How to facilitate knowledge sharing within a company | 5 steps to create an effective knowledge management system

Do specific knowledge and skill sets you need to keep your business thriving occasionally evaporate into the ether when A-star employees leave? Stressful, right? You’re going to need to make knowledge sharing a priority. Fortunately, we’ve got a 5-step system you can take to not only safeguard institutional knowledge, but ensure all the employees that need it have access to it.

Not effectively facilitating knowledge sharing within your company can cause all kinds of issues. From losing pertinent institutional knowledge, to operational inefficiencies when employees don’t know the correct channel to go through when they need to be upskilled.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly as your business grows. Knowledge goes from being in the hands of a select few by necessity, to suddenly needing to be distributed across 10 new people, then 20 new people, until suddenly your workforce hits the 100s and the chosen few are stretched thin, with tasks going weeks without progressing due to annual leave and mass confusion.

1. Identify knowledge worth harvesting

The first step is to identify critical knowledge areas. Think: if you needed to restart your business from scratch with a completely new workforce, what key information would you need that a qualified new hire wouldn’t walk through the door knowing, or be able to figure out in a couple of minutes? This is the knowledge worth harvesting.

You also have to accept, particularly when you operate at scale, that you as the business owner won’t necessarily know everything that’s needed. Your marketing department, your IT department, your HR department, and so on and so forth, will all have key knowledge and skills that would create operational inefficiencies if they were lost.

Conduct a systematic knowledge audit with all of your department heads to pinpoint expertise that needs preservation. Focus on capturing proprietary company knowledge, unique skills, and best practices that are essential to the company’s success. (For example, knowing how to use proprietary software and hardware is knowledge worth harvesting, whereas being able to attach a document to an email doesn’t count.)

Pro tip: You can easily customise Surveys on Drimify to include every member of your organisation in your knowledge audit. While your department heads will be the best people to liaise with, the bigger your company, the easier it is for little but important things to slip through the cracks.

Sometimes, the only person who knows how to do a specific thing upon which a lot rests, and even knows that said specific thing needs doing, is the person whose job it is, so everyone’s input is valuable in this exercise. This is highly possible if a new department head is brought in externally, and has to learn their area.

You could even include open questions in your Survey to ask people what knowledge or skills they think are missing that would make the organisation operate more smoothly.

2. Organise and categorise knowledge

Once you’ve done your audit, you need to organise the knowledge into categories and tags that align with the company’s structure and processes. The people who possess the institutional knowledge and proprietary skills that you need to organise – get them to write the processes and information down blow-by-blow, and show their department head or the most appropriate colleague how it works in practice.

You should create a database of this collated information on your company’s intranet, and make it easy for employees to navigate to find relevant information.

Pro tip: Give someone the responsibility of keeping it up to date. Out of date knowledge and approaches can be as harmful as losing knowledge, particularly if a change was made because of updates in legislation..

3. Create effective programmes of interactive content to help employees learn more effectively

So you know what needs to be known, you know what you need people to be able to do, and it’s all together in an easy to navigate knowledge hub-type repository. If you’re this far, that’s excellent progress. The boring stuff is kind of out of the way.

However, even the combined literary might of Ernest Hemingway, George Elliot, and Margaret Atwood aren’t going to be able to make tomes of institutional knowledge engaging, nor effectively teach your people how to apply that knowledge in their jobs through the written word alone. This is where gamification comes in.

Developing engaging gamified learning programmes will allow employees to more effectively engage with the material. Combining various formats like videos, interactive modules, and Quizzes allows you to more effectively cater to different learning styles. Not everyone can just read and assimilate information. Gamified courses also allow you to pose work-specific scenarios, and ask questions that encourage users to apply that knowledge to those scenarios.

Pro tip: Modern gamified courses, which you can easily create by customising tried and tested game engines when putting together a Dynamic Path™, give real-time data for every user action. By paying attention to this, you can assess a user’s understanding of the subject matter they’ve engaged with, and the effectiveness of your gamified course, making it easy to improve and optimise over time.

Another option is to integrate customised Quizzes and other learning games into existing learning apps you may be using, or embedding them at the end of articles and instructionals inside your knowledge base or learning management system (LMS).

A platform like Drimify has the versatility to allow you to create an entire learning journey, or complement and refine an existing pathway.

4. Market to the right programmes to the right employees

You read that right. You need to market them. Just because you’ve made the most effective gamified courses in your area doesn’t mean anything if people don’t buy into the process and make time to engage with them. You also need to know who needs to play through which courses.

The best way to do this is to make them an integral part of quarterly performance reviews. Understanding the skill gaps and interests of individual employees will allow your HR department to personalise programme recommendations.

You can also utilise internal communication channels like newsletters and team meetings to spread awareness about available learning and upskilling opportunities.

5. Create ambassadors, experts, or mentors in specific business areas

Designating key individuals as knowledge ambassadors or mentors in specific domains is a great way to ensure that they’re constantly updated, and constantly promoted internally.

These experts would take responsibility for preserving and sharing knowledge within their areas of expertise, and could act as quick points of reference for other employees.

Key takeaway

We’ve all worked in a place where a single colleague in a seemingly obscure position was the first point of reference for everyone, no matter where in the company they worked, and how far removed, they knew said employees name, and that no matter their issue, that was the person to call to get it resolved. And when they’re on annual leave: chaos. And when they hand in their notice: panic.

By putting in place an effective knowledge management system, you won’t lose institutional knowledge when key members of staff move on to new opportunities. Our 5-step programme detailed here offers an easily actionable approach across all industries to setting up your own approach.

Pro tip: Don’t hesitate to set this up. You’re in business to succeed, and that typically means growth, and scaling up your headcount. It’s easier to set up when it’s a challenge on the horizon than when it’s a challenge that you’ve passed and has now become a problem.