Is knowledge sharing the secret ingredient to a highly productive, agile, and innovative workplace?
In the recently published Forrester Consulting Opportunity Snapshot, it is revealed that 63% of employees are wasting time either searching for company information or reaching out to the right colleague to help discover the answer or information they need. The report further highlights that “equipping employees with the right tools” not only fosters collaboration but can also lift sales by around 20%.
Fostering a highly collaborative and communicative culture in the workplace requires a strong knowledge sharing strategy that combines human innovation with technological support.
Yet, how can such a strategy be achieved? Let’s take a look at four ways you can improve knowledge sharing at your company.
Invest in tech-based knowledge sharing solutions
Effective knowledge sharing in today’s modern era of digitization starts with technology.
For organizations relying on outdated knowledge management strategies, embracing tech-based tools and solutions can be the key to enhancing overall connectivity between team members.
With the right mix of capabilities — such as automation and codified knowledge — your company can easily establish a more adaptable and flexible team.
Here are three aspects of tech-based knowledge sharing solutions to consider:
- Going Beyond LMS: You need a tech-based solution that can go beyond the capabilities of a standard learning management system (or LMS for short). While LMS solutions often provide powerful capabilities for workplace learning, they typically fail to offer the comprehensive oversight and control you need to make company knowledge more accessible. As a result, you need a knowledge sharing solution that encompasses the entirety of your business needs.
- Increasing Personalization: Personalization is the name of the game when it comes to increasing knowledge sharing throughout your organization. No two employees think exactly alike, meaning that each team member requires different tools and resources for accessing company information. By choosing tech-based solutions that prioritize personalization, you can ensure your team is fully enabled to share knowledge in the ways that work best for them.
- Involving Your Entire Team: Connecting your teams across the entire business is the key to sharing knowledge effectively, as well as opening up new pathways for feedback and collaboration. A team that communicates well, collaborates well — and it’s up to you to implement the best solutions you can find for simplifying communication processes.
Connect your learning & knowledge tools to a central platform
To enhance knowledge sharing in the workplace, it is crucial to streamline information into a single, highly accessible source. This requires an optimized platform solution that enables you to integrate and connect a variety of different tools, including both learning and knowledge sharing tools.
Creating a seamless flow of information within your business requires three main platform components:
- Simplified Discovery: A centralized knowledge base can provide you with a well-organized and thorough source of information that is easy to search for specific facts or data. From connecting with your top experts to creating a catalog of searchable learning content, your chosen platform should provide you with everything you need for simplified discovery.
- Information Tracking: Along with aggregating all information into a central source, it is also crucial to have tracking and reporting capabilities. The ability to track information across your business is vital to assessing and comparing different metrics, such as employee engagement and overall productivity. Plus, your chosen platform should also make it easy to generate detailed reports and visualizations.
- Automated Data Gathering: Tracking and discovering internal information is not enough — you also need the power to gather new data and information automatically. Through customizable and automated feedback tools — such as automated surveys — you can connect with your team in a timely manner and gather all the relevant information you need to improve future learning programs and your approach to knowledge sharing.
Create an accessible catalog of learning content
Building a vast repository of learning content is essential to get all of your team members on the same page and enabled to do their best work. Yet, your learning content is only as effective as it is accessible.
To allow your entire team to benefit from internal knowledge sharing, you must organize and present your company’s learning content in a user-friendly manner. This requires the proper digital environment for storing, posting, and accessing this content.
Creating a highly accessible catalog of learning content is best achieved through a comprehensive learning and development (L&D) platform.
With the right platform, you can not only categorize and tag content for easy discovery but also couple this with other search tools that help users connect learning content with relevant business experts. By doing so, it is easier for your employees to determine who to turn to for further guidance or mentorship, as well as simplifying the process of finding potential instructors and mentors for your L&D team.
Enable real-time data analytics & performance measurement
Truly effective knowledge sharing requires you to keep your knowledge base up to date on the latest business developments and insights — and this requires real-time data and performance measurement.
Data analytics help you to make sense of valuable information gleaned through performance measurement — the practice of tracking specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that show a quantifiable change within your team (such as increased engagement or job satisfaction).
From a technology perspective, enabling real-time data analytics and performance measurement requires a few key tools and capabilities:
- Analytics Dashboard: First and foremost, you need a user-friendly dashboard that displays all of the results gathered for your specific metrics, such as program completion rates and skill proficiency. This type of dashboard helps you to quickly identify problems within your current learning programs and update the knowledge base accordingly.
- Automated Feedback: Gathering feedback from employees is essential to create a robust knowledge sharing ecosystem. As mentioned earlier, tools like automated surveys and other automatic feedback mechanisms can be essential for discovering the successes and pain points within your current platform or another knowledge sharing solution.
- Adaptive Learning Techniques: After you have collected, measured, and analyzed key data points and feedback, you need the ability to adjust your learning programs and platform to reflect your latest findings. The platform you choose for knowledge sharing needs to be highly adaptable, allowing you to actively evolve your knowledge base in real-time.
Centralize your expertise with PlusPlus
Improving knowledge sharing at your company requires a multifaceted approach.
While tech-based solutions are often the key to achieving codified knowledge, you need to choose a platform with the capabilities to look at information from all sides. From gathering and analyzing data to collecting feedback from employees, the ideal platform will provide you with all the tools you need to not only aggregate this information into a central source but also make it highly searchable.
At PlusPlus, our Employee Enablement Platform has all the knowledge sharing capabilities you need to improve communication and collaboration at your company. With PlusPlus, you can establish a single source of truth that enables simple tracking and data analysis to help you improve your business.
