An in-depth guide to knowledge sharing best practices

And knowledge sharing boosts learning in the workplace. 55% of employees prefer peer learning to learning from their top management. This blog post will review knowledge-sharing best practices that won’t cost an arm and a leg to reap all the benefits we mentioned above. Let’s read on!

Even though knowledge sharing is meant to impact the organizations positively, employees often demonstrate a lack of engagement and interest.

Common concerns include the threat of disbalance between working time and knowledge sharing activities or lack of motivation.

To get people collaborating and sharing their knowledge with peers, close common objections like:

“Do I contribute to corporate knowledge sharing during my working time or in my free time?”

“What if I don’t have time?”

“What do I personally get by contributing to the company’s knowledge base?”

“What if my colleagues criticize my work?”

“Are there any negative consequences of punishments for my contribution?”

Below, we’ll review some of the engagement techniques that allow you to build a sense of trust in your employees and motivate them to build a professional community within an organization.

Introducing knowledge sharing best practices and handing over the tools to your employees isn’t enough. The statistics are discouraging: 64% of employees don’t use the learning management initiatives and platforms at their organizations.

Xerox walked in those shoes too. They introduced Eureka – the custom-build knowledge management platform that allowed software engineers to share their ready-made solutions and templates. Even though the idea was promising, the company spotted low engagement from employees. As a result, the Xerox team enabled employees to add their names in the added solutions that incentivized them to generate more content and build their professional image globally. This trick resulted in a 10% reduction in workforce costs and about 80% input growth every week.

Indeed, this isn’t a final list knowledge sharing best practices that incentivize employees. You can use our ideas or tweak them to fit in your corporate culture and team spirit.

Building trust in the workplace and creating a safe environment for ideas exchange is a native way to encourage knowledge sharing. For example, Facebook recognizes the importance of psychological safety. In the podcast Knowledge Sharing: A Sneak Peek into Facebook’s Engineering Teams, Balázs Balázs (ex-Engineering Manager at Facebook) reveals that Facebook encourages employees to ask questions and to admit they don’t know all the answers.

Needless to say, that their engineering team implements additional knowledge-sharing best practices. For example, they are connecting knowledge sharing with other personal development goals like public speaking. Thus, employees kill two birds with one stone, developing several expertise domains at once and contributing to the knowledge-sharing process.

At Buffer, a remote-first company, employees occasionally record Impromptu Knowledge Screencasts to share some “behind the scenes” of software development and fulfill a learning purpose. As an alternative, the Buffer team records GIFs to save time explaining the solution on a call or in a chat. Such effortless content formats allow a software development team to accumulate expertise, save time on explanation, and engage everyone in the knowledge-sharing process.

In a nutshell, the metrics must answer critical questions like:

“Do we add value to our organization?”

“Do employees willingly participate in this process?”

“What gaps can we detect, and is there room for improvement?”