Working smarter instead of harder means creating a culture of knowledge sharing

How to build a culture of knowledge sharing

If you ask any senior business manager what one of the biggest time wasting problems are within their organisation, no doubt one of their first answers will be severe information asymmetry across departments, and time wasted in finding that information. This is completely natural, and you will certainly have experienced this in any role in your career to date.

The problem

When you join an organisation, you are expected to work in one specialist area and to excel at your day-to-day role, be that sales, marketing, HR etc. However, within this normal daily routine, there will be plenty of times where you have a query and need an answer to a problem that is covered by a different colleague in a different department. Of course, the natural way to seek an answer is by going and speaking to them or by sending an email. This immediately brings about a huge problem in that it causes a significant amount of time wasting. You will need to distract them from their task in order to get an answer, and can’t carry on with your own work until they have responded to you. Essentially, both yourself and the person you are speaking to are working harder, instead of smarter, in order to solve this problem of information asymmetry.

The solution

Simply put, the answer to this massive organisational problem, is what is termed knowledge sharing. It means building a culture within your company that encourages people to share solutions to common problems that they specialise in and making them readily accessible at all times to anyone else in the company. For example, if you work in sales and know that the pricing structure is about to change, then make sure that updated, and previous, pricing structures are in place. This means that customer services, if they need to speak to a customer regarding an issue, have access to how much they should have paid and exactly what it is they are meant to receive.

How do you do this?

The best way to incorporate knowledge sharing within a company is through creating a central, digital hub where everyone can upload and seek access to problems when they arrive. If you are asked about a specialist query, instead of just emailing the response to one person, upload it to the central hub so that it can quickly be searched for at a later date. This is exactly what Noddlepod has created, a space for all employees to share their given knowledge and make better use of their time, by encouraging independence from fellow employees and providing them with the tools they need to help themselves. It also serves as a central space for everyone to share new ideas and innovative solutions to other problems in their day-to-day working lives.

By incorporating this culture of knowledge sharing, you will quickly find that not just your own, but also the daily tasks of your colleagues, become easier and more efficient. You will no doubt start to quickly see the benefits of this for your business and realise that the most productive way forward for streamlining your company is to encourage everyone to work smarter, instead of harder.

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