Knowledge sharing, HR processes, and tech – Nintex on how it all comes together

Encouraging knowledge sharing within a business can not only help employees to grow their skills, but it can also increase engagement, retention, and overall satisfaction, says Nintex APAC vice-president Christian Lucarelli.

Nintex is an automation software company that is working to boost organisational knowledge sharing. Mr Lucarelli joined The HR Leader to discuss how important it is to implement this practice.

Mr Lucarelli said: “One of the key things [organisations are] facing is how do we get people that are coming in, number one, onboarded, and number two, understand the knowledge and the processes of what they need to do, to do their job.”

Mr Lucarelli noted that tech like Nintex could assist with bringing candidates up to speed by prioritising onboarding and knowledge sharing early on in the hiring process.

“The biggest thing that tech [like Nintex] can help with is to onboard people coming into organisations through our workflow and technology. And then also from a knowledge-sharing standpoint [there] is that tacit knowledge and that collaborative process knowledge that we’re capturing through our process mapping technology … [it] is helping them share and onboard and getting them to understand how to do things from day one,” Mr Lucarelli explained.

Creating a “centre of excellence” within your organisation is another effective method of knowledge sharing that can help build the skills of employees through mentorship, training, and shared experiences.

Mr Lucarelli commented: “One of the common problems that we see is … frontline workers don’t know how to operate and work within the business’s processes. And typically, what we find is that organisations start setting up what we are calling a ‘centre of excellence’.”

This sort of learning space can also be used to educate employees on specific issues they may be having trouble understanding.

“It also helps drive engagement across businesses and is usually headed up by someone in operations. HR is a massive part of that, because it takes collaboration, and people involved in collaborating on processes that get put in place,” he said.

“One of the things that organisations go through is thought process … What we encourage organisations to do is to start with a divisional head or a framework, go in and start socialising the benefits of mapping and understanding processes and understanding where work gets done, and then drive more advocacy around collaborating on processes. And it just starts to become something that permeates through the culture of [a] business.”

According to Mr Lucarelli, the future of HR will centre around technology, especially artificial intelligence. With this in mind, organisations may benefit from getting in early and making this a focus of their own centre of excellence.

Mr Lucarelli continued: “If you think about the way we interact with processes and technology at the moment, we’re capturing a lot of data, and we’re capturing a lot of sentiment around how employees are using technology within organisations. And what I think is, as machine learning and AI starts to develop in HR tech … how do we create and provide recommendations to HR, around how processes are working to help them become more optimal, to then drive more engagement.”

He added: “I’d love to see a technology from an HR standpoint, and Nintex standpoint really, drive the customer experience and employee experience as aligned goals. As businesses, we talk a lot about customer experience, and I think it is equally as important to focus on employee experience as well because, ultimately, that’s what’s going to drive the interaction out to your customers, is how happy and how engaged and how easy it is for your employees to do their job.”

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation, recorded on 30 November 2022 with Christian Lucarelli is below, and the original podcast article can be found here.