The hunt for knowledge is a common problem in your organization: IDC found that the typical knowledge worker spends around 2.5 hours each day simply searching for information required to do their jobs.
In order to improve productivity and give your team access to the information that will help them generate new insights and innovate faster, it’s important to put a knowledge sharing program in place.
A knowledge sharing platform can enable all employees throughout the organization to ask questions, provide answers, add to existing discussions, and search for information about products, policies, and technologies. A strong knowledge sharing practice will help to ensure access to vital information to all of your staff, and foster collaboration and greater innovation among your team members.
That said, it won’t do much for your organization if people don’t use it.
Here are some ideas for increasing adoption rates of your knowledge sharing tool:
Start with a core group of knowledge “seeders”
Identify a core group of employees across the organization who are passionate about learning and sharing their knowledge, and spearhead a project asking them to write down the most common questions they see in their roles, as well as their own perspective on how to answer them.
Ask everyone to contribute, and recognize those that do
Once your knowledge sharing platform has been populated with initial Q-and-As, the group of seeders can ask the rest of their teams to contribute by asking the questions they’re curious about, or providing their own answers to existing questions on the platform. If the platform has a voting function to vote for the best responses, you can create a leaderboard to publicly spotlight the employees who are providing the most value on the platform. Additionally, you can consider providing incentives for winning the leaderboard, such as tokens that can be redeemed for gift cards or office perks.
Make knowledge-sharing a core part of your company culture
Once your team members have begun to populate your knowledge-sharing platform, you can build processes around it that point to it as a central repository for any internal knowledge. During your team training, encourage employees to look to the knowledge-sharing platform before asking a coworker for help with a problem, and, if they don’t see the answer, to write the question there. Encourage all employees to spend at least a couple of hours each week in the knowledge-sharing tool, reading Q&As and adding their own questions and answers.
By building processes around knowledge-sharing and incentivizing your team members to use it, you can transform your knowledge-sharing platform into a critical part of your company infrastructure.
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