Tacit Knowledge & the Future of Work

Lots of people are talking about the future of work these days, by which they usually mean remote work, or some hybrid form of remote and in-office work. And one of the common themes about the future of work, especially as it pertains to remote work, is how to effectively convey tacit knowledge to a remote work force.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge which is hard to encode in text form. Indeed has a pretty good explanation of it here:

Tacit knowledge is gained from personal experience and can be difficult to share with others. In the workplace, tacit knowledge might refer to processes and techniques that you can only learn through practical experience, context and training. This could include topics like sales strategies, management styles or presenting. These examples represent types of knowledge that can be difficult to convey to new hires. For example, you can teach them the individual elements to use when making a pitch, but sometimes there's no substitute for experience and intuition.

As I've discussed elsewhere on this blog, I think that writing well is key to performing well in most knowledge-related jobs. As great as good writing is, though, good writing can't capture certain kinds of information. The issue for employers trying to manage a remote work force, then, is to figure out which knowledge that their employees need is tacit, and which is not. Tacit knowledge requires a different tactic than non-tacit knowledge.

You can write great documentation about company processes. This is non-tacit knowledge, and it is the lifeblood of many distributed workforces. Gitlab's company Handbook is, for example, well-known among students of remote work forces. Here's Gitlab explaining the thinking behind its handbook:

At GitLab our handbook is extensive and keeping it relevant is an important part of everyone's job. It is a vital part of who we are and how we communicate. We estbalished these processes because we saw these benefits:

1. Reading is much faster than listening.
2. Reading is async, you don't have to interrupt someone or wait for them to become available.
3. Talent Acquisition is easier if people can see what we stand for and how we operate.
4. Retention is better if people know what they are getting into before they join.
5. On-boarding is easier if you can find all relevant information spelled out.
6. Teamwork is easier if you can read how other parts of the company work.
7. Discussing changes is easier if you can read what the current process is.
8. Communicating change is easier if you can just point to the diff.
9. Everyone can contribute to it by proposing a change via a merge request.

These are some great benefits! And for a company built from the ground up to be fully remote, the Handbook-as-authority works pretty well. But not all companies are built from the ground up to be fully remote.

More pertinently, as I mentioned earlier, tacit knowledge is not easily conveyed in text form. To understand this, consider metalworking. Walter Sorrells is a knifemaker and YouTuber whose videos convey a large amount of tacit knowledge about metalworking:

Obviously your average remote worker isn't doing metalworking. However, most knowledge workers rely on some combination of tacit and non-tacit knowledge to get their job done.

I've been thinking a bit about this, as I read an interesting post from 2019 about knowledge transfer via YouTube. The author, Samo Burja, makes the interesting point that, in spite of naysayers' claims that YouTube is making us all stupid, YouTube conveys tacit knowledge at a scale that would otherwise be impossible:

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time--skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he's written books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to centralization, as its local transmission provides an advantage for decentralized players that can't be replicated by a central authority. The center cannot appropriate what it cannot access: there will never be a state monopoly on plumbing or dentistry, for example.

Here's an interesting article I found, written during the height of the pandemic, in August 2020. It claims:

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, employees have been required to work from home (WFH) as much as possible. They then communicate with each other, managers, subordinates, clients, and stakeholders through the use of online videoconferencing software such as Zoom.

There’s increasing speculation that this shift towards WFH will remain after the pandemic ends, with major companies such as Mondelez, Nationwide, and Barclays now talking about a permanent shift to WFH with associated reductions in costly office space. Reinforcing this, more than two-thirds of the 5000 workers approached in a recent survey conducted in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom say they are more productive working at home, and a recent study found that 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home.

However, there’s a potentially serious downside of the WFH online communication trend that is only now starting to receive attention. As a new editorial in the Journal of International Business Policy alerts, “complex forms of knowledge are difficult to communicate over distance and require direct and repeated face-to-face contact for their exchange.”

At this point I suppose I should offer some advice about what employers should do to solve this problem. Ideas that come to mind include:

• Figure out which processes rely on tacit knowledge and which do not.
• YouTube or Loom are great ways to convey tacit knowledge, for those occasions where text-based information fails.
• Employers should avoid the mistake of assuming all knowledge is better conveyed via video. Most knowledge workers will tell you that certain kinds of information are better conveyed via text than video. Your job is to figure out which is which in your copany.

Managing a distribute work force requires a lot of upfront work that traditional employers are not great at. One of the many tasks required of distributed employes is ensuring that their employees have ready access to the information and knowledge required to do their jobs. And, if that knowledge isn't effectively conveyed, employees will become frustrated, attrition will rise, and executives may decide to dispense with remote work and require everyone to return to the office.