Sharing Best Practices In The Workplace: Informal Methods And Knowledge Sharing Tools
Sharing best practices in organizations has always been considered vital for incessant development. The main objective is to recognize the supreme method of doing something—whether in the industry or within your organization—and to distribute the knowledge and experience obtained across your organization to make everybody reach the maximum level of performance.
Theoretically, it seems to be an easy feat. However, in actual, sharing best practices in companies can be exceptionally challenging in terms of not only recognizing those best practices but also in sharing them across inter-departmental silos. One of the major challenges in this regard is the lack of right tools that make knowledge sharing an easy process for all.
If you wish to cultivate a corporate culture that facilitates employees in sharing best practices across different departments, you need to focus on these 5 tools:
1. Knowledge Sharing Tools
One of the most convenient methods of fostering a knowledge sharing culture in your company is to invest in a knowledge sharing tool such as BoostHQ. It allows users to effortlessly and speedily look for content, ask queries, share files and videos, reorganize their training, and motivate everybody, from interns to the higher management, to share their knowledge.
Moreover, by means of robust reporting and analytics, you can always keep a track of your employees’ progress and how much information each employee is contributing to the team. By rewarding employees who share knowledge more often, you can also encourage others who are either unwilling or simply less motivated to share their ideas.
2. Social Media Networks
Whether you like it or not, your employees are using social media networks even during work hours. Why not use it for knowledge sharing?
Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have taken the world by storm. From microblogging to YouTube-inspired sources of educational videos, these social platforms support managers to nurture information distribution across disseminated employees. These platforms provide an informal and relaxed environment for employees to share their ideas, brainstorm and collaborate.
3. Corporate Intranet
Having an exclusive corporate intranet acts as a platform that promotes social collaboration along with information sharing among employees. For instance, you can invest in intranet products such as Honey, Igloo and Slack. Though Slack is not explicitly mentioned as an intranet, it provides features regarding communication, one-to-one discussion and file-sharing that make it a convenient intranet solution.
By means of an intranet, you can allow workers to share knowledge with colleagues. In fact, many intranet products allow the use of subject labels or hashtags to make formerly shared knowledge easy to be searched. This way, workers can conveniently search for and share knowledge about common issues, thereby, diminishing the need for supervisors to intervene.
However, along with having a corporate intranet service across the entire organization, it is advisable to produce departmental focused clusters within your intranet so that workers can effortlessly share pertinent information with particularly their departments/teams.
4. Note-Taking Apps
At times, workers require a more relaxed approach for sharing best practices with colleagues. Note-taking tools such as Evernote serve as an exceptional multi-platform tool for such occurrences. It allows workers to generate and share written notes, pictures, digitally handwritten notes, screenshots and audio proceedings with their workmates.
Moreover, such tools also allow syncing notes from smartphones to the laptop or workstation automatically. Hence, whenever an idea comes to their mind, your workers can capture it immediately in their note-taking tool and share with their colleagues via Windows or Mac integration.
Such an informal, laid-back communication among employees can encourage them to indulge in more recurrent communication and when workers interact frequently, sharing best practices and knowledge occurs more certainly and more regularly.
5. Kanban Tools
Not many companies are familiar with Kanban tools and are, therefore, missing out on an important resource.
Kanban is simply a workflow method that aids you in organizing your chores into buckets which are basically diverse phases of your workflow procedure. For instance, “Conception”, “Model”, “Implementation”, and “Accomplished” could be some possible buckets in your workflow process. As ventures proceed from the conception stage to the accomplished stage, companies can observe where they’re in the process and uphold accurate deadlines for their consumers.
The two popular Kanban tools designed specifically for corporate needs are Atlassian and Kanbanize. These tools allow project managers to monitor which employees are working on different tasks, in different phases. Consequently, it upturns transparency for the management while spontaneously giving all workers better knowledge of the task’s progress and continuing requirements.
Final Word
Although customary methods of sharing best practices are undoubtedly valuable in the office, there exists a necessity to re-frame how we embolden information distribution among our workers. Using informal methods such as social media networks and note-taking tools, or more formal approaches such as corporate intranet systems, Kanban tools and dedicated knowledge sharing tools, your workers can start perceiving information sharing as an innovative, and supportive process.
