoidable work and overservice, despite existing office technology that could help, even automate, their actions? And why does nobody notice? The answers—and solutions—are in this book. The Knowledge Work Factory uncovers the well-intentioned waste that hides in plain sight within virtually every organization. It reveals the ingrained perceptual biases that trick our brains into accepting the status quo and missing breakthrough opportunities. It draws stunning parallels to industrial production, which cracked this very code over 100 years ago. Most importantly, it gives you an easy-to-follow, one-stop guide to boost efficiency, productivity, and morale among the very knowledge workers who struggle under the burden of the productivity paradox. Discover your organization’s true, untapped capacity. Maximize the productivity of every single knowledge worker. Uncover “better-than-best practices.” Reap benefits that drop straight to the bottom line. The power is in your hands—with The Knowledge Work Factory.

Putting Knowledge to Work unveils the role that knowledge plays in NGOs work in international cooperation for development, unpacking tensions and challenges faced by small- and medium-sized development NGOs in particular; analysing cases in which organizations have devised inspiring solutions to improve their own performance.

Addresses the following questions: What is knowledge work? What are strategies and methods for increasing productivity, quality, effectiveness and value of knowledge work? Can knowledge workers be managed, and if yes, how? What are adequate methods for measuring performance of knowledge workers?

Work Process Knowledge brings together the findings of twenty-four leading researchers on new forms of work and the demands these place on workers' knowledge and skill. Their findings, based on a new set of investigations in a wide range of manufacturing and service industries, identify the kinds of knowledge required to work effectively in the post-Taylorist industrial organization. Raising fundamental issues for current industrial policy, science and technology policy, and ways of managing the post-Taylorist organization and developing human resources, this book will be of essential interest to academics and professionals working in the fields of management, human resource development, and workplace learning.

In The Laws of the Knowledge Workplace, Dr Jemielniak has collected research-based chapters providing deep, interdisciplinary insight into knowledge professions, addressing issues of professional identity, emotion, power and authority, trust and indoctrination, and management behaviour. This leads to an examination of issues related to time and work scheduling and its bearing on play, family, symbolic sacrifices, and employee burn-out. In particular, it delves into the identity shifts between knowledge workers and managers, nepotism and turnover intentions among knowledge workers, the implementation of engineering projects, coordination problems in offshore production systems, leadership in virtual teams, decision support systems; taking into account the moral aspects of consequences, netnography as a tool for studying knowledge work, and innovative networks in the aviation industry. The accounts and studies in this book come from management, organization studies, sociology, and anthropology of work perspectives and are fully international in scope. They highlight the scale of the serious changes in occupational roles and to the meaning of work that is taking place in knowledge-intensive environments and give a pointer to what might constitute good and bad management practice in knowledge-intensive companies.

This open access book makes a contribution to our understanding of one of the social challenges facing many western nations i.e. the challenge of an ageing population. It specifically addresses the issue of competence among older employees. Others have studied ageing populations in terms of the economic burden or the pressure on healthcare services and generally view the rising numbers of seniors more as a challenge than an opportunity. In this book, authors discuss ways of gaining positive benefits from our ageing and more experienced work force.

Work analysis seeks to breakdown the work behaviors that people do and the characteristics of people who successfully perform the work, and then to reassemble the information in a form that has many uses in practice. The information can be used to specify job expectations, establish quality standards, develop training programs, document work processes, and anticipate safety risks, among many other uses. This book is a practical guide to using the work analysis process for improving performance in the workplace, particularly with the emergence of knowledge work. Work has undergone much change, and the trend is towards increased complexity, demanding employees to use their cognitive abilities to a greater extent. Work analysis has often been criticized for its historical focus on documenting simple, observable, and routine behaviors performed by individuals involved in low-skilled production work. But it doesn’t have to be so, as readers will discover. Indeed, the demands of organizations and societies in the digital age has placed greater emphasis on documenting the changing nature of work. This practical book addresses the questions of how does one perform a work analysis? How can complex work be documented? How can the information be used by organizations, technical schools, and government agencies? Readers will find detailed descriptions of numerous work analysis techniques, along with case studies and example documents from actual organizational and national workforce development situations. This book serves as a relatively comprehensive resource for human resource development professionals in range of settings. The book should also be useful for human resource managers, line managers and supervisors, and other professionals such as quality and safety staff. Readers will value the information in the book, based on the author’s extensive experience, which is presented in a clear and concise approach.

Work-based learning is Joe Raelin’s unique way of incorporating a number of action strategies—such as action learning, action science, and communities of practice—into a comprehensive framework to help people learn collectively with others. In this thoroughly updated and revised edition, he demonstrates how to engage our reflective powers to challenge those taken-for-granted assumptions that unwittingly hold us back from questioning standard ways of operating. A well-known popular author, Joe is an avid student of the many traditions that support work-based learning, so he presents an inclusive model that has wide appeal across disciplines and occupations. He provides readers with the most recent updates in the field, such as his coverage of virtual team learning, portfolios, multisource feedback, critical and global action learning, and changes in educational policy. Whether you're an organizational or college educator, this book will help you make learning accessible to everyone—and even contagious within your organization!