The value of a coherent corporate knowledge share strategy.

Introduction.

Every company needs to share certain types of information for employees. HR departments are required to disseminate a lot of information across a company, and it needs to stick. Procedures need to be followed, and policies need to be adhered to. Managers need to ensure efficient onboarding and performance of their direct reports.

When new staff come into the company, what avenues are available to them to get up to speed? Going forward, what resources are available for them to find answers to their problems? There will be plenty of answers on Google of course, but what about the things that are done in a certain way in that company?

The Problem.

No company is for life anymore. You can see the correlation, As more people from newer generations into the workforce, there has been an inverse effect on time spent at a company. Millenials will look to change jobs more frequently than Baby Boomers [1] and while Gen Z shows signs that it’s less willing to be forward on this front, while the Boomer generation begins to leave the workplace, the proportions will switch.

With more frequent changing of roles, there’s an increased pressure on corporate HR and recruitment departments to make their onboarding procedures efficient and for managers to get their staff up to speed to get maximum value from their hire.

Self Serve HR.

Smaller HR departments can easily get overrun with work, especially manual . Having a centralised repository for important HR information to reduce load on the department is crucial.

Think about the policies and procedures most useful to your staff. Create a repository, internal wiki or a knowledge library and put them in there. The next job is publicity. Once everything is in there, the staff need to be made aware and reinforced that answers will be there when they forget. Another thing to think about is getting new starters sold on going to your repository for their answers before HR.

Professional Growth.

Having a method of up-skilling junior and new members of your team that involves others from around the company is a great way to foster a supportive environment. Set up a mechanism for people to ask work related questions with a stipulation of only serious responses. This could be a group on Facebook Workplace, a #help channel on slack or equivalent, or an email list. In effect, it requires a forum where a question can be asked, with comments and discussion below. The idea is that as more questions are asked, it becomes a searchable resource for people looking for similar answers. The software industry has been doing this for years since the advent of StackOverflow and it’s become a very important tool for developers across the world.

By decentralising to improve this side of their work rather than centralising it, you’re reducing the amount of time taken answering questions and allowing both manager and report to focus on being productive for the company.

The Value.

The value of having a coherent strategy is simple. Internal information sources being available to employees saves time. Less time is wasted on asking and responding to questions where answers already exist.

Knowledge becomes self-serve, from the people who know it.Your managers spend less time answering questions. HR spend less time answering questions. The days of knowledge being in the head of a manager and gradually imparted down to the notepad of their direct reports have gone. It’s an obsolete process.

With documentation practices from the world of technology being more increasingly adopted in other industries, it’s simply not enough anymore to not have a plan for sharing knowledge.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/better/business/what-millennials-can-teach-you-about-asking-raise-ncna852351