Knowledge sharing as a strategic building block for firm development in the era of digital transformation

Author:  Anett Diósi, PS SME Director

Human resource development as a key element of a competitive strategy

Our development programmes take many forms and are based on continuous, differentiated and coordinated training – at all levels and functional areas of the organisation, from new recruits to top management.

When someone joins us as an entry-level employee, they become part of a conscious career path planning process that ensures they gain a wide range of knowledge and experience…

• starting with the New Joiner training program, which provides a good professional basis for putting into practice what you have learned on the school bench, and
• continuing with on-the-job training, where colleagues have the opportunity to acquire practical knowledge by working on concrete client projects,
• and rotations between client jobs provide variety, new challenges to gain broader industry experience, and of course
• business and general skills training, where, among other things, employees learn how to fit into different teams and adapt to different client cultures.

 

Building a career path to a higher organisational level is also underpinned by leadership support training, which Process Solutions also places a strong emphasis on.

• For example, the “senior school“, where, in addition to gaining an insight into the “being a boss”, our newly promoted colleagues also benefit from a week-long training series that strengthens and unites a very good team – when the international situation allows, in a popular foreign city.
• But we also offer training in assertiveness, delegation and time management, all of which help our colleagues to adapt smoothly to changing tasks and environments in their everyday lives.

However, whether you are a beginner or a manager, you have to remember that you work in an accounting services provider firm, where in order to serve clients to a high standard, you have to keep your skills up to date, keeping up with the changes and digital challenges in the industry, not to mention the challenges of frequent changes in the law.

 

To keep pace with change and to serve a diverse client base from many industries to a high standard, successful knowledge sharing is strategic. It is important that once a problem has been solved, a technical change or a new feature has been researched by one of our colleagues, that information is quickly available to all with the required level of detail and explanation. This saves a considerable amount of time at company level, which also gives us a competitive advantage in the market, as we are a profit-oriented company. The more efficient the knowledge sharing, the less effort is needed to achieve the results our clients expect, that is by increasing and sharing the knowledge base at team level, the workload for all of us is reduced, which is one of the key ways to increase employee satisfaction.

 

This is why we have a strategic goal to develop effective knowledge sharing, because if it is an integral part of our culture as an attitude of our employees, then as Process Solutions’ business recognition grows, our professionals will feel more successful, more recognised and more satisfied, and where it is good to work and be part of a community, it is also worth planning and building a career for the long term.

 

A new milestone in the development of knowledge sharing at PS  – The launch of the SME Team

The above strategic principles have given birth to the SME team within the PS. SME stands for Subject Matter Expert, an expert who provides ongoing support to PS and its clients in key areas such as accounting, taxation and payroll. The primary task of the SME Team is the institutionalised management of knowledge sharing at company level with the help of a dedicated team of experts, supported by an online solution in line with the digitalisation trend of the times and adapted to the requirements of hybrid working.

 

The SME Team itself was launched in autumn 2019, with 2 dedicated and skilled colleagues with expertise in all areas of development. Our first main task was to rethink our previous knowledge sharing processes and tools, and then to develop a modern new framework to achieve the triple aim set by PS:

• high professional quality and even better customer service,
• developing and retaining our staff by building an inspiring professional environment, and
• improving efficiency to maintain our business leadership.

 

Our Team sees the key to achieving these goals in the promotion of knowledge sharing and its transformation into a way of life. It is perhaps not necessary to explain why we expect this approach to further improve efficiency, and it goes without saying that further professionalisation goes hand in hand with even more professional customer service. In addition to quality and efficiency as important business objectives, it should also be stressed that in today’s information-centric world, the key to retaining new generations is novelty, variety, motivation, and the ability to grasp the interesting, which is also inherent in a knowledge-sharing approach.

The SME team has expanded over the past two years and now has 8 members, some of whom support the team full time, and some of whom work alongside the client-facing, so-called “front office” work in the team, helping to achieve SME’s objectives.

 

We believe in and work to ensure that the “SME approach and mindset”, in line with PS’s strategic goals, is embedded and automatic in the thinking of all new colleagues who join us as part of PS’s corporate culture. And this rhymes well with the “share-info–connect–build-community” attitude of the new generations, a common “community organizing and building” core concept in today’s rapidly evolving digital world, first naturalized by Facebook (now Meta) worldwide and taken to a new level by the “professional contact network builder” LinkedIn. We want to bring the benefits of this “spirit of the age” approach to the world of PS.

 

You can read more about how we do this, what the SME Team does and how it supports the PS Front Office in a future post.