In today’s digital workplace, knowledge sharing encompasses much more than passing along a few “pearls of wisdom” to the new employee at the company. In order to enable knowledge sharing you must reduce the barriers, or minimize and create “frictionless” communication for users when they’re engaged in either sharing or finding a solution. In some cases, that means replacing clunky procedures and technology that get in the way with streamlined collaboration.
The deliverables and proposals produced by a professional services firm, for example, tend to be very document-centric projects. In this digital workplace, improving knowledge management around documents would likely result in significant gains in performance and value. Investing in platforms that facilitate document management, file-sharing and version control would likely prove to be a good use of resources, because they help minimize friction in knowledge sharing.
The success of a knowledge management initiative, however, requires more than investing in the latest technology. There has to be a culture of transparency at the organization, or those tools are likely to go unused.
For experienced employees to share their knowledge across the organization, they need an incentive, such as reciprocity. They need some certainty that, “If I put something in, I’ll also get something out of it.” If the employees also see value in gaining access to the information others are sharing, that’s a very concrete reciprocal incentive.
The incentive to share knowledge should be tailored to an organization’s culture and demographics. In situations where developing a reputation as an expert within the organization is a significant incentive, people readily share their expertise by posting on discussion boards and Yammer feeds to cultivate this status. Judging the effectiveness of this motivation is difficult, and its value is going to be determined largely by the culture of the organization.
Once you’ve made sure your digital workplace has expectations and incentives for knowledge sharing, the next step is to evaluate business processes. In the earlier example of a professional services firm, that organization’s knowledge management processes might include either a manual or automated process for tagging documents with metadata to make sure documents are easy to find.
Developing clear practices around document coauthoring, too, offers huge value by eliminating multiple versions of documents scattered around the organization and by speeding up the editing process. Consistency is key here, as you can’t have some people posting to SharePoint while others are circulating copies via email.
These processes, in turn, are then supported by a wide range of knowledge management tools, such as intranets, wikis and social collaboration tools like Yammer. For many organizations, part of the solution is to use an intranet or document library as a central depository. The other part is allowing users to share knowledge in less formal ways that integrate with their daily activities and communication preferences.
Let’s say that the employees at your organization use email, Yammer and wikis as their primary communication devices. How could you make it as easy as possible to share knowledge across these platforms? Eliminating friction here is the key to user adoption, as well as smooth communication and collaboration. One reason wikis are nice is that they offer a very easy, non-technical way to accumulate organizational knowledge. Since everybody is able to contribute, a single person who knows a particular system well enough to update the information doesn’t dominate the content. Wikis are a simple, unstructured way for any business user to update and maintain on an ongoing basis.
In the end, knowledge sharing is vital to a healthy digital workplace. Forward-looking organizations support this practice by making it easy for employees to interact around sharing or finding a solution.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by contacting Portal Solutions.
