3 Ways to Improve Knowledge Sharing for Remote Employees
Today it’s easier than ever to share institutional and practical knowledge with all members. But not all institutions have a knowledge management structure to promote the free flow of information among employees. This leads to information silos. Knowledge sharing is essential as it ensures each employee has access to the necessary information available in the organization.
1. Reduce Communication Barriers and Encourage a Knowledge Sharing Culture
Organizations should eliminate communication barriers and foster a supportive environment encouraging knowledge sharing. Medium to larger organizations have multiple departments, and intra-team mixing is uncommon.
For example, the tech team tends to rarely interact with the sales and marketing teams. It’s important to encourage team-coordination since all members, despite their groups, work towards a collective goal.
There are two types of team coordination:
- Explicit coordination: the organization's leaders actively encourage team participation. Leaders use strategies like direct communication, delegation, conferences, creating knowledge structures, and building effective work processes.
- Implicit coordination: the team members make personal initiatives to come together and cohabitate by adapting to their needs and how to assist each other in the organization.
Physical disconnects among remote workers lead to a weak knowledge-sharing culture. It’s up to the company to identify and bridge the gaps.
Some of the reasons behind weak and inefficient knowledge sharing include:
- The silo effect: Employees only share information with team members they relate with and exempt other colleagues.
- Social friction: Due to remote workers having minimal to no physical interactions among themselves. Social conflict brings about poor communication, which stifles innovation.
- Unorganized and scattered data: Challenging to understand and therefore irrelevant. Disorganization makes it difficult to find and access the necessary knowledge.
- Captured knowledge that is inconclusive or has some parts that are omitted: The blanks are challenging to fill in, and employees waste time tracking the information.
2. Ensure Access to Pre-existing Resources
Organizations should place a priority on storing valuable information that’s readily accessible to all employees. Organizations can facilitate easy knowledge sharing by leveraging popular digital platforms like Google Drive or SharePoint.
Additionally, to effectively encourage knowledge sharing, businesses should consider developing and maintaining a comprehensive knowledge management system. Think of this as the documentation hub for your organization.
When you start developing this system, there are a few things that should be covered:
- Knowledge Repositories: Think of this as the learning hub within your business. This can be in the form of educational short-form videos, document management systems, or even a simple wiki. The idea is to centralize all important training and onboarding documents for both current and future team members to access as needed.
- Content Creation and Curation: It’s important to incentivize and promote positive feedback to employees when they contribute to your KMS. Whether it’s lessons learned, important resources, or client-critical information—having multiple members helping update and maintain a repository of information can help streamline workflows, improve quality standards, and encourage productivity.
3. Provide Expert Training and Mentorship
Experts are highly knowledgeable in their field, and it is essential that they transfer this valuable information to your employees. Training employees makes them more efficient and confident with their work, which results in the company’s growth.
Methods like curriculum vitae’s (CV’s) and surveys are getting pushed out by modern skill-mapping tools. After picking out experts in your organization, let them know their skills are highly appreciated and critical to the institution. The experts could already be part of the team, and it’s the organization’s job to identify them from the crowd.
