It is said that knowledge is the king; it is entirely accurate, especially today, in this age of great advancement. People with knowledge are intellectuals, thus are an asset to an organization, and it is attributed to their aptitude that different organizations look for opportunities to rope them in.

While the aforementioned statement is hundred percent true, such people think that holding their knowledge to themselves makes them an asset, which is untrue. Knowledge acquisition is basic human nature.

The unique quality of the knowledge is that it can be preserved, improved, and transferred through reflection, application, and sharing.

The best way to preserve and spread knowledge for the collective well-being of an institution is through sharing and teaching. It is the institution's responsibility to manage and maintain a steady circulation of knowledge within and outside different groups, as it ensures personal and business growth. In this article, we will discuss how knowledge management (KM) can improve employee efficiency in a company.

First of all, What does knowledge management mean?

KM is a process of creating, using, sharing, and maintaining the organizations' knowledge and information. It is cherished as one of the useful strategies used in business sectors to use the knowledge assets to advance their growth and success. The core purpose of employing knowledge management strategies is to help those who seek knowledge meet with those who already have it.

Tom Davenport articulated the most precise and accurate definition of knowledge management as:

"Knowledge management is capturing, distributing, and effectively using  knowledge."

Why Knowledge management is essential to improve employee efficiency:

1.      Easy to access knowledge:

When all the employees from top to bottom have easy access to knowledge and the required information, they are able to complete their tasks on time. They can better examine a situation and come up with a solution. Not only this, they can produce high-quality work, as they will have their hands on every information needed to perform their job. Therefore, the organizations where the employees can easily access the relevant information and knowledge are more efficient and productive.

In contrast, if the workers are not given the opportunities to capture knowledge, they will struggle to complete their tasks. Even if they manage to do, they will not be able to produce competitive results. Therefore, the organizations that focus on making the information and knowledge available to their employees are most affluent and successful as their employees can produce impeccable results for the company.

Quick Note: 15 highest paying jobs in 2022

2.     Leads to innovation:

How do innovations take place? They take place where there are ideas: the more ideas, the better. A team that abounds with lots of information and knowledge can work efficiently and creatively, leading to innovation. The researchers have noted that the abundance of ideas empowers people to make innovations. The more the ideas, the more the innovations and the more will be a company's success. Therefore, gearing your teams with essential knowledge and information and offering them the opportunities to get indulged in carving the knowledge to develop new ideas and plans to execute is of sheer importance. For example, if a  marketing company has a number of marketing experts with wide knowledge and experience, who sit together with the market analytics in their hands, you can inevitably expect them to do some sort of innovations, helping your business grow by leaps and bounds. 

3.     Improves collaboration among the team:

The members of a team are the most productive when they are tied and integrated with each other. Do you know how? The essence of making the team is that each member strives to achieve a single goal. If all the members of the team are fragmented and do not collaborate, they will not be able to complete their job efficiently. It is the job of a team lead to bring all the team members together and use their abilities and knowledge effectively. The companies which focus on KM are well aware of the importance of teams collaboration for boosting the practice of sharing knowledge and using it effectively. In order to ensure the productivity of knowledge management, the employers tie the employees together, which strengthens their cooperation and cohesion.

4.     Helps find out the ineffectively applied knowledge:

Producing flawless work is not only about avoiding mistakes but reducing the mistakes that are already being made. When there is sufficient knowledge available to cross-check the assumptions or practices made by the employees, it can result in producing high-quality work. It can be said that the KM strategies help the employees identify the inefficiencies in applying their knowledge while making decisions or tasks that enable them to reduce redundancies. In essence, when the employees are aware of their mistakes in their judgments, decisions, or practices, they will avoid doing them the next time, which boosts their efficiency. 

5.     Improves well-being of the employees:

If you are really looking forward to increasing the efficiency and productivity of your employees, you must ensure their well-being. Work-related stress has serious psychological impacts on the employees, which cripples them from performing proficiently. On the one hand, they are pressured by the employers to complete their work, and on the other hand, the insufficient resources or an abundance of mismanaged resources makes them highly infuriated and disturbed mentally. The KM practices can ensure that the employees are supplied with the required information and knowledge. They are able to focus on what is important and complete their tasks easily, leading to their well-being.

Bottom line:

Curating knowledge management strategies in a business allows the employees to easily access the relevant information and knowledge to work seamlessly and efficiently in groups and individually for the accomplishment of their roles and success of the business.

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As Drucker says – “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.

Knowledge management (KM) has been now well established as a key to innovation and enable organizations to meet the challenges of highly competitive market landscape. With access to knowledge that is streamlined, relevant and readily available round the clock, it makes employees productive, efficient, and foster innovation to help achieve competitive edge. However, Knowledge Management system and capabilities needs to be constantly reviewed and evolved for it to align with business goals and help achieve the organizational goals.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the very impactful tools to gather feedback and measure success of your KM system. The existence of heathy NPS score indicates a well-built KM system.

NPS is a measuring index ranging from 0 to 10 to gauge how effective is your current KM framework.  All you need to ask from your target audience is a single question – “how likely will you recommend a particular service / community to a colleague or a friend?”. Your target audience is divided into three categories based on their response. See description below:

How to analyze the score and make improvements in the KM system

In your KM survey, you can ask one single question similar to the below given examples:

“How likely are you to recommend the Professional Community to a colleague”?

“How likely are you to recommend a specific KM tool or service to a colleague”?

Requesting the responders to add their feedback on why they chose the score and how the service or community is helping people from perspective of enablement and adding business value you can gain valuable insight on what’s working and what’s not:

How to calculate NPS from above data?

% Promoters - % Detractors

The score generated between -100 to 100 is known as NPS. From between 1 to 10 if the score falls towards left of the spectrum, it’s easy to deduce that people are not happy and if received on the right end of the spectrum, employees are happy. The key is to analyze the score, the feedback received and create actionable insights to improve engagement.

The work should be directed in the direction to convert detractors into promoters and keep a track of how NPS changes over time. This will give you a sense of how your KM strategy is working and what changes you need to make while mapping your future KM roadmap to best serve the interest of your employees and organization as a whole.

I will discuss more about NPS, how to use gather insights from NPS and its limitation in the next article.

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Writing good assessment questions is crucial for being able to manage your organization’s knowledge base. If your questions are poorly written, you won’t be able to collect accurate information. Hence, here’s how to write good assessment questions.

#1 Align the Questions with the Objectives

The first thing you should do is align the questions with the objectives. Think about the aims you are pursuing with the questionnaire. If these assessment questions are part of something much bigger, you need to keep in mind the bigger picture and adjust your questions according to it.

#2 Use the Right Questions Types

The next thing you need to do is use the right question types. Depending on the information you want to get, you will need to be using the right question types to get this information. For example, if you need a longer answer or have too many options to list, make the question open-ended so that the person can reply to it with the right information on their own. At the same time, some questions work better as multiple-choice rather than open-ended.

#3 Keep Answer Options Around the Same Length

Though it’s important to mind your questions, you should also think about the answers you provide, especially in multiple-choice questions. As Elizabeth Jones from the custom writing reviews site Online Writers Rating says, “Make sure that your answers are all around the same length. This will make them equally possible for the respondents and won’t make your respondents lean to longer (or shorter) answers rather than choosing the right ones instead.”

#4 Avoid Using Your Biases When Making Questions

One issue that many knowledge managers encounter when making assessment questions is that they intentionally or unintentionally start using their biases. This leads to the questions being increasingly inaccurate or inherently biased which makes the answers flawed as well. This is why you must avoid using your biases when making questions at all cost. After all, you don’t want to have questions that won’t do you any good during the assessment.

#5 Don’t Ask Unrealistic Questions or Use Unrealistic Situations

Another issue you may encounter when creating the questions is that you will start asking unrealistic questions or using unrealistic situations either consciously or unconsciously. Always ask yourself whether what you are talking about makes sense and is relevant to the assessment and the objectives. If it isn’t, then you probably shouldn’t be asking the question you want to include.

#6 Be as Clear and as Precise as Possible

An obvious thing you should do when creating your assessment questions is be as clear and as precise as possible. As William Atkins from the writing services reviews site Best Writers Online notes, “You should always use terms that won’t confuse your respondents. Don’t use complex or rarely used phrases and tend to stick to words that don’t have multiple meanings. You absolutely need to be clear with what you mean.”

#7 Keep the Tone Consistent Throughout the Questions

To make your entire questionnaire or survey feel uniform, you need to keep the tone consistent throughout the questions. Instead of being friendly and fun in one part and serious and professional in another, stick to a single approach and make sure that your respondents are immersed into the survey with the help of the tone you are using.

#8 Check Spelling and Grammatical Errors

Once all of your assessment questions are complete, the best thing you can do is check their spelling and grammatical errors (if there are any). This will ensure that your questionnaire is fully ready to be presented to the respondents and shouldn’t be reworked, edited, or rewritten again (i.e. you have the final version ready).

#9 Have Someone Else Check the Questions

That being said, before you can consider your assessment questions their final version, you need to have someone else check the questions too and see if they understand everything or notice any errors. This will ensure that you aren’t missing anything important which can happen when you are reading the text over and over again.

Final Thoughts

All in all, writing good assessment questions may take some time, but you will definitely succeed with the task once you practice a little. Use the tips in this article to perfect your writing skills and start creating better assessment questions.

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Initiating effective knowledge management in your organization often seems like a timely and complex procedure, but done right it can lead to powerful efficiency across all departments. However, this process often requires the confrontation of a number of significant challenges and there are common pitfalls that can ensure a project. Here are 5 mistakes that can cost your organization significantly when implementing knowledge management - awareness will enable you to prevent falling into these traps.

1) Doing Too Much At Once

When you’re taking on knowledge management in your organization it’s natural to shoot for the stars. You want to optimize every aspect of knowledge management to achieve the best possible outcomes for your business. However, by taking on too much you’ll often undermine your core goals, leading to worse outcomes overall.

There are a number of risks entailed in taking on too much when you approach knowledge management. A protracted process of knowledge management implementation risks alienating key stakeholders from your aims, and sometimes a quick victory with measurable outcomes builds momentum. When you set off on your knowledge management journey, phase your strategy with short term goals and realistic aims for the beginning period.

2) Failing To Identify Measurable Goals

Knowledge management, when it’s implemented effectively, provides your organization with strategic insights and solutions that are targeted to certain problems. It is not, as some understand it, a productive background operation, but a highly specific process. When you begin to implement knowledge management in your institution, it needs to be accompanied by specific goals to have an impact.

“Choosing the right goals for knowledge management should be the first step, along with identifying the key metrics that will enable you to track these goals,” says Steven Frost, a KM expert at PaperFellows and OXEssays. “Whether you’re trying to decrease the handling time of clients or improve compliance across the board, targeting and tracking goals will lead to better outcomes.”

3) Forgetting About End Users

When it comes to implementing a new technology across the hierarchies of your organization, and especially when that technology is built around the complexities of knowledge management, it’s easy for architects of these systems to get caught up in the details. However, once implemented, your knowledge management system will be living and breathing through the end users, so ensuring that this practice guides your design is key to a successful system.

Throughout the process, pause at regular intervals to identify the pain points of your end users and proactively address these issues. Even small concerns of end users can snowball if they’re left unresolved, leading to significant inefficiencies as an end result.

4) Enforcing A One Size Fits All Approach

Successfully implementing knowledge management across your business requires building a system of access that works for all employees, regardless of their background, skills and styles. Building a functional system that doesn’t assume one was of thinking makes knowledge accessible to your whole organization, democratizing information and optimizing workflow.

To this end, knowledge should be available in a number of ways. Search terms should work both with specialized keywords and natural language and knowledge hierarchies should be built to be multifaceted, allowing access from a variety of directions. Building a range of paths to knowledge allows it to be distributed effectively and doesn’t presume one approach to accessing information.

5) Ignoring Feedback

“Any knowledge management infrastructure needs to find a way of collecting, incorporating and actioning feedback,” says Mona Hodge, a writer at State Of Writing and Essay Writer. “Feedback is itself a form of knowledge and it’s vital that as your organization starts producing knowledge that your users feel heard and recognized.”

Enable qualitative feedback to be issued from end users to article owners within your knowledge management infrastructure as well as identifying space for quantitative surveys of user experience. As these feed into the knowledge management system you’ll ultimately create an effective platform for all the users across your organization.

Signing Off

Knowledge management is a complex problem for organizations and there are a number of pitfalls that can doom a knowledge management project. However, by improving access to knowledge across your organization you can increase performance in every department. By avoiding these costly mistakes you’ll find a new level of efficiency within your business, and strive towards greater profits.
 

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Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to work better leading to a well-informed, efficient, and innovative workforce. Let's see below how it leads to cost savings for any organization.

• Connecting people to people via the medium of Knowledge Management (KM) communities or knowledge-sharing platforms provide them with a streamlined channel to capture, store and share knowledge leading to increased efficiency and decreased response time.
• With a KM framework in places, people are well versed with best practices followed by employees from other teams working on similar projects leading to a decrease in errors and an increase in quality of work output.
• A higher degree of employee accountability is created when knowledge is easily shared and accessed via various KM channels and tools like communities, knowledge repositories and discussion forums.
• With increased focus on KM employees get a chance to connect with global peers to share and learn from each other leading to Innovation and creation of new products and efficient ways to perform services.
• Client satisfaction is a vital component of sales & delivery for any organization. By having easy access to the knowledge sources, you need to perform your job efficiently, you shorten the sales cycle.

Well, these are reasons enough to start putting together a KM framework for your organization if not already in place. And coming up in the next article is how to capture knowledge and make it available for value creation via various KM channels.

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