How to Promote Knowledge Sharing in the Workplace
The following is part of a series of guest articles on improving the workplace. This post is from Hafez Adel, Marketing Associate at ReTargeter, a self-serve advertising solution that provides retargeting to brands of all sizes.
One of the most potent assets a corporation has is the combined knowledge and expertise of its employees. Unfortunately, much of this wisdom goes untapped in the day-to-day operation of a company. While people routinely apply their intelligence to perform their duties, they don’t often take the time to share their knowledge with their colleagues outside of specific task-oriented settings. As a result, they miss out on invaluable opportunities to share their ideas, learn new skills, and enrich one another as employees and as individuals.
A culture of knowledge sharing can’t be created overnight, but with the right values, tools and habits, any company can harness its team’s talents and increase the intelligence of the organization as a whole.
Values
Workplace knowledge sharing is only sustainable if all of the stakeholders—employees and management alike—firmly believe in its value. That’s why it’s crucial to instill a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and humility in the office to establish the conditions in which knowledge sharing can thrive. Curiosity is important because it discourages intellectual complacency, and challenges people to continuously learn and educate themselves as part of their daily routine. A spirit of collaboration helps employees think of success as a group achievement, thus providing an incentive for them to help and teach each other. Humility is absolutely necessary because it creates an environment in which people feel comfortable discussing their ideas and fosters respect for opposing viewpoints. Without humility, candid conversations can turn into opportunities for one-upmanship and bragging, which undermines group cohesion and discourages people from sharing in the future.
Tools
From a knowledge sharing perspective, we’re fortunate to live in a time when communication and collaborative technologies are abundant—there’s no need to shout across cubicles anymore. Knowledge sharing tools fall under two general categories: communication and collaboration.
Communication
The following tools can help your team keep the lines of communication open and rapidly disseminate information throughout your organization:
Chat/Instant Messaging: Chat programs such as Google Chat and Windows Live Messenger allow employees to send each other quick messages without interrupting their workflow the way a phone call or an in-person visit would. They are also useful for asking brief questions when a full e-mail isn’t warranted, as they enable the recipient to answer the question at their leisure without having the added stress of another unread message in their inbox.
Enterprise Social Software: If you’d like more robust functionality than a chat program can provide, than you may be interested in the new breed of enterprise social software which has cropped up over the last few years. Services like Yammer and Socialcast bring the power of social media to your corporate network, giving employees the ability to post status updates, create discussion threads, and initiate multi-person chat sessions. These services are especially useful in workplaces staffed with digital natives, who are already accustomed to using social media to share and communicate with others.
Collaboration
If communication software is seen as a viable alternative to phone calls and meetings, then collaboration software can be thought of as a replacement for whiteboards, file cabinets, and much more. The following services give your team the ability to brainstorm, share, and work together like never before:
Google Docs: Think Microsoft Office, but in the cloud. Google Docs allow multiple people to create and edit documents in real-time, with built-in color coding and revision histories to help keep track of who contributed what, and when they contributed it. Better yet, Google recently integrated chat functionality directly into Google Docs so team members can discuss the document as they’re working on it.
Wiki: As Wikipedia has demonstrated, a wiki is a great option for creating a central repository of information that’s editable by anyone. With enough people contributing, a corporate wiki can become an invaluable resource for tapping into organizational knowledge, while also ensuring that important facts and figures don’t get lost in the stream of daily activity. Some popular choices for deploying a wiki for your company include MediaWiki (also used by Wikipedia) and PBWorks.
Habits
One of the biggest challenges of instituting knowledge sharing practices in the workplace is that it’s difficult to sustain. When tools like Google Docs and Yammer are introduced, there’s usually an initial rush of enthusiasm, followed by a rapid decline in usage. The most effective way to combat this trend is by embedding knowledge sharing into the company’s DNA and making it part of employees’ routines. Perhaps this means encouraging people to share a few interesting and relevant articles every week a to help keep everyone up-to-date with the latest industry developments and keep the flow of information going. Or maybe it means scheduling time every so often for employees to gather together and learn a new skill or subject area from one of their colleagues. Whatever tactic you choose to employ, it’s clear that promoting knowledge-sharing in the workplace is not a one-time event—it’s an ongoing process that requires a fundamental shift in how managers perceives employee communication, and how employees understand their responsibilities towards managers and towards one another. If instituted correctly, a culture of knowledge sharing can build more tight-knit teams, improve inter-departmental communication, and raise the intelligence of the organization as a whole.
hammers photo by juniorvelo
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