7-Strategy approach to nurture knowledge sharing in your organisation

What a company knows is now its main advantage over its competitors. Remote and hybrid work made that harder: the knowledge that used to travel across a desk now has to travel through a system. Companies need one that gets the right information to the right person while it still matters.

Organisations that value and use knowledge as a resource are more productive and spend less running themselves. An integral part of knowledge management is knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing allows knowledge to be accessible and usable within and across organisations.

As knowledge is not something tangible, transferring it from a source to a receiver is not that easy. There is no simple template available to capture and share the different types of knowledge available. However, researchers have studied and indexed social, organisational, and technological factors that encourage knowledge sharing. One study found that task characteristics, organisational culture, social relations, learning orientations and social networking tools mattered most for knowledge sharing in the workplace.

How to grow workplace knowledge sharing

In the context of an organisation and the workplace, knowledge resources are what enable employees to accomplish tasks and reach goals. An employee has to have specific knowledge to carry out a job according to an organisation’s specifications. For every employee needing to acquire distinct knowledge, there is one employee willing to impart what they know. Knowledge sharing is two movements playing off each other: someone seeks, someone shares. The rest of this article is about what sets each movement off.

1. Develop a continuous learning habit

Make curiosity normal in the office, and continuous learning follows. The people who learn proactively are also the ones who share the most.

Learning orientation is a person’s potential geared towards acquiring new skills and knowledge so they may upgrade their competency. This ability to proactively learn drives competitive advantage for both the individual employee and the entire organisation. Each organisation acquires unique knowledge through experience over time. As employees perform organisation-specific tasks, the more they learn and acquire organisational knowledge. This knowledge resource is how an organisation reaches its objectives.

Curious employees ask more questions. The people who answer them learn what the company does not yet document.

2. Make knowledge sharing casual and fun

How do you get your knowledge experts to share their most boring tacit knowledge while keeping your newest recruit curious and unintimidated? You design the workplace to allow everyone to randomly mingle in common areas out of management’s earshot.

People share more with colleagues they already know and feel at ease with. Good knowledge sharing is determined by the quality of the relationship between knowledge seekers and knowledge owners. Employees will only share valuable knowledge to their colleagues when they are comfortable with them determined by a level of trust, reciprocity, openness and shared norms. Frequent interaction is the foundation of social relations and interpersonal trust.

Design social-friendly spaces to encourage informal interactions and build trust among colleagues for enjoyable impromptu knowledge sharing, and to establish familiarity for more formal meetings:

• Water cooler station: This one’s a classic: the well-known stop for gossip and catch-ups in the history of office work. It gave birth to the term ‘water cooler conversation’ and a phenomenon called ‘the water cooler effect’ that accounts for a 10-15% increase in productivity thanks to employees’ feelings of connectedness with each other. Make sure to place your water cooler in a strategic location to maximise accidental, happy interactions and possible collaborations.
• Coffee and snack areas: Position multiple coffee stations around the office to further expand social space. Include healthy and interesting snacks for additional engagement. Not only does everyone love coffee but a cosy coffee area is great for casual encounters that encourage people to share knowledge and stories of work-related experiences, and talk about the problems they are handling.
• Other liminal spaces: Researchers have studied and identified liminal spaces as providing a ‘transitory space for conversations without organisational conventions’. Take for example the term ‘corridor conversations’ in the healthcare sector. It’s in corridors or walkways that random colleagues find each other and end up discussing openly how they’re dealing with crises and complexity. Create more comfortable in-between spaces for your employees: turn your toilet, doorways, supply rooms, printing area, basement, parking lot, steps, stairs, fire exit, corners and other undefined spaces into ‘positive pockets’ and ‘spaces for inspiration’. The sense of informality and freedom in these spaces provide meaningful spatial resources for creative conversation and knowledge exchange.
• Virtual water cooler: Having informal digital chats among teams and projects is one way of incorporating casual conversations into everyday work life. These virtual water coolers are another avenue, especially for hybrid or remote work setups.

You might also like: 4 practical steps to an effective knowledge transfer plan

3. But also create structured knowledge-sharing spaces and protocols

In addition to the ‘positive pockets’ that in-between spaces provide, the ideal knowledge-sharing setting also provides ‘pockets of peace’:

• Dedicated rooms for formal collaboration and private discussions: conference rooms, meeting rooms and brainstorming rooms for the activities that need them.
  • Structured company-wide or departmental meetings with a formal approach and set objectives.
  • Employee onboarding and training programmes designed to deliver specific knowledge to specific employees.
  • Performance reviews and other discussions involving sensitive and private topics.
• Enclosed spaces for distraction-free reading and individual quiet work.
  • A worker breaks away with another person for mentoring or job shadowing, sharing tacit knowledge without distractions.
  • People take a video or phone call in an enclosed area, away from the noise.
  • An employee hides away to focus deeply while preparing for a meeting.
• Behaviour and area protocols that set expectations for specific times and places.
  • Job rotations at regular intervals, so people have to seek and share knowledge to handle their new roles.
  • More frequent, shorter breaks, to allow more relationship-building.
  • Designated quiet hours for focused individual work.

4. Cultivate a knowledge-sharing culture

First, let us take a look at what the term  ‘organisational culture’ actually entails. Simply put, there are three notable dimensions when referring to it:

• Basic assumptions, which are invisible core values unconsciously executed by company members.
• Norms are the social standards and expectations that employees match their actions with.
• Practices, those that visibly express organisational culture through office layout, interaction patterns, dressing styles, knowledge databases, and similar things stemming from the organisation’s basic assumptions.

Including knowledge sharing as a core value in an organisation’s culture would lead to employees embracing knowledge-sharing activities that eventually become a norm. And as knowledge sharing becomes associated with corporate culture, any knowledge sharing related activity will be regarded with a sense of professionalism, and expectations of management and colleagues.

More to read: Why large companies need knowledge management

5. Reward knowledge-sharing initiatives

It’s a given that helping others has its own intrinsic rewards. However, when it comes to helping others by sharing their self-generated knowledge, individuals are a lot less willing to help without rewards. The theory presumes that employees believe the knowledge they have collected through their experiences is part of their identity. Any help involving sharing their knowledge, they deem more costly to provide.

That cost is also what builds trust. Someone who shares hard-won knowledge feels a bond with the person who receives it, and expects something back. A reward makes that exchange easier to start.

So how should organisations reward knowledge sharing? A study of incentive design found subjective incentives (a bonus based on colleagues’ evaluations) the most effective. When recipients help decide on the rewards, it builds trust and softens individuals to share their knowledge.

6. Nurture a collaborative and innovative environment

A successful knowledge-sharing environment is one that provides a range of spaces that grant employees the freedom of where and how to get their jobs done. People need privacy to work, and privacy does not compete with collaboration. It supports it: teams that can retreat come back with something to contribute.

Whether physical or virtual, allocating ‘shielded’ spaces for your teams allows them to move easily between group time and individual time, creating a healthy knowledge-sharing rhythm. Meeting together to think about a problem and then separating to let the ideas ferment, engages employees to think critically and reflect on new information. They come back to the next conversation with something new to put in it.

7. Use the most suitable knowledge-sharing tool

You need to find a knowledge management platform that allows all the above-mentioned knowledge-sharing best practices in one simple tool. The most suitable knowledge management software will:

• Allow your organisation and employees to develop a continuous learning habit. What you need is knowledge management software that will let you find the right information at the right time. Create intelligent content organised around pre-defined topics that everyone in your organisation can also search for.
• Engage interactions centred on casual sharing and light-hearted learning. You need a knowledge management platform that encourages everyone in your organisation to contribute ideas and bounce insights.
• Structure centralised knowledge in spaces and groups that automatically organise large volumes of information according to context. Anyone in the organisation can locate expert information, access training and onboarding procedures, and store high-dense information.
• Make all learning activities revolve around knowledge sharing. This may manifest in different ways but a suitable platform speeds up content creation with pre-defined templates for faster capture of knowledge. Additionally, it also enables collaborative functions such as sharing, commenting, and co-editing.
• Drive collaboration and innovation through a unified sharing platform through insights, trends and collective intelligence. The right platform brings insights, exchanges and feedback together in one place.

Conclusion

Building a knowledge sharing culture in an organisation follows the seven-step approach above. However, remember that it mainly depends on two things:

1. Highly motivated employees engaged in continuous learning.
2. A knowledge library that is properly organised and stored in such a way that facilitates easy knowledge retrieval, integration and sharing.

Want to see this working in a real platform? Book a demo.