The first day of a new job, new team or new project is always full of details. Once a question has been answered, three new questions emerge, while others seem to be concerned about everything. Senior employees are no exception. Even when a company has been in service for many years, each time a major change occurs, it is once again in a state of uncertainty. This "not knowing" is inevitable when organizations are accustomed to hiding information in shared drives, in written documents or in the brain of an employee, whether you are a newcomer or a veteran. A culture of information barriers slows down the project, forcing staff to search frequently and frustratedly for the knowledge they need, and also taking up a great deal of expert time, forcing them to answer the same questions over and over again. In the absence of effective means of storing and obtaining the required information, staff will eventually move forward as if they were in the dark. A survey conducted by the american management association showed that 36 per cent of employees indicated that they were “nearly aware” of intra-corporate dynamics. Fifty-five per cent of the staff stated that they were only “frequently” informed。
As the atlassian team leader in charge of technical client management said, "you may find old data or old knowledge no longer useful," she explained, "you may not find the answers you want at all. Even if they were there, you might not find them."
In essence, blocking the knowledge base throughout the company is a waste of time, and time (emphasis added) is money。
What is knowledge sharing
It is not necessary, but we should perhaps define knowledge-sharing and then elaborate on why that is a good thing. Knowledge sharing is the exchange of information or understanding between people, teams, communities or organizations. This is a positive and deliberate act, which increases the number of known entities and also creates or builds on knowledge archives accessible to others。
This is knowledge sharing if you are writing a book or handbook that describes your research, provides guidance, or is just talking informally with a team. Knowledge sharing can help staff and enterprises become more agile and adaptable, better oriented and ensure sustained growth and sustainability。
3 bad habits (and solutions) that hinder knowledge sharing
Like most of the most deeply rooted habits, it may be difficult for people working in closed cultures to reveal their deepest secrets. Watch out for these behaviours that could put knowledge sharing in jeopardy and proactively simulate the atmosphere you want to see。
Harm: knowledge is power. Power is job security. Employees who want to feel indispensable may hide what they know and make themselves appear irreplaceable. Some may be driven by competition and fear that others will receive what they believe they deserve。
Solutions: pay tribute. If you often acknowledge and publicize the hard work of everyone, you are proving that they are experts in their respective fields, and that their own need for status disappears. If they knew that the company regarded them as valuable mentors for new employees or other team members, they would feel less threatened。
Hazards: who is the most famous? Who chairs the most discussions? Organizations built around “stars” prevent others from remaining open。
Solutions: spread love. Recognize that some members of your team may have a lot of knowledge, but they're not the most straightforward ones, or that the role they play does not require much exposure. But they may be the best leaders of your company. Ask them directly about their ideas or give them the lead in a project that gives them the opportunity to share their knowledge, thereby helping them improve their public relations capacity。
Customary: relying on essentials
Harm: did you say, "if there was no one i didn't know what would happen to us?" that's a problem. While some may be proud to be human encyclopedias, it is a burden to keep answering the same questions. These disruptions reduce the ability of your experts to perform excellent work, and if they decide to leave, all knowledge will follow。
Solutions: develop reserves. Some companies will direct another employee as part of everyone's work, even linking salary increases and promotions to knowledge transfer. So, more than one person knows how you work as a team or organization. The creation of such a procedure could be a major cultural shift, and there could be a great deal of work to be done once in a while. You can start by interviewing and recording what the preferred expert knows. We'll tell you what to do later
If you build it, you can see the effect
For this and many other compelling reasons, knowledge-sharing systems are a key tool for linking the entire organization. When people share what they know, your organization will collect useful content. The knowledge-sharing system will soon be full of content from frequently asked questions and product failure alerts to advanced files on corporate goals and missions。
Full transparency allows teams to easily locate and communicate relevant information. It not only links the right person to the right content, but also fosters a corporate culture of sharing successes and lessons learned. All employees can benefit by exposing errors or disappointments (products that have not been issued successfully or why your company’s clients choose their competitors)。
Some knowledge of types of knowledge
Now that you've really learned about the company's openness, you can learn about the different types of knowledge you want. By dividing them into different parts, you will have a better understanding of how to access them. We'll tell you how to start
Invisible knowledge. It was one thing to be told that the stove was hot and that it was another to put your hands on the stove and then go to emergency care. There are things you just have to figure out through practice -- it's hidden knowledge. Think about how much we make in our daily work. For enterprises, this is the most valuable information and the most difficult to determine. You don't know anything about yourself unless you need to know。
Capture: it is difficult and not a perfect science to use all the things in the staff mind that drive business, but there is hope. You can recruit an interviewer who can ask senior staff in-depth questions, record their answers and store them at the best practices centre of the knowledge-sharing system。
That would contain a lot of information, and the following is a possible result. Vernon is one of your top support representatives who's been working for your clients for years. No matter how bad the client called, he always got a five-star rating. How did he do that
Let the interviewer sit next to vernon and know what goes beyond talking points or troubleshooting guidelines. What special things did vernon do to please callers? Give him some scenes and see what he'll come up with. Gather his answers and share them widely in your knowledge-sharing system, social intranet or internal wikis, encouraging all to use them so that we do not lose them. (incentives: vernon would find it inconceivable to share its methods more actively in the future and/or encourage others to do the same
This is one way we're gathering hidden knowledge in atlas. Wall explained, "we have something we like to call a guide to dialogue. We will talk to those who are very familiar with these things and write down everything they ask their clients, every word and all concepts. And then we try to regulate it as something that others can use so that they can acquire basic knowledge without having to spend 15 years getting familiar with it."
Visible knowledge. Also known as “coding knowledge”, this information has been transferred from the brain to paper or audio and is now accessible to the general public. These things may already be ready, such as the employee manual, whether we work on the second day of the new year, and how to get that printer out of hold。
Capture: good work has been done in preserving these important assets in a documented form. Now, please ensure that they are available and up to date so that they can bring long-term value. If the team finds the old logo in your file, you can't really blame them for ordering 500 company t-shirts with the old logo。
Skips the shared hard drive (which may be a black hole in the document) and adopts a solution that can easily and quickly update and share knowledge. CoTools to help, coThis is an open platform for creating, sharing, commenting and archiving all content。
Invisible knowledge. These are unwritten office operating methods, derived from routine processes and routines. These little stickers help you to carry out your work smoothly and efficiently and in a manner appropriate to the company's culture. Wall said, "it depends on how you run your business, everyone knows."
This is the difference between creating project plans in google slides when culture prefers to use trallo panels. It shows new people how to improve their job, so they don't have to ask questions, for example, if you can send a slack message to your boss after 5:00, or if you mind turning off the camera during video teleconferences。
Capture: this article is difficult because many of the details of what we do are derived from the living corporate culture and the incorporation of every e-mail, project and presentation. Your mission and vision statement can serve as a high-level guideline for everyone on what to put first in their daily interactions. You also need to get and share specific ways of working that turn people on。
One way to do this is to survey your staff and ask, “do you want to know how our team works on the first day?” and collect feedback. The answer is then integrated into the best practice document so that you can share it widely with new and active employees。
Now you know you know how to share knowledge
Knowledge sharing is not once and for all; it needs to be embedded in corporate structures so that valuable information does not disappear, falls into isolation or disappears when seniors leave。
You may think you are ready to keep business-driven knowledge forever, but face reality, see if your organization encourages employees to hide. Look closely at the practice that we have discussed, but it is equally important to see how to simulate the changes you want to see。
The following are some of the exercises: do you think about how to improve corporate knowledge-sharing practices? Share them immediately with the team (and the article, why not?) and start the dialogue. Now
