How does your business share it’s knowledge?
How would you rank the below options for the best method of sharing knowledge within your business?
Documentation
Emails
Meetings
Videos
Before we explore the options in more detail, it’s important to understand the difference between information and knowledge. Information is a collection of facts or details on a subject, while knowledge is the understanding, interpretation, and application of that information. Information is derived from data, which is the raw material, and knowledge is built upon information.
Meetings
Meetings are a great way for sharing ideas and team collaboration, but to extract information/knowledge held by individuals can often prove unnecessary and time consuming.
Firstly, they create an instant bottleneck, if you are reliant on having to schedule a meeting to extract information/knowledge from either an individual or team it relies on finding a time when everyone is available, which could take hours, days or weeks. Holidays, illness and resignations may all mean that key people are not available when the knowledge is sought.
Secondly, have you ever stopped to consider the cost of a meeting? Whilst some meetings are invaluable, if you stop and add up the time and the approximate cost per hour for each of the attendees the costs can quickly start to spiral.
Have you ever asked for some information from an individual for them to suggest a meeting because it’s quite ‘technical’. You’ll end up sitting through a 30-minute meeting after the inevitable small talk only to discover that the technical information was not that complicated after all. You ask at the end of the meeting whether there is any documentation to support the information shared, only to be told that the individual is too busy and they are unlikely to get around to it. However, you leave the meeting feeling that if they’d spent the 30 minutes producing a document to capture the information shared in the meeting, then not only would you have that information to take away with you, but it would also be available to the rest of the company, negating the need for further meetings with the said individual freeing up their time.
The above is something so obvious but why are individuals so reluctant to document their knowledge so it can be shared?
Insecurity and fear about their position?
They enjoy the feeling of being needed and having power over others?
Stressed and overworked so unable to think logically about problems?
Poor processes and procedures within the business for creating documentation?
Emails
Emails are a great way of sharing knowledge as a short-term solution and do allow some form of information/knowledge capture, but ultimately in the long term they are no more successful that meetings. If someone has a question and you have time to document an answer then if the recipient is an efficient person, they’re likely to store it in their own personal email folder and keep it for when they need it next. However, there are three problems associated with this:
It creates silos of knowledge not accessible to the whole company
If the information changes or becomes out of date, the recipient may be unaware and continue sharing incorrect information/knowledge
The recipient may continuously ask the creator whether the information is still relevant and up to date before they share the information with other sources, clogging up inboxes and creating unnecessary admin work
Documentation and Videos
Creating documentation and videos have both advantages and disadvantages, but even with the best documents and video content, making them easily accessible to all within your business is the secret to successful knowledge sharing. Have you ever created a document only to find out that one already exists that you weren’t aware of!? Or you stumble across a document that would have saved you hours of independent research had you known it existed?
Documents are great for the majority of information/knowledge sharing content provided they are clear and concise and where appropriate accompanied by diagrams. However, a 30 second video can show the equivalent detail as 10 – 20 pages of document content in a far clearer and easier way to follow. For both documents and videos its often better to create shorter documents and content. When they require updating, replacing a 30 second video with new content is much easier, then having to redo a 30-minute video due to a very small change.
Search culture
We’re all guilty of using a search option to quickly find the information that we need, we simply go to Google and type what we’re looking for. The problem with this method is that you can’t search for something if you don’t know it exists? Multiple documents pertaining the same information may still end up being created but saved with different titles or tags.
At AICOR we’d recommend a clear taxonomy to your knowledge database. Assigning someone in each team to take responsibility for the folder structure used is really important. If team members don’t know where to save a document, then they can revert to the team member in charge to seek guidance. By having a well thought through taxonomy allows everyone in your company to browse categories so they can explore all the content across your entire business.
How many of your teams are guilty of creating really good examples but locking down access to just their department or even worse Team or channel due to the participants who originally attended a call? We’d also recommend having the default option as public to everyone in your business.
The above is a huge topic and we’re only just scratching the surface. If your business’s greatest asset is the knowledge held within your employees' heads, and you need help in ensuring that it is appropriately captured, stored and shared within your business then AICOR can help you on this journey.
