Have you ever felt disconnected from your organization or out of the loop on important updates? While it’s normal to feel this way from time to time, sustained disengagement can negatively impact both individual and company performance.
Empowering employees with access to relevant information is a straightforward way for business leaders to foster higher engagement levels. One highly effective engagement tool that businesses often overlook is implementing an intuitive knowledge management, or KM, system.
What is KM? Simply put, KM involves organizing, sharing, and growing a company’s collective expertise to lighten individual workloads and connect all members of the team. In this article, we’ll explore how the right KM solution can help bring your workforce together and boost engagement in the long run.
What is KM?
In case you’re not familiar with the term, knowledge management refers to coordinating a business’s intangible assets – things like institutional wisdom, processes, and industry insights accumulated over time.
Knowledge management mainly aims to streamline how teammates located around the world access and contribute to this treasure trove of information. Whether it’s finding answers to technical queries or double-checking best practices, empowering your employees with easy, convenient KM access is key.
The right KM strategy can help eliminate roadblocks by streamlining how knowledge workers collaborate, learn, and problem-solve together. When deployed effectively, KM has been shown to lighten individual workloads, accelerate onboarding and skills development, and inspire new ideas.
Perhaps most importantly, it helps cut research times and address duplicative efforts that drain productivity.
Improve Workflows and Efficiency
A well-designed KM platform can streamline countless repetitive tasks that often disrupt workflow and decrease productivity. For example, consider a sales rep who must search through past emails or internal files every time a client has a question already addressed elsewhere.
With KM, queries that previously required hours of research can now be resolved in minutes through centralized databases. The same goes for engineers who spend valuable time reinventing solutions already discovered by others. Consolidating knowledge fosters efficiency and collaboration over needless duplication of efforts.
Reducing Knowledge Silos for Better Coordination
Many businesses inadvertently create “knowledge silos” as unique departments develop specialized vocabularies and methodologies in isolation. However, restricting information flow breeds disconnected work styles and territorial clashes down the line.
KM removes these barriers by cultivating an inclusive culture where all teammates feel valued for contributing their distinct talents. For instance, remote and entry-level employees gain worthwhile ways to lend their skills and participate fully as esteemed colleagues rather than outsiders.
Sharing Successes Inspires Continuous Learning
In addition to serving everyday queries, KM provides a venue for showcasing intriguing successes from across the organization. Highlighting top performers not only motivates others to surpass their achievements but also exposes potential best practices everyone can adopt.
Regularly updated KM case studies spark new ideas that keep your workforce engaged and your business innovating long-term. Continuous learning also plays a big role in retaining top talent, as cutting-edge firms are now ranked primarily on their dedication to cultivating lifelong learners over job titles or salaries alone.
Main Types of Knowledge
For knowledge management to fulfill its potential, systems must be designed to capture both explicit and tacit knowledge types. Explicit knowledge describes information that has already been codified, such as published documents, policies, and product specifications. It lends itself well to storage in databases or document management systems.
Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, refers to personal insights, experiences, perspectives, intuitions, and skills that reside within people’s minds. It’s often gained informally on the job through experimentation and relationship-building over long periods.
Tacit knowledge is considerably more difficult to extract and share in a structured format. Without deliberate efforts to convert tacit forms into sharable explicit content, they remain siloed within individuals.
In addition to explicit and tacit knowledge, there are also types. Declarative knowledge describes static facts about topics, while procedural knowledge deals with how to perform processes through steps. A posteriori knowledge is gained from observation/experience, and a priori knowledge comprises truths derived from reason alone.
As knowledge workers become more distributed, companies risk losing expertise through attrition. Collectively capturing these different forms of knowledge through documented policies, training materials, and other formats yields a more comprehensive understanding within organizations.
What is KM’s Application Process?
An effective KM process includes iterative cycles of acquiring, organizing, sharing, and applying information to maximize its real-world impact.
Knowledge acquisition refers to identifying priority knowledge needs and collecting contributions from across departments and levels. This ensures a comprehensive, multi-dimensional understanding of customer trends and competitor dynamics.
With a dynamic knowledge base in place, the next step is organizing the vast amounts of information. Businesses use taxonomies, metadata schemas, topic relationship maps, and search/visualization tools. The goal is to establish logical connections between explicit facts and tacit perspectives to facilitate easy discovery later on.
Once structured for retrieval, knowledge must be widely shared among teams, locations, and generations. This is typically done through centralized repositories, collaboration hubs, forums, guidance documents, rotational programs, and other distribution channels. By sharing valuable information, companies aim to spark new ideas, accelerate problem-solving, cut learning curves, and prevent information silos.
The final piece brings the process full circle – knowledge users apply existing learnings, identify new knowledge needs, and directly contribute refinements to expand the collective knowledge foundation. This feedback loop sustains continuous knowledge improvement and adaptability.
What is KM’s Role In Boosting Employee Engagement? Final Thoughts
Knowledge and information run the modern business world. Business agility hinges on keeping teammates well-informed and collaborating smoothly as one cohesive unit.
Make knowledge management a top priority by selecting a solution tailored to your unique workforce needs. Some of the key benefits of knowledge management include improved efficiency, informed decision-making, reduced knowledge silos and duplicate efforts, and enhanced organizational learning and innovation.
When implemented properly through an intuitive system, KM helps streamline processes, cut research time, facilitate collaboration across teams, boost quality and consistency, retain valuable expertise, and accelerate responses – all of which can significantly increase employee engagement and productivity.
For more information, visit ApzoMedia