A Killer Knowledge Base With These Five Practices

A killer knowledge base is essential to a healthy, successful business. With effective company knowledge management, an organization can capture, retain and share information among its employees, resulting in improved decision making, efficient decision-making and quality customer service interactions. Follow these five practices to maintain a stellar knowledge base within your company.

1. Utilize a Knowledge Management System

By using formal knowledge management system software, your company can gather essential organizational information and make it readily available to all employees. Rather than keeping vital work papers or valuable presentations to themselves, employees can store them on the system to make work easier for co-workers. To implement a keen knowledge management system and reduce the risk of security breaches within your agency, train your employees on the proper use of technology.

2. Make Employee Retention a Top Priority

When an employee leaves your organization, he takes some amount of company knowledge with him. Recognize the importance of retaining quality by recognizing the value each one brings to your organization. Direct managers to address issues before they reach an uncomfortable level that may cause employees to leave. Garner feedback from your workers through employee satisfaction surveys. Analyze the results, and make the necessary changes to improve the workplace and keep your employee knowledge base intact.

3. Encourage Employee Knowledge Sharing

Focus on a company culture that encourages teamwork and collaboration. By creating interdepartmental teams for certain projects, you can foster an environment of knowledge sharing among employees. Reward innovative ideas that result from shared information, and set a precedent by demonstrating the importance of communication and knowledge sharing at the management level.

4. Develop Social Learning Opportunities

Make it easy for new employees to tap into the existing knowledge base within the organization. Create a mentoring program that pairs seasoned veterans with incoming workers. If existing workers appear to be struggling in specific areas, promote on-the-job training by a more experienced employee to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. Conduct skills assessments to determine employee skills and weaknesses, and use the results to pair workers for training purposes.

5. Promote Visual Information Sharing

When the knowledge base becomes too broad, workers become overwhelmed with the amount of information being thrown at them. Review the information you disseminate to workers on a regular basis, and ensure only the most essential data is provided. Utilize visual presentations in the form of charts, graphs and infographics to make the data memorable and easy to digest.

Creating and maintaining a knowledge base can help your organization create a strong information stream that aids employees and managers in their day-to-day duties. Consider these five practices to keep the importance of your organization's knowledge base rooted firmly in the company culture.

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