The document provides an overview of knowledge management (KM) workstreams and efforts to align KM with the digital employee experience at Blend. Key points include: - Three 2022 KM workstreams are discussed: establishing a common document sharing platform, implementing a content publishing platform, and rolling out an enterprise search tool. - Feedback from employees highlighted challenges with information overload, inconsistent knowledge sharing practices, and difficulty finding information across multiple tools. - The vision is to create a holistic digital employee experience through streamlining knowledge sharing and delivering tools/platforms coherently. - Future areas of focus include coordinating the KM vision across teams, establishing information architecture standards, evolving distributed work practices,

1. August 16, 2022
Curtis Conley, Ed.D
cconley@blend.com | cconley@gmail.com
Aligning Knowledge Management and the
Digital Employee Experience at Blend

2. Agenda
KM workstreams and digital employee experience
Q&A
Introduction
KM strategy and program development at Blend
- Document sharing & collaboration
- Content publishing
- Enterprise Search
Exploring what’s next

3. Scope, Charter and Vision
KM at Blend

5. Knowledge Management | Charter
The Knowledge Management team is responsible for improving
internal knowledge sharing practices, processes, and tools that
enable operational excellence at Blend.
Strategic Operations
The Strategic Operations team is responsible for helping Blend
achieve operational excellence at the enterprise level. We run
Blend’s operating rhythm and directly support the Head of Blend
and President in a cross-functional operating capacity.
KM Charter
Common Drivers of Knowledge Management
● Organizational effectiveness - improving the internal practices and
processes so than we can operate better, faster, cheaper, etc.
● Customer knowledge - building a better understanding of customers
wants and needs, and how to satisfy them
● Innovation - creation of new knowledge in order to create new
products and services
● Growth and change - replicating existing success in new markets,
with new staff, or developing the knowledge to enter new markets
Nick Milton & Patrick Lambe (2019) The Knowledge Manager's Handbook:
A Step-By-Step Guide to Embedding Effective Knowledge Management in Your Organization.

6. A culture that values continuous learning, and
recognizes those who lead by example in their
knowledge sharing behaviors and contributions.
Create both the social environment & technical infrastructure necessary so that
knowledge can be accessed, shared, and created as frictionlessly as possible.
KM Vision
A holistic, strategic, integrated and consistent view of
the digital employee experience, comprised of different
digital channels, tools, and touchpoints.

8. Do we need offices? What is the office for now?
How frequently do teams need to meet in person?
When teams meet, what tools and devices will they need?
What does mentorship look like in a digital environment?
What would a digital front door
look like for our company?
DEX vision, program of work to achieve
future-state
Streamlined knowledge sharing,
information is easy to share and find
DEX guiding principles, standards for
knowledge sharing
Tools, platforms and environments are delivered in
a coherent, usable and productive way.
How to address less opportunity for connection?
Employee support, changing needs
Professional development in a
distributed environment
Psychological safety
Changing environment, possible implications for KM
Digital literacy

9. User Feedback
Understanding user challenges & frustrations
to better inform KM project prioritization

10. The Digital Collaboration Canvas by Oscar Berg
KM Prioritization | Identify and remove key employee frustrations, reduce collaborative friction
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11. Employee Feedback | Major barriers and frustrations in knowledge sharing
Searching for a needle in
multiple haystacks
With updates, information, and
documents spread across many
applications - finding information or
getting an answer to a question can
often be a lengthy, uncertain process.
Application overload has
reached a tipping point
The number of options for
collaboration and productivity tools is
overwhelming, and there is a growing
desire for thoughtful standardization
and guidance on good practices.
Collaboration is frustrating
without shared practices
Without enterprise-wide standards for
documentation or shared tools,
knowledge sharing practices differ
among teams - resulting in friction and
slowing us down.

12. Environmental influences on KM | Changing working environments and expectations
Distributed work
With our organization shifting to a distributed work model, the digital element
of the employee experience will play a much more significant role in how
employees experience life at Blend.
As digital technologies increasingly shape our collaboration and knowledge
sharing environment, a well-crafted digital employee experience is a
critical success factor for knowledge management efforts.

13. Scariest challenge(IMO)
facing KM?
The Langoliers! Err… 45 day retention policy in Slack
45 days later
DMs
Community discussions
Knowledge transfer
Lessons learned
unstructured knowledge
WoL

14. 2022 Knowledge Management Prioritization
Document
sharing
Standardize on Google
Workspace; deprecate
duplicative tools
Content
publishing
Confluence platform
assessment; evaluate
information sharing needs
Enterprise
search
Making it easier to find
content & expertise; rollout
of Glean
Workstream #1 Workstream #2 Workstream #3

15. 2022 KM Workstream #1
Document Sharing & Collaboration

16. How much are users switching? One study found most people average only 3
minutes on any given task (and only 2 min. on a digital tool before moving on)
Each extra task or ‘context’ you switch between eats up
20–80% of your overall productivity
● Focusing on one task at a time = 100% of productive time available
● Task switching between two tasks at a time = 40% of productive
time for each and 20% lost to context switching
● Task switching between three tasks at a time = 20% of productive
time for each and 40% lost to context switching
Hidden impact of context switching
Source: https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/news/event/2004/10/work-fragmentation-common-practice-paradox-it-support

17. Optimize how we co-create, share, and collaborate
Duplicative document collaboration solutions
results in operational inefficiencies and a poor
user experience. High cost, less secure.
Current state
Establish a common, shared document
collaboration platform, reducing friction when
working with colleagues from across Blend
Future state
🚫 no access 🤬 switching costs
💸 Licensing & admin costs
🔍 “Where is it!?!”

18. 2022 KM Workstream #2
Content Publishing

19. G
O
V
E
R
N
A
N
C
E
R
E
Q
U
I
R
E
M
E
N
T
S
AUTONOMOUS
● User-discretion
● Personal information
● Short-lived information
COLLABORATIVE
● Ad-hoc
● Short-life
STRUCTURED
● Process-driven change with life-cycle management
● Long-lived information, typically non-collaborative
● Information published for consumption/use by end users
Intranet
Knowledge Bases
/ Support Centers
(Managed)
Shared Drives
(Managed)
Team & Project Sites, Channels
Personal Productivity
ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT
● Enterprise Search
● Information Architecture
● Records Management
TEAM AND PROJECT CONTEXT
● Document Management
● Reporting, Dashboards
● Workflows, Automations
● Collaboration, co-creation
END USER CONTEXT
● Doc creation
● Note taking
● Messaging
● Task management
MANAGED
● Team-driven information sharing
● Retention of information dependent on duration of
project, process, etc.
Where to begin introducing standardization? Governance?
(hint)

20. Replatform content to fit-for purpose solutions
Current state
Fit-for-purpose content publishing and KB/support platforms. With
operational governance and structured content publishing to ensure
content recency, relevancy, usefulness, and compliance.
Future state
Lack of consistency in how and where content is published,
resulting in similar content spread across multiple applications.
As a result, users are unable to trust the accuracy of content.
Content Publishing Platform
(Confluence or ??? TBD)
News / Updates
Dept. / Team info Org Charts
Office info
Benefits
Policies
Knowledge Base
(Zendesk)
Troubleshooting
Documentation How-to
ERGs Staff info
News / Updates
Dept. / Team info
Org Charts
Office info
Benefits Policies
How-to
Staff info
ERGs
Troubleshooting
Documentation
*

21. 2022 KM Workstream #3
Enterprise Search

23. Improving how we search for and find content
Siloed search experience across numerous applications; finding
content requires (1) remembering where it lives, and (2) learning
how to effectively search in each application
An enterprise search solution that
provides a holistic search solution
across key content repositories
Current state
Future state
Search solution to be adaptable; adding/removing
sources as content mgmt. tools & practices evolve

24. Glean | Search results from across apps used today at Blend

25. Adam Savage
“ I like to work fast. I despise not having the
right tool or, worse, knowing I have it but
not being able to find it. It's a pointless
delay that wrecks my pace—and mood. ”

26. “ I love tools. I also love arranging them,
to the point where I came up with a
name for my organizing metric:
first-order retrievability. ”
“ Any tool you will use should be immediately
accessible from the place from which you work. ”
“ The finished boxes housed everything I
needed. No tool had to be moved out of the
way to get to another. ”
Adam Savage

27. First order retrievability in action

28. Glean Directory
Glean Collections
Collections are an easy way to organize related documents across all your tools by a
single topic. Curate a set of documents for others to find and use easily.
Content Verification

29. Glean Answers
w/ Slack bot integration

30. What’s next?

31. Alignment
Coordinate KM vision
Understand challenges and opportunities for KM
at the department/team levels; partnering with
content creators and publishers
Information Architecture & Content Management
Adopt federated content management standards, stand up process and
deploy and adaptable, consistent enterprise information architecture
Future of Work - Digital Employee Experience
Evolve our organizational norms and behaviors around how we work
together, how we manage our people, and how we create the conditions for
people to thrive in our Distributed Work Environment with hybrid, remote,
and co-located teams.
NEAR TERM ON THE HORIZON
Maturing Capability
Application Governance
Alignment of IT systems to support knowledge
sharing, reduce friction in collaboration and
remove barriers in productivity and effectiveness
What’s next for KM at Blend?

32. Thank you