More and more organizations are implementing an internal knowledge base for many different reasons. As you grow your business, you also need a place where employees can connect and retrieve invaluable information that can help them make informed decisions.
By implementing an internal knowledge base, you can reap many of the benefits of this organized collection of information and knowledge from within your organization. So, what exactly happens when you make this information readily available to everyone who needs it?
Let’s take a closer look, and you’ll see why your organization needs an internal knowledge base. In a word, it will make your operations much more efficient and your employees much more productive.
Improving Productivity Across All Departments
The importance of productivity doesn’t need to be explained at all, but it’s very worrying to see how much productivity has dropped over the past few years. The average employee is only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes per day due to various factors, and that needs to change.
One reason productivity is so low is that employees spend a lot of their time searching for information. This is especially true for larger organizations with many employees and those that don’t have a proper system in place for storing and finding information.
If you ever had to search through cluttered boxes, scroll through old Slack messages, or find a coworker who might have the information you are looking for, you know how much time that can waste. However, if you implement an internal knowledge base where you store all the essential data, that will be a thing of the past.
Increasing Employee Engagement
The difference between an engaged and non-engaged employee is staggering. Employee engagement improves morale, increases profitability, and leads to 41% lower absenteeism. One of the easiest ways to ensure increased engagement is to give all of your employees access to your knowledge base.
Make all of the knowledge and information from the organization available through knowledge base tools. You will show that your business values transparency above all else. This will, in turn, foster trust because all of your employees will feel they’re being kept in the loop.
Workers who have faith in the company they work for are more willing to share their knowledge, which they can conveniently do through your knowledge base. And since modern bases have amazing collaboration features, your workers will be able to interact more than ever before.
Thanks to features that allow users to comment on posts or documents, like them, tag other colleagues, ask questions, follow topics, and much more, collaboration and engagement will undoubtedly increase. Whether your workers are sitting side by side or working from different parts of the world, they will always be connected and feel like their voice is valued within the company.
Preserving Knowledge Of Past Employees
Nobody works in one organization forever, and there are various reasons employees leave a company, some temporarily and others permanently. Whether someone changes their job, retires, or goes on vacation, they also take a lot of valuable knowledge and information with them.
Every worker is an important part of your business, and if you lose someone’s expertise just because they are no longer with your company, this can lead to disaster and create problems. Luckily, this can all be avoided if you know how to handle knowledge transfer effortlessly.
Encourage everyone employed within your company to document every project they complete, question they ask, piece of content they write, the protocol they develop, and so on. That way, it will be much more straightforward to transfer tasks and information from one person to another.
Additionally, if you employ subject matter experts, you need to use a platform that allows users to share content in different formats. If you allow images, audio, video, and text posts in your knowledge base, you allow experts to share information in a way that’s most convenient for them.
Empowering Remote Workers
The days of 9 to 5 office hours are slowly being replaced with a different form of working, and that’s remote work. You don’t have to share an office with someone to collaborate with them, especially since more and more people are transitioning to working from home.
The number of remote workers keeps increasing every year, and that number has become even higher since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a high possibility you have a number of remote employees in your company as well, but that doesn’t mean collaboration has to suffer.
As long as you have a cloud-based and mobile-friendly internal knowledge base, any employee can access it from anywhere in the world.
And if you adopt a flexible work model and allow your workers to be on the job when they want, they can access the information they need whenever they need it. So, even if someone isn’t available at a certain time, their expertise always will be.
If someone from your company needs to access time-sensitive information, an easily accessible knowledge base is your greatest weapon. For instance, if a customer service rep who works remotely needs to answer a customer’s question immediately, they can do that without any issues.
Remember that a company’s reputation can greatly depend on how quickly it can provide service to a customer or client. If your line of work requires your employees to assist in a timely manner, a knowledge base where they can find answers and information immediately is essential.
Reducing The Need For Emails
For a long time, workers within an organization relied on emails and various messaging platforms to share knowledge, and this practice is still present in many businesses. However, sharing content like this has one glaring issue: version control.
When you share a document with someone via email and the person who received it needs to edit it, they will have to resend the new and up-to-date version. Sometimes, multiple people have to work on one document at the same time, resulting in many different versions of that document.
Additionally, issues can arise if there are multiple one-to-one conversations regarding this document over email, which usually leads to soiled information.
If you encourage your workers to use a knowledge base and post to it every time they work on projects with multiple people, you can ensure that all of the content is always up to date. You will also be able to view who made what change over time, which will increase accountability.
Final Thoughts
All of the benefits we’ve discussed here aren’t speculations; they’re simple facts that have been proven over and over again. Each company that has implemented its knowledge base has seen an increase in employee productivity, engagement, and much more.
The size and niche of your business are irrelevant because this type of knowledge preserving and sharing can be beneficial for any organization. As long as you make sure that all of your employees understand that the knowledge base is there to make their jobs easier and more efficient, you won’t have any issues implementing it.