A month ago I mentioned my scepticism about the value of using incentives to encourage participation in KM.  I asked for people to share their experience and thoughts and have shared these below.  My thoughts on the topic will be coming later this month.

Thanks to Lars, Chris, Richard and John for their feedback:

In earlier years at Linklaters (circa. 2001/2), we used to give away a voucher for dinner at a local restaurant to the fee earner who submitted what was considered the most “valuable” piece of KH (as assessed by the KH partner) on a monthly basis. Weight on “value” here was placed on items of KH submitted where we were lacking contributions in that sector/area (e.g. a memo to a client or an article on securitisations where there was no existing securitisation material would gain bonus points).

League-tables of fee earner KH submissions over the course of a year were also kept. These were then used by the partners during the fee earner appraisal process – which is not to say these [league-tables] had a “direct” impact on the overall assessment process – in that I doubt a fee earner with 120% utilisation and 0 KH contributed items would had suffered too much!.

While an initial advocate of incentive programs for fee earner participation in KM programs, over time I found it tended to be the same fee earners participating each time and, in most cases, these fee earners informed me they would have participated in the program regardless of whether or not there had been an incentive program. As such, I’m now far more of an advocate of putting forward a good firm-wide culture of KM participation (value-based), rather than trying to bribe people to take part. — Richard

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At my former firm (one of the largest here in Canada), one of the practice groups that I looked after was the environmental law group. They had about 20 members across the country (in four offices). At the monthly practice group video conference calls, I told everyone that I was available to help out with contributions to the KM system. The practice group leader encouraged others to contribute, but actually did little himself to lead by example.

So that’s my only experience, and as you can see, it wasn’t terribly positive. — John

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I don’t have experience in using incentives to inspire KM. However, I think that incentive ptrograms are necessary in certain situations – and that is especially true for law firms. As lawyers usually have to produce billable hours, I think it is a must that KM activities lead to billable hours, one way or the other.  — Chris

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Hi.
Not in the legal business, but anyway.  We have tried incentives for KM participation, and I don’t want to go there again.  Our worst mistakes were done when we deployed our global Knowledge Management program for Customer support back in 2000.  One country unit decided to give away a Swiss army knife to every engineer that wrote 10 knowledge objects. This was one of our larger Country units, so we got >1000 knowledge objects written (and very armed and dangerous engineers…). Why did this fail: There was no incentive on writing anything useful, or to adhere to any of the internal format guidelines. These poor knowledge objects polluted the search for ALL country units for years.  We had other mis-guided incentives aimed for quantity, as well as incentives aiming for proper behaviours, but still missing target.

When managers ask me about incentives on KM I ask them to put the incentives on the behaviours, not quantity. We are a bit better at managing KM when including the KM behaviours in the performance evaluations. — Lars

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under KM, Law firms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.