14 Nov
We took our Café Connect event on the road! We headed across the Channel to London for a cosy morning of learning and exchange. It all took place at the Breather workspace in central London, a stunning space and perfect location to welcome our guests. We had a great mix of attendees, from architects and engineers to consultants and recruiters, brought together by the difficulties they faced distributing expertise within their organisation.
In this era of digitalisation, every organisation is facing a competitive, legal and technological environment that is constantly evolving. Growth and agility is needed in order to integrate new information, skills and experience faster than ever. But what’s the best way to do this?
The market is seeing a shift from highly-centralised knowledge management within static file repositories (such as SharePoint), towards fully decentralised social tools and intranets, which encourage team-based collaboration or a community-based sharing approach (you can delve further into this concept here). But this can raise difficulties without balance, giving information overload and a lot of noise. Elium bridges the gap between these two ideas, providing the right technology and a methodology which supports giving employees space and time to digest information.
What are the difficulties facing organisations?
The interactive session was led by Fabienne Vandekerkove, Chief Operations at Elium, and Gregory Culpin, our Head of Product Marketing. We discussed the individual, organisational and technological obstacles that are in the way of organisations implementing successful knowledge sharing, exploring examples from our own customers as well as the attendees. A key concern was the need to share good practices across the globe for local projects to benefit from, and the difficulties they faced breaking silos in their organisation – employees who don’t share beyond their team. Others worried about a potential lack of engagement from their employees reluctant to lose their ‘expert status’.
How do we overcome these issues?
It’s important to educate employees about the benefits of knowledge sharing within your organisation, so they have the drive to share and can see first-hand the benefits. In time, both managers and employees will see the benefit of exchanging information, learning from others working on a similar project.
Sharing content should also be very simple, so building it into employee habits can help improve engagement with the platform. For previous collaborations, we’ve worked with our customers to create guides for their platform launch, encouraging their employees to share and build on the knowledge and expertise of others.
Another key to success is having a supportive group of ambassadors, to champion the platform amongst colleagues and higher management. Ambassadors should not be selected from those with hierarchical power, but those that are the ‘social butterflies’ of your organisation, with a will to share and an eye for interesting content, from a range of departments. Take a look how our customer, the leading insurance company D.A.S., implemented their team of ambassadors, and how they reward them.
See you next time!
We’d like to thank those who joined us once again, we really appreciate your enthusiasm and will to learn as it allowed our discussions to go deeper, really into the heart of what your organisations are struggling with today. We hoped we helped you to understand the next steps for your organisation and how knowledge sharing can help.
Did you miss out on this edition of Cafe Connect? Don’t panic, we’re doing it all again! Join us for the next Café Connect, or one of our interactive webinars, where we’ll be demonstrating our platform and answering any questions you may have on knowledge sharing. Check the dates and register here.
