How often have you been onboarded into a new role and struggled to find out everything you need to know to hit the ground running? It can often be an issue of company size and resources, but organisations large and small need to understand the business benefits of paying close attention to their knowledge management. What does that mean in practice?

Mark Scicluna is the AC3 Service Manager – Knowledge and Training and he says that, in layman’s terms, knowledge management can be defined as allowing people to come to work without having to worry about finding information or feeling confused about different processes and procedures.

But this is so much more than simply receiving comprehensive handover documents from a predecessor in the role. Rather, knowledge management is about building a bank of information that can be added to at any time. Individuals stop keeping their own notes about the idiosyncrasies of their roles and make contributions to the central knowledge depository, so that others can benefit too. Because, importantly, an organisation’s knowledge also needs to be shared. There may be one person in a company who is the fount of all wisdom regarding stationery supplies, and when and how it gets ordered.

A person leaving the company is one thing, but what happens if they’re simply away from work ill or on holiday? How do you ensure that the best supplier is used, and the optimal number of window envelopes are ordered? That’s a simple example, but without a best practice knowledge management system in place, organisations can find themselves reinventing the wheel constantly. And any time a system or process must be created from scratch, time is wasted, resources are wasted, and the bottom line is negatively impacted.

Another benefit is that of fresh eyes – when new staff join a company, they can be asked what they think of the onboarding documentation they receive and whether it is truly useful or reflective of their experiences. Is there anything missing? What do they wish they’d known from the get-go? This can be a terrific opportunity to look at the knowledge the company has built up and give it a rigorous review.

START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON

To prevent the frantic rush from an operational redundancy point of view when someone moves on from the company, Scicluna recommends prioritising knowledge management from the start. Applying this to teams rather than simply individually, ask what do they do in their current roles? What are all the different tasks and is there a piece of how-to documentation aligned with each one? Writing down a list of every task will help to identify which ones don’t. And if they don’t, that can then become an action – put it down on paper.

BEYOND DOCUMENTATION

When considering knowledge management, people generally first think of documentation – Word documents and spreadsheets. But there are other ways of transferring information. Conversations, training sessions, mentoring and buddy systems are all useful too. Culture is such a huge part of any organisation, but nobody ever gleaned a really deep understanding of ‘the actual way things are done here’ from a manual. Scicluna stresses that keeping it simple and lightweight is best when it comes to training sessions. “If you feel you are forced to do it, it doesn’t work,” he says.

PRIMING YOUR PARTNERS

Sharing is not solely a company-wide recommendation. When it comes to service provider partners, typically the more they know about their customers, the better they can support them. Sharing knowledge of key contacts in case of possible or probable scenarios can be vital. Contextual information is also helpful. A service provider that has comprehensive knowledge of its customers’ businesses, their peak periods of activity, the timing of their specific deliverables, and other business critical information is one that can provide a better service, every time.

Tips for sharing knowledge:

  • Promote a culture of building knowledge in shared areas, as well as through non-written formats.
  • Don’t wait until you have a polished document; start building a draft that can be added to or adapted.
  • Emphasise that everyone’s contributions are valuable – senior C-suite or inexperienced intern.
  • Ensure there is management buy-in and support.
  • Encourage participation by explaining the benefits – imagine the positive response to advice like ‘If we do this, a new starter can use it, get up to speed and be in a position to help the team more quickly.’