Building Knowledge in The Workplace

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Employee

Knowledge
A complete guide to building
it in the workplace
What is workplace knowledge?
Workplace knowledge is the sum of all business processes,
policies and procedures.
Effective workplace knowledge provides a competitive
advantage by reducing inefficiencies, encouraging collaboration,
creating trust between employees and management, and
making company knowledge readily available, accessible and
accurate.
Why does it matter?
Workplace knowledge is important because it enables
employees to do their jobs effectively. Facilitating the sharing
of that knowledge (while avoiding knowledge silos) ensures
your workforce have equal access to the information they need
to do their jobs.
How does it help?
Staying ahead of the curve is incredibly important as
marketplaces become more and more saturated. Consumers
know they can go elsewhere and so do employees – which is a
problem when they take certain information with them.
Employee
Knowledge
Benefits
Build decision-making capabilities
Access to the right resources at key moments in time is critical
for leaders when making decisions. This rings even more true
when there is an excess of irrelevant data in front of them and
they’re on a deadline.
Create a more collaborative culture
It’s important to ensure knowledge sharing is an underlying
current in workplace culture. What’s done at the top trickles
down and what’s done amongst a team is internalised by
new hires.
Reduce employee attrition/turnover
The more resignations, the more knowledge and experience lost if
it is not properly captured. A central point for storing learning
demonstrates the value of collaboration and the unique
knowledge your employees possess.
Support learning in the flow of work
Peer-to-peer learning is an important factor of on-the-job
training, which is in turn a hands-on method of imparting job-
specific knowledge. Additionally, employees who are
encouraged to learn are more willing and able to meet their
organisation’s needs and objectives.
Crafting A
Knowledge
Management
Process
Step 1: Define Your Touchpoints
There’ll be multiple sources of knowledge and multiple
channels for it.
You’ll want to figure out the touch points it originates from,
moves through and is stored in. This puts boundaries around
your knowledge assets, making it a whole lot easier to define
what is mission critical.
Step 1: Define Your Touchpoints
All together, this gives you an idea of what’s valuable,
sustainable, impossible to replicate and powering your
competitive advantage. And this gives big data its value,
justifying the cost of managing it.
Step 2: Create a single source
repository
All organisations accrue a vast amount of information and
expertise, which is why it’s important to store and organise
them in a structured manner. This can be as simple as
standardising writing and keeping electronic copies of
routinely used documents.
Step 2: Create a single source
repository
All of this can and should live in a platform that is already used
daily by employees. The advantage here is that you’re not
introducing something new or complicated to their work lives
but making better use of an existing tool.
Step 3: Establish knowledge sharing
practices
Some say that knowledge needs to be shared because all
knowledge is created and built from existing knowledge.
If employees see what they know as contributing to the
greater (intellectual capital) goals of their organisation, they
are likely to treat their knowledge as an asset that is meant to
be shared.
Step 3: Establish knowledge sharing
practices
A big part of fostering a culture is creating an environment in
which people feel psychologically safe to share ideas and
information, both implicitly and explicitly. In this way, you
could say knowledge sharing has two purposes:
• Creating space for social learning between employees
• Having subject matter experts routinely teach others.
You can learn more about this
topic by checking out the full
article:

https://acornlms.com/resources/workplace-
knowledge

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