Knowledge Management and Smoking

After a long break, I would like to come back to you with another rather controversial opinion. Namely, it is about smoking at workplace from the perspective of Knowledge Management...

In the past when smoking was allowed everywhere and at all times, apart from the health concerns, it was of little or no significance to Knowledge Management. Yes, if your key employee, the bearer of knowledge, contacts, visions and strategies, was a heavy smoker, it did mean a considerable risk from the point of view of losing this ''source of knowledge'', but as a phenomenon for transferring and sharing of information, his or her smoking would not have had any impact.

With gradual banning of smoking at workplace though, it has become, on the contrary, an important and quite surprisingly, completely neglected factor. The emergence of smoking rooms, corners of the buildings, spaces for the outcasts... At these places, several times a day, people with the same vices, the mark of Cain, meet up and discuss what is new, what people in which department are doing, how projects are progressing etc. In comparison to the discussions over coffee and snacks, the smoking area discussions, to a much greater degree, are debates about work and workplace, and mainly, cutting across the company hierarchy. Often discussed are even the details, that would not be discussed among others, i.e. not outcast smokers, just to play it safe. The smoking corner blurs the differences among the positions in the company. It is a place where often, the ''janitor'' chats with a member of the management in a completely open manner and does not fear.

We are currently approaching the ''final'' stage of the campaign against smoking and even those secluded places where the employee could quickly have his nicotine dose are gradually disappearing. And thus are disappearing those unique places for transferring and sharing of information and knowledge. What we are left with are growing number of employees who shiver nervously and scratch the places where his nicotine patch became unstuck.

If we compare the time wasted away drinking coffee and chit-chatting about ourselves etc to several ten-minute cigarette breaks with quick debates, I am certain that we are talking about very different numbers and diametrically different impacts on sharing of information at the workplace...

And now cast the stones at me...