What are your knowledge categories?

[amyv]

We are just starting our HR knowledge base and are having some difficulties deciding on categories that can be used globally.  I'm curious what other people have done. What categories do you use for HR knowledge?  Are you a global company?  Do you have any standards around how long (wordy) the categories can be?

For example, some challenges we are facing are:

• We have "Insurance" in the US, which seems obvious, but Europe and China have "labor law".  Do we just have both and have each country use whatever one makes the most sense to them, even though that will be technically inconsistent?
• For that matter, where do US labor law things go, like harassment policies and conflict management?  I think I am resisting "labor law" because it doesnt sound happy and nice like it seems we try to make all HR things be.
• We have how-to system articles like, How to change your HR data -- does this go in an "HR Systems" category or the "Employee Information and Records" category?  The HR Systems category is giving me a headache for all kinds of reasons!
• Similarly, how to sign your performance review -- this is a system function but would an employee look under "HR Systems" or a "Learning, Development, and Performance" category?

I'm not looking for answers to my specific questions, just looking for examples of what you have done.

Thank you!

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

Just curious if you all have a Service Manager or Process Manager at your company?

My own advice would be to try and keep it as "Generic" as you can. The more specific you get, the harder it's going to be to get things to fit properly. For example, this link shows you documentation provided by ServiceNow that shows some examples of HR KB Categories: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-hr-service-delivery/page/product/human-resources/concept/h... this is vague/generic on purpose, it allows you to sort of scale as you go along. Here's some more HR topic categories: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-hr-service-delivery/page/product/human-resources/referen...

Our KB pretty much mirrors the same categories found in incidents, etc. This allows end-users as easier experience because they are already accustomed to one naming mechanism...and we're all about easier end-user experience.

Hopefully this gives you some idea, but ideally, you'd want to bounce this off your Service/Process Manager, if you have one, and see what they think.

Please mark my reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Tracey Scott]

Hi Amy,

I know what you mean! When we implemented our knowledge base we faced the same challenges. We operate in three different countries (Canada, U.S. and Mexico) as well as multiple jurisdictions within those, each of which has its own requirements and nuances.

From the beginning our focus was to keep it simple, knowing that we could build out the categories even further over time. That being said, we wanted to ensure our initial category structure was clean, comprehensive and not overlapping so that it could be expanded upon later without having to undo any original categorization of KBAs.

When determining our HR knowledge categories we focused on how our employees would look for information. The search engine is very powerful so we wanted to drive the behaviour to search for content rather than following breadcrumbs. However, we know that behaviours can take time to change, and we also have a significant amount of HR content (don't we all?!) so we implemented two levels of categorization to support those users who like to drill down / use breadcrumbs.

Our goal was to have only one place for each piece of information and for that place to be as intuitive as possible for the end user. That - the end user experience - remained our primary driver throughout the build and continues to be our primary focus today. In HR we seem to have a lot of 'HR speak' that makes sense to us but doesn't necessarily translate to those outside of HR all that well! We engaged some of our non-HR colleagues as well as our Corporate Communications team throughout the build as well, to validate our approach.

Some examples of our categories (and sub-categories) are:

- Careers (Career Opportunities, Employee Referral Program, Recruitment)

- Employment Practices (Allowances, Leaves)

- HR Contacts (no sub-category)

- Performance and Development (Development, Onboarding, Performance)

The other approach we took that's working really well for us is in how we addressed our jurisdictional needs as well as KBA types (e.g. Quick Reference Guides, etc.). We did not incorporate jurisdictions or document types into the categorization structure. For both, we addressed this by creating naming conventions, often including jurisdictions or document types by title suffix (e.g. "Title - Canada" or "Title - U.S.", "Title - QRG".)

Doing so makes it easy for employees to search for what they need by jurisdiction or by document type. (So often employees know they're looking for a QRG, for instance, but they can't remember what it's called. This enables them to simply search for 'QRG'.)

We're keen to explore knowledge blocking as we anticipate it will address most of our jurisdictional needs in the future. Hopefully when that time comes we'll be able to remove the jurisdictional suffix from our KBA naming convention. In the meantime though, our current system seems to be working well for our employees.

Your last question actually illustrates a lot of our approach that I've mentioned above. You asked:

• Similarly, how to sign your performance review -- this is a system function but would an employee look under "HR Systems" or a "Learning, Development, and Performance" category?

We have a category titled "Performance and Development" with a sub-category for Performance. We also have a category for our HR Systems content with sub-categories within as well. We elected to put the 'signing your performance review' (which we call "Acknowledgement and Completion") in the Performance sub-category. That specific content is captured as a QRG, which is attached to the knowledge base article for that phase of our performance management cycle. 

Same as you, many of our processes and programs tie into systems such as SAP and SuccessFactors. To help us decide where to put this content, again, we thought of the employee perspective. What are they looking for and, most of all, why are they looking for it? In this case, they are trying to finalize their performance review. So, we tied it to performance because that was the driving force or trigger behind the search.

(While much of our content could be categorized into the HR Systems section, we try to prevent categorizing KBAs there because it just doesn't seem to be as intuitive to our end user and the volume of content would be so significant our employees could get lost in it all.)

I hope this helps! All the best to you on your knowledge base build.

Tracey