It’s important because it enables employees to do their jobs effectively. Facilitating the sharing of that knowledge (while avoiding knowledge silos) ensures your workforce have equal access to the information they need to do their jobs.
Staying ahead of the curve is incredibly important as marketplaces become more and more saturated. Consumers know they can go elsewhere and so do employees – which is a problem when they take certain information with them.
Building and sharing employee knowledge in your organisation is crucially beneficial for a few reasons.
- Build decision-making capabilities: Access to the right resources at key moments in time is critical for leaders when making decisions. This rings even more true when there is an excess of irrelevant data in front of them and they’re on a deadline.
- Create a more collaborative culture: It’s important to ensure knowledge sharing is an underlying current in workplace culture. What’s done at the top trickles down and what’s done amongst a team is internalised by new hires.
- Reduce employee attrition and turnover: The more resignations, the more knowledge and experience lost if it is not properly captured. A central point for storing learning demonstrates the value of collaboration and the unique knowledge your employees possess.
- Support learning in the flow of work: Peer-to-peer learning is an important factor of on-the-job training, which is in turn a hands-on method of imparting job-specific knowledge. Additionally, employees who are encouraged to learn are more willing and able to meet their organisation’s needs and objectives.
Creating a fluid and active knowledge management process in the workplace begins with asking yourself how knowledge is discovered and stored within your organisation, and how could it be incorporated into your culture. This can translate into action steps.
Step 1: Define your touchpoints
There’ll be multiple sources of knowledge and multiple channels for it. You’ll want to figure out the touch points it originates from, moves through and is stored in. This puts boundaries around your knowledge assets, making it a whole lot easier to define what is mission critical.
All together, this gives you an idea of what’s valuable, sustainable, impossible to replicate and powering your competitive advantage. And this gives big data its value, justifying the cost of managing it.
Step 2: Create a single source repository
All organisations accrue a vast amount of information and expertise, which is why it’s important to store and organise them in a structured manner. This can be as simple as standardising writing and keeping electronic copies of routinely used documents.
All of this can and should live in a platform that is already used daily by employees. The advantage here is that you’re not introducing something new or complicated to their work lives but making better use of an existing tool.
Step 3: Establish knowledge sharing practices
Some say that knowledge needs to be shared because all knowledge is created and built from existing knowledge. If employees see what they know as contributing to the greater (intellectual capital) goals of their organisation, they are likely to treat their knowledge as an asset that is meant to be shared.
A big part of fostering a culture is creating an environment in which people feel psychologically safe to share ideas and information, both implicitly and explicitly. In this way, you could say knowledge sharing has two purposes:
- Creating space for social learning between employees
- Having subject matter experts routinely teach others.
For a more in-depth look at building employee knowledge, have a read of the full article.
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