Knowledge management (KM) is all about using the best tools and resources to organize and make the best use of company knowledge. It only makes sense to utilize it to improve internal communications and ensure everyone is on the same page. When you’re able to streamline communication efforts between everyone in your business, you’ll see an increase in productivity and a boost in company culture.

However, that can be easier said than done if you aren’t sure how to make knowledge management work for you in that capacity.

With that in mind, let’s dig a little deeper into some of the benefits of knowledge sharing within your organization, and cover some knowledge management tips you can use to better foster internal communications.

The Benefits of KM to Improve Internal Communications

There’s no denying we’re living in a period of economic uncertainty. Coming out of the pandemic, so many aspects of our economy feel unstable, from supply chain issues to inflation rates. During these times of uncertainty, small businesses can benefit from better knowledge management as improved communication and collaboration will make it easier to deal with potential crises. The more in-tune your team is with one another, the easier it will be to create strategies that directly respond to economic uncertainty and increase cost-effectiveness.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using KM to improve internal communications. You’ll also experience benefits like:

• Giving employees a clearer view of your entire organization;
• Keeping employees engaged;
• Extra dimension to the workplace.

A better work environment will also trickle down to your customers. Knowledge management that boosts internal communication can help businesses connect organizational silos. Doing so creates a more streamlined, seamless customer experience. When departments are siloed, there’s a greater risk of obstruction on the customer journey. Collaboration efforts and better communication remove those obstructions and help the journey move forward smoothly.

Best Practices for Better Communication

Understanding the importance and benefits of knowledge management to improve internal communication is only the beginning. How can you implement these strategies so they’ll actually improve your business?

Start by creating an internal knowledge base. A system that is strictly meant to be used by your team will help to ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to specific projects and data analytics. You can put management tools in place to decide which employees have access to certain parts of the program, or specific documents. However, the more crossover you allow, the easier it will be to streamline communication efforts. Your company’s internal knowledge base should include:

• Basic company information and reports;
• HR material;
• Training material;
• Sales collateral;
• Documentation;
• Media;
• Design files;
• Legal files;
• Customer service information and documents.

In addition to having these things accessible to everyone, you can utilize programs like Slack and Microsoft Teams to ensure everyone can stay connected if they have questions or comments. Put practices in place that allow everyone to see when something is being edited, changed, or moved somewhere. To do this, train your entire team so they can know about the process for using your internal knowledge base.

In addition to building a strong base, some of the best practices for improving internal communications include creating two-way channels for feedback, making sure your communication efforts have a steady stream, and keeping things equal across the workforce. Obviously, there are some documents and programs not every employee needs to see. But, it’s important to strike a healthy balance so certain employees don’t feel like they’re being left out of the communication efforts.

Most importantly, avoid communication overload. Having a lot of information in front of your team is helpful, but too much can be overwhelming, especially if multiple people are communicating at once, or the programs and tools you’re using are distracting. Knowledge management should be used to keep things organized and streamlined, not chaotic and random. If you aren’t able to train your team properly, they could end up getting burnt out by a communication overload.

Integrate KM Into All Departments

The one caveat with KM is that you must integrate KM for all departments in a business — not just one or some. In fact, you may even find it’s easier to put the best practices above into place if you’re using the same tools and resources to better manage and share knowledge inter-departmentally. Having a solid KM system and training everyone on how to use it is the best way to utilize your resources and get the most out of your experience.

Things like customer relationship systems, automation systems, inventory management systems, and document management systems can all help to connect different teams throughout the workplace. Not only will that improve internal communications, but it will improve your productivity and customer experience. Specifically, KM tools will help to empower your customer service teams by:

●      Helping team members understand their roles;

●      Improving the decision-making process;

●      Creating opportunities,

The right system will improve your products, services, strategies, and sales. As a result, you’ll boost your profitability and stay one step ahead of your competitors. A company that works fluidly together is a successful one. Keep these tips in mind and utilize KM resources and best practices to improve internal communications while building a better brand environment.

Knowledge management (KM) activities include knowledge creation, editing, capturing, assembling, sharing, integration, advantage, and exploitation ranging from acquiring new knowledge to exploitation. Like other functions, KM is an important branch and plays a critical difference factor in the entire search process for hiring industries.

With continued demand growth (3.6% YoY), the staffing industry must adopt KM to succeed.

SMART Recruiting

Knowledge management improves the ability of organizations to solve problems better, adapt, adapt to changing business needs, and adapt to disruptive changes.

Smart Recruiting is a technology that disrupts the hiring industry. Smart placement adheres to the most successful recruitment objectives, in line with business objectives, in general - these are SMART objectives. They are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based objectives provide clear goals and action plans.

In recent years there has been a significant increase in potential job candidates and hence the costs associated with their appointment. This is mainly due to both the complex talent of the employees and the increased geographical flexibility.

The need for talent recruitment has grown so much that today we need to adopt an ingenious, intelligent, automated applicant tracking system. Find savvy recruiters in growth companies and high-caliber talent looking to join them.

Some initiatives have significantly improved the situation by developing automated solutions to make the e-recruitment process more efficient. Traditional solutions have limitations in handling semantic relationships properly. However, semantic processing, a sub-discipline of knowledge management, bridges this gap.

Knowledge Management In HR

The HRM (Human Resource Management) system uses basic information related to candidates and hiring staff. Knowledge management, in general, is an essential tool for any business that wants to increase its base and market share.

From an HR perspective, KM collects and stores the knowledge of employees, which is why companies are giving them success so far. In addition, sharing this information across the organization provides employees with insights into past approaches that improve performance or suggest new policies.

One of the significant benefits of HR Knowledge Management is that employees can find and access the information they need without the help of HR. The exchange of information is also managed by the entry-level. Based on the users' role, the staff members' access privileges reveal accessible information to the concerned employees.

Benefits of KM in Human Resources

The ultimate goal of knowledge management in decision making at a strategic, innovative, and operational level is to take more awareness steps toward business success.

Some of the additional benefits can be calculated as mentioned below:

Benefits to in-house HR processes

• Single Source - A centralized space for information is assigned when creating a knowledge management system that remains available and constantly updates as employee records change. This way, you bridge the information gap, your employees may not be able to fill it alone, and you will be free from information loss.
• Speed up Onboarding - One of the main objectives of the staff onboarding process is to create an alignment between your new hire and your organization. On the one hand, your new employee needs to clearly understand their role in your company and what they are responsible for. Employers also get feedback from new hires to help improve the process. 
• With a proper knowledge base in artificial intelligence, the entire onboarding process can be expedited, as they provide a structured walk-through of your system and procedures, making that part easier. With process-based knowledge management software, you can start anew from any process, even providing reference help and videos at each workflow stage.
• Successful revolution - When you prioritize knowledge management, it significantly increases your chances of achieving successful innovation. An integral part of knowledge management that drives innovation is gaining knowledge from external sources - market, competitors, and industry leaders. With market insights at your fingertips, you can stay on top of change, quickly identify and accept trends, make intelligent decisions, and improve your organization's business performance.
• Team Collaboration - Proper knowledge management will also contribute to staying aligned with company values, results-based outlooks, and collaborative tactics. Employees in your organization may be job-specific or wear multiple hats. In both cases, the knowledge management system and the process will help your employees - and the company - gain greater transparency about what knowledge is available and lead to better team productivity.

Benefits to Staffing Agencies

Market intelligence is critical to ensure that executive search consultants make the right decisions and provide clients with informative advice, knowledge, and talent.

Some of the significant benefits are highlighted as follows:

• Faster turnaround - As market data increases every year, traditional research methods no longer cope with it. The hiring industry is taking on a new shape driven by disruptive technology, forcing a disrupted executive search market. They work in the background to systematically gather intelligence from talent data sources and build KM around them to meet client needs.
• Aspects of KM, sharing, reuse of knowledge, and innovation significantly reduce the time to deliver talent resources to the customer. This translates into increased win rates, add-on businesses, and new contracts.
• Deliver Hiring Solution - Knowledge Management for Recruitment Agency helps to create KM integrated system that provides end-to-end hiring solutions. Knowledge can be stored and refined in the HR Knowledge Base, which helps make decisions on fast and good work. Criteria-based evaluation of suitable candidates is done faster and more accurately.
• Effective Executive Search - Market knowledge is the main differentiator. The recruiting consultant or talent acquisition team knows the role, organization, and industry trend to identify the best-fit candidate. Having the KM platform facilitates quick access for background checks, screening, and client verification.
• Analytics with Information pool - When you need to respond to customers, solve problems, analyze trends, evaluate markets, benchmark against peers, understand competition, create new offers, formulate policies, and think critically, you usually look for information and resources to support these activities. 

Takeaway

A Strong Knowledge Management Foundation is necessary to succeed in any Conversational Recruiting Strategy. Knowledge management is essential for enhancing and improving performance in an organization. Knowledge base management for recruiting agencies helps create effective solutions and make faster and more effective decisions in the recruitment process. Developing knowledge management for staffing agencies makes talent acquisition goals accurate and quicker.

Today, securing a budget to implement Knowledge Management at scale is a prime challenge, as the business wants to ensure you are promising to deliver tangible business value every time.  Most large organizations acknowledge that these complexities are so dynamic that often we depend on predictable answers to solve the business problem, although we know the situation might have changed. Are we asking the right questions?

Let me take three simple examples to understand this point.

• Snippet-1 (client): You have signed a new contact and the client is asking for what best practices have been delivered for other similar clients and the team is expected to make a presentation around the same.
• Snippet-2 (partner): You have secured a project as a service partner for a large digital transformation project however the incumbent is transitioning out and hence there is a need for their support for the right amount of knowledge transfer.
• Snippet-3 (vendor): There is an existing software that your users are happy with for collaboration and your sales team has received a good pricing from another global player who is offering a better deal. You need buy in from your leaders to proceed basis their experience.

If you look at these three examples, all talk about situations where one needs to depend on others being knowledgeable. We are accustomed to the same old practices for delivering business value through KM based on predictable answers. However, as one can assume in the real world, this stable state keeps changing and creates new complications that raise questions that need to be solved. It is for these questions that one must be knowledgeable to solve the right answers. How can we train ourselves?

Let me introduce you to a proven practice: the 'SCQA story telling model' and explore it a little to understand why one requires to understand the question before we find the answers.

The SCQA model is an acronym for Situation - Complication - Question and Answer. You might have heard about the 'elevator pitch' where you must try to summarize something in five minutes. This method makes it extremely easy. Let us see the below example, which I am sure most KM professionals would be familiar with.

Situation: We are talking about any user (players) who visits a KM portal and they do not see the bigger picture of how they can benefit from sharing their expertise and experience through knowledge harvesting & sharing (context of what is happening)
Complication: This deals with what is changing and needs attention as you can see only few leaders are believers, most users come sparingly and few that visit regularly feel they are not rewarded.
Question: As we can see there is a problem. Basis the problem statement being defined we start developing the questions, many a times its hidden in the complication. Like in our case one can see that the problem is as below

To DESIGN a nimble KM system that is intuitive to the user [group] and advances them to contribute and get incentivized

Answers: Finding the answers would in-turn give rise to a solution(s). For example, in our case we design a more rewarding system through gamification, ape client systems so users start actively contributing. We involve leaders to sign the petition, so their word of mouth motivates individuals to intrinsically contribute and make HR aware of the critical touchpoints to reward users.

In-Summary

Typically, business leaders are looking for a solid pitch to assure their buy-in and sponsor budgets for KM. Most teams focus on the status quo and begin with the quality metrics and start with collecting raw data, analyzing the information to arrive at facts and then present their conclusion. However, they fail to impress largely because the pitch is not convincing.

Through the SCQA method you immediately capture the attention of the business to presenting an abstract of what is intended to achieve through a storyline which is appealing. Once we have got their buy-in then we go deeper into the facts and how we have arrived at the basis for the same which is the raw data interpretation.

KM is a journey that starts the very first time we visit the firm’s intranet portal. Many colleagues have participated in contests, published white papers, or taken expert advice and tell us about checking out the KM portal. But the question is how many of us today know we have our very own customized KM page that shows us the last ten enquires we posted, the latest document we searched and related other information that can add value to our daily routing work.

There is a growing need to harness the true potential of KM and explore the different sections.

Some collaborative spaces are more individual in nature, others like War rooms, PDB are specific to group or projects. There is a growing need however for better awareness not just from the KM team to employees but more importantly managers who with proper governance can help resolve some of the challenges highlighted below.

KM as such is only a tool and must be understood effectively by an employee in applying it to improve his productivity. All the challenges have been shared by employees in accessing KM and I have used my experience and speaking to fellow employees to suggest an approach.

10 Top Challenges for Knowledge Managers to tackle

1. Information is available from multiple sources on Google. Today employees who adopt KM spend time finding the right documents but often face challenges with validation. 

This is more to do with a behavioural pattern for adoption. Today most of the information on Google is copyright and the employee would be willing to use a proven framework document uploaded on their KM portal, with the relevant guidelines on how to customize the framework available but what is lacking is who will validate the final document.

There is a need for creation of project champions in teams who can guide employees to use chat forums and publish their questions online to seek the right help to validate information.

2. Project wins need to be supported by the right resources. Today delivery managers are faced with the challenge of depending on resourcing teams to find a fitment as employee resumes are not updated.

During the tenure of an employee, he/she would have updated their resume at least once on a Resume Corner. The challenge is a resourcing team has their owned defined portal and process more importantly is based on the band of an employee. Today, many employees with cross functional skills are not updating their resume completely.

A "Managers corner" where constant reminders are sent should be present and a monthly dashboard sent to the BU Head to ensure employees frequently update their resumes highlighting any significant achievements. 

3. Many teams are doing similar projects as a part of the same domain and some of this work is being recognized but the success factors are not clearly captured completely while building a framework.

Key Wins are highlighted at a BU level and recognition is happening for talented performers who are motivated to build solution frameworks. Today organizations are looking at patenting these frameworks but there is a burning need for identifying trainers who can coach employees working on similar domain projects to identify the tenants of building a framework, more importantly executing it as per the project scope. Webinars are effective but not everyone prefers disclosing his identity in an open forum.

Communities of Practice should be explored more where Discussion Thread links are shared and content can be downloaded for analyses, questions posted, other sections of KM portal accessed such as an Expert Corner and RFP Corner. 

4. Consultants are mostly onsite and are facing a challenge with identifying themselves with the culture of the organization.

Most of the time employees use their time doing certifications, completing administrative work like bills submissions and if nothing just sitting at home.

There is a need for more effective capturing of time sheet data and aligning their time to contribute to knowledge sharing sessions like organizing sessions to new recruits , domain-based case study creations and more such that their tacit knowledge is of broader use and reference to the organization.

5. Not all employees know how to be smart workers using KM, mostly they cite accessibility, access rights permission denied and search not valid as reasons.

It is the responsibility of the manager to educate the employee on updating KM regularly. Most employees today have VPN access and are good workers, but the challenge is there is no proper governance established. If immediate managers see the benefits in the long rung motivating employees to share documents and review the same before uploading on KM can be a winner. Today most of the employee’s upload documents for compliance; they do not see the added benefit and recognition that comes if their document is referenced by another team member.

Contests must be expanded and recognize talent where documents mentioned in a Proposal by another fellow employee are recognized rather than the number of employees who have accessed it. 

6. Project Managers do not want their artifacts to be put on KM as most of the time this involves seeking customer permission. 

This is a challenge as the information must be reviewed and selectively edited by someone from the team. Most of the time project managers do not disclose the set of documents in the WSR document.

It should be made a practice where the WSR is reviewed and the number of documents uploaded tallied with the WSR, if any gaps are found valid reasons should be sort from the delivery teams.

7. An employee mostly reaches out to the KM team at the last moment and finds an answer. Today most organizationa have tools like Slack / Microsoft Teams other collaboration tools handy however these are stand-alone from the KM portal which has the ready templates, proposals of past projects, case studies and other information available. However, there are instances where there is a need for an international case reference, backdated reference documents and other such scenarios. It is important to do an online search, put a query or write to an expert all options worth exploring with KM portal. However, the problem is running against time will we get a response quickly?

The answer lies with the KM Team, as sometimes archived documents are not visible but that does not mean they are not present. It is important to ask your KM Champion and seek his recommendation on the best approach. 

8. Employee before leaving the project uploads all his documents on KM but in a hurried and haphazard manner such that it is useless. 

There must be a manager scorecard showcased at the QIC that merits the use of more frequent KM usage at a BU level. This does not have to be an extensive exercise and involve a lot of data collection and analysis.

Managers can make a choice and decide the type of documents that must be uploaded on a regular basis and drive compliance and quality rather than quantity.

9. When an Employee is on bench, he is spending hours giving interviews for new projects to be billable. Every employee is interested in his QPLC. Their efforts are always invested to tell their immediate managers of their billability and find suitable projects to be aligned to. There have been occurrences where an employee is not updated his manager or vice versa and this has led to billability not being achieved.

To resolve there has to be a BU level skill dashboard visible to all employees for open positions by band, competency and other parameters if an employee’s tenure in the project is nearing the project end term.

10. Customers are seeing better connect from senior management visits than survey feedback as the ownership is better managed.

Today review calls, escalation matrix is some of the ways customers are being given authority to get the right service from a partner. They are seeing value in ownership as many times senior management visits also are planned to resolve a problem in a timely manner. However, many times the customer is failing to acknowledge these initiatives and only remembers the issue at hand which impacts the CSAT.

It is important for clients to recognize that any problem is a time for due diligence and recognizing that a change is managed two ways. There must be a proper signoff and the customer aware that his feedback has been captured in the KM portal and would be used for future reviews to improve the service delivery.

To summarize I have aligned most of the suggestions around the three parameters below.

Employee Productivity

1. It is important employees do not always use KM for a last-minute information search but understand how to navigate KM depending on the kind of requirement.

2. Employees refer the BU dashboard regularly and plan well in advance for their next project. Update their resume with significant achievement that helps delivery managers identify their talent.

3. Managers drive employee to regularly access KM and the same is highlighted during QIC’s to ensure the organization is committed.

Employee Satisfaction

1. It is important employees see value from KM in their work being referenced rather than just the number of times it is accessed.

2. Many employees who do not prefer face to face interactions may be more comfortable using chat forums, WarRooms or even webinars where they type a question to the presenter. 

3. Onsite employees see value in taking knowledge sessions for new project team members, working on case study references, framework design and more for reusable artifacts.

Customer Satisfaction

1. Customers must be made more aware of the knowledge captured in KM portal. It is not just project artifacts but even review meeting minutes , senior management connect sessions and others are important. It is important senior management signoff happens and the feedback is captured on KM portal to ensure quality service delivery.

An effective Knowledge Manager

1. Should be visible to all employees in the BU through his actions rather than reactions. He must reach out informally as well and talk to fellow employees to relate information to them.

2. Learn two ways, spending more time with Project Champions helping employee know the merits of using the virtual KM world.

3. Know the customer’s pulse and drives information to delivery teams supporting them with data to make a winning impression or resolve conflicts. This cannot happen visiting the client place it has to be done informally using the relationship with the delivery or sales teams.

4. Represent the BU as their spokesperson, success stories are not always captured in case studies. An effective KM Manager should sell Knowledge to fellow employees.

5. Acknowledge helping employees in different time zones working on the same domain as many times timings may differ. Helping your BU employee service his customer better should be the motto of all Knowledge Managers, as their success is yours.

Knowledge sharing at the workplace is essential for any organization that wants to grow and thrive. Successful organizations have a strong knowledge base due to teamwork support, continuous encouragement, and having an effective knowledge management system in place. While everyone in the organization is doing their best to achieve their goals, knowledge sharing can quickly change to knowledge hoarding.

The knowledge that employees share is an integral part of the knowledge-sharing culture. However, most people don’t realize this. Employees who have different perspectives on knowledge sharing will create huge problems for the organization in the long run because knowledge sharing will fail at its core. While the culture of knowledge sharing is developed to boost the efficiency and productivity of an organization, some employees are usually unwilling to share knowledge for different reasons.

Why hoard information?

While knowledge sharing sounds like a simple thing, it’s one of the hardest tasks for employees to perform. Most employees have no idea of the type of information they need to share. When they learn about the organization’s secrets, they tend to stop sharing information. They do this by hoarding the information they have. As we mentioned earlier, there are a couple of reasons that propel them to act in this manner.

1.     Lack of trust

One of the main reasons behind hoarding information is a lack of trust. Employees block and hoard information to stay ahead of their colleagues and receive rewards. To solve this problem, leaders need to focus on the goals and objectives of the organization. Employees need to be rewarded based on their progress. Also, leaders should encourage their employees to work together on projects to create an atmosphere of trust.

2.     Time management

Poor time management always results in failure and dissatisfaction. Every employee in an organization wants to perform their duties and achieve their long-term goals in the shortest time possible. This is why you’ll always find employees busy. With no time to spare, busy employees will have a hard time sharing important information with others. Instead of looking at information sharing as a separate task, leaders should encourage employees to delegate tasks to assignment writing services and include knowledge sharing in their daily tasks to make their work easy.

3.     Failure to understand knowledge sharing

While hiring new employees has its advantages, it’s quite difficult to find a newbie who understands the concept of knowledge sharing. Due to a lack of training on knowledge management and communication, they might fail to know what to do with the knowledge that they’ve been withholding. This problem can be eliminated if leaders find time to train newbies on sharing knowledge properly. Communicating with junior and senior staff regularly, and hosting in-house and web-based training will allow employees to learn more about the process of sharing knowledge. Apart from that, all webinar and training records should be easy to access.

4.     Lack of a common platform to share knowledge

Employees might feel vulnerable if they have to ask for information from upper management. A research study conducted by McKinsey and Company found that the average employee wastes 20 percent of his or her time searching for essential information or looking for a colleague who can help them obtain the knowledge they need. Leaders need to create a knowledge-sharing platform. Studies have shown that the creation of these platforms and using paper writing websites saves 35 percent of an employee’s time.

5.     Knowledge is power

Most employees know that knowledge is power. Therefore, the individual who hoards the most information is considered to be the most powerful in the workplace. Some employees will pile a lot of information in their heads while others lead them to get it. They hope to be treated in a special way for sharing information. Therefore, the management must identify and reward employees who share information and deal with those who hoard it.

6.     Considering information sharing as a non-important task

Some employees consider information sharing as a low-priority task and dedicate most of their time and energy to tasks that they consider beneficial and important. To solve this problem, the upper management should serve as an example to all employees. Leaders should find time to share knowledge with their employees and ensure that their employees do the same. They should also include knowledge sharing as an objective that has to be achieved by every employee in the organization.

7.     Punishing employees for sharing information

Some leaders and employees punish their colleagues for sharing information. As we said earlier, employees need to be trained on the knowledge sharing process to know the kind of information that they need to share. The knowledge-sharing process should be aligned with the goals of the organization.

8.     They think they are sharing information

Employees might be sharing information with their colleagues. However, they could be doing it the wrong way. They could be using the wrong channel or sharing the wrong type of information. Leaders need to show them how to share information using the recommended ways. Upper management also needs to ensure that their employees have the best tools and equipment to perform their duties.

Conclusion

When employees share knowledge properly, the organization will grow and thrive. Knowledge sharing nurtures teamwork, boosts productivity, and builds trust between employees and upper management. Leaders need to train employees regularly and encourage them to share information to promote themselves. Now that you know the reasons behind hoarding information, what are you going to work on today to achieve your goals?