A successful company needs a team who has the skills and knowledge to help it survive and thrive. The knowledge within your workforce is as valuable an asset as your premises, products, and services.
Effective knowledge sharing within your team is a way to make your workplace as up-skilled, up-to-date, and well-trained as possible. Utilizing the store of expertise that each team member holds, and ensuring they have the opportunity, time, and tools to pass this knowledge on to their colleagues, is essential.
Not only is knowledge sharing a vital strategy to enhance workplace productivity, it can also reduce your firm’s training budget, improve staff morale and make your business more competitive.
Let’s look at why knowledge sharing is so valuable for business, and how to improve knowledge sharing in your workplace.
What Is Knowledge Sharing?
In basic terms, knowledge sharing means one team member passing on information, skills, and experience to their colleagues. Sometimes this is a formalized and structured ‘teaching’ session, but it can also be informal, or done via online forums, in-person-get-togethers or mentoring.
Knowledge sharing is an effective way of enhancing business communication, as well as training staff.
Looking at it another way, knowledge sharing is an essential form of collaboration and teamwork. As the chart below shows, most employees view collaboration within a company as a positive and beneficial process.
A workforce that communicates, collaborates and shares its knowledge is one that has the best chance of rolling with the changes and challenges of a competitive and ever evolving, global business world.
Some Benefits of Knowledge Sharing
One statistic gives the number of respondents who blame poor communication for failings within companies as 86%. Good communication, on the other hand, including knowledge sharing techniques can enhance employee productivity and create a culture of problem-solving and growth.
Let’s look in detail at the benefits of knowledge sharing on employee development and business success.
Retains knowledge and reduces costs
A culture of learning and sharing knowledge has one key benefit: expertise and skills don’t leave the company when an individual moves on. If that person has shared what they know and helped train colleagues, valuable knowledge and know-how is retained.
A culture of knowledge sharing reduces training costs. Formal training sessions can be costly, and also take time away from daily business tasks. But it doesn’t have to be formal training like that, just an informal question like, for instance, “How to unsubscribe from emails”, can lead staff to share collective knowledge and together fill any gaps, being far less costly in terms of money and time.
Builds community and engagement
Colleagues who communicate and share knowledge regularly, form better bonds and working relationships. This builds a sense of community within the business and raises levels of staff engagement and loyalty, because individuals feel part of something, and are committed to the company’s success.
Boosts efficiency and performance
Knowledge sharing means continuous learning, this means that employees are ongoingly helped to do their jobs better and improve performance.
Well trained employees make fewer errors, are more productive, and waste less time through mistakes or inexperience. Managers with well-trained teams also waste less time answering questions, and intervening when staff run into tasks they lack the skills for.
To make the whole operation more efficient and productive it’s also important to know where valuable knowledge is gathered in the first place.
Even if your company is using technology such as interactive voice response systems, it is important to determine quickly if the caller wants to contact the billing department, the technical support team, or simply wants to talk to a human operator. Up to date knowledge enhances performance and helps the business run smoothly.
Six Effective Ways To Improve Knowledge Sharing
We’ve looked at the main advantages in broad terms of knowledge sharing. Now we’ll look at ways to facilitate and increase knowledge sharing within a business.
1. Promote a knowledge sharing culture
Team leaders who want to encourage the sharing of knowledge as one of their organizational goals must ensure the whole workforce is involved.
Knowledge sharing should become best practice in every department and at every level. The organizational culture of the business should encourage and facilitate knowledge sharing from the top down. It’s vital for managers to lead by example, and share their knowledge with each other and their teams.
It’s also important to include remote workers, and part-time employees. This may require specific channels and platforms for staff to communicate ideas and share skills.
Remember to reward and motivate staff who have important expertise they can share.
This could mean that staff who use some of their own free time to teach their colleagues could be given time off, bonuses, or other rewards.
Encouraging staff to share their knowledge base should become something that is praised and talked about at staff appraisals and reviews. Make it clear that sharing knowledge is an achievement that is admired and valued as a contribution to the business.
2. Create spaces for knowledge sharing
Having encouraged your staff to share their knowledge and ensured that your business has a culture of peer to peer tuition and teaching, it’s important to have the environment to support this.
Whether these are physical spaces or virtual spaces, employees need places to get together, talk, and share information. Your knowledge sharing spaces will need the right facilities, this may depend to an extent on the type of business you run, but anything from white boards, to VR headsets should be available.
In terms of the physical office space, audit your facilities and the layout, assess whether it’s really conducive to knowledge sharing. If you are unsure, ask your staff for their views, and encourage suggestions about how to improve the physical environment.
Many offices are fairly tightly packed in terms of work stations and equipment. Space can feel cluttered and busy, and staff can find they are shuttered off into cubicles and separate corners. Make sure you have an open, comfortable space, with chairs and tables arranged in a way that is sociable and right for communication and exchanging ideas.
For remote teams, make sure you have an equally comfortable and user-friendly virtual space. Encourage in-house staff to visit this space and join in with remote staff chats and sessions.
To further enhance connectivity and recognition among team members, consider incorporating