So you’ve done all the hard work of choosing a knowledge-sharing tool and training your team on how to use it. It’s been a few months, and you need to report to other stakeholders on how successful the effort has been. What metrics do you use to determine how well your company has adopted the knowledge-sharing platform?
While it’s easy to look at basic metrics such as how many questions have been asked and answered on the platform, that won’t give you the full picture of how successful the program has been. To see that, look at questions such as:
How many unique users are participating on the platform?
If only the same handful of people are using the platform regularly, it’s not a success. A strong adoption means that many employees are using the tool for both asking questions and responding to them.
What percentage of employees from each department are contributing?
If your knowledge-sharing tool has been introduced as a company-wide solution, how many departments are participating? You should be able to track percentage rates across departments to see which ones are using the tool most widely.
What percentage of questions are unanswered?
That’s great if you’ve got employees using the tool to ask questions, but it’s equally important to incentivize your subject-matter experts to participate in responding.
How quickly are responses provided on new questions? How often are new responses added to existing threads?
It’s not enough to have an initial surge of use—to show success with knowledge-sharing, it needs to be a regular habit. A TSIA survey found that 50% of companies updated their content every few months or “hardly ever,” while 23% update content daily as part of a regular practice.
How quickly are projects being completed now compared to before implementing a knowledge-sharing solution?
Ideally, the tool should be reducing the amount of time spent searching for information, and improving team productivity as a result. Evaluate how quickly projects are being completed today compared to immediately before implementation—are you seeing an improvement?
If your success rate isn’t as high as you’d hoped, it’s time to focus on making knowledge-sharing part of your core company culture. Publicly recognize employees who contribute value to the knowledge base regularly, and encourage them to create a daily habit of searching there for information they need; asking questions if the answers aren’t available; and contributing their own insights when they have information to share. By creating a culture of sharing information, you can build a path to better collaboration and higher productivity across the organization.
