Training programs are expensive, and employees don’t find them engaging. Although a Gallup study revealed that 87% of Millennials “say professional development or career growth opportunities are very important to them in jobs” many find them monotonous and, frankly, a waste of time.
How do we provide learning opportunities for our teams without forcing them to go through ineffective training courses? The answer is knowledge sharing.
What Is Knowledge Sharing?
What is knowledge sharing? It connects employees together to share what they know with one another and encourages them to apply what they learn.
It’s capturing the tactic knowledge within your organization and distributing it. Organizations that lean into knowledge sharing can point to it as the foundation for innovating, solving, and building a strong company culture where all departments work together.
There are three different types of knowledge sharing:
- Face-to-face knowledge sharing. This is done mostly through mentoring relationships where senior employees share advice and tactic knowledge they’ve built up over their career with junior employees or high potential talent.
- Group knowledge sharing through informal discussions or planned presentations. This is similar to face-to-face knowledge sharing but is a group setting instead. Groups of senior employees can work together to impart what they know to cohorts of junior employees. These cohorts are usually employees being groomed for leadership roles or special projects.
- Documentation and codifying the knowledge that was shared. This is distinct from the first two. After the knowledge is shared, documenting it in some form of a digital library makes it accessible to the rest of the company.
This article will outline X reasons why knowledge sharing is the future of workplace learning and how to introduce it into your organization to improve employee experience.
Let’s start with why knowledge sharing is effective:
6 Reasons Why Knowledge Sharing Is The Future Of Workplace Learning
1. Keep valuable know-how within the organization
Your senior employees will have a lot of knowledge and experience developed throughout their careers. And companies will lose a lot of that value if/when those tenured employees transition out of the company.
With knowledge sharing, you can pair up senior leaders or experienced employees with high potential team members or new hires to transfer that knowledge to the next generation of employees. Rather than re-learning the hard-earned lessons, newer employees can draw advice and guidance from mentors in the company.
2. Knowledge sharing is cost-effective
The amount companies spend on training their employees is over $20 million amount each year in the US. That’s a lot. With knowledge sharing, companies take the lessons that have already been learned and make them available to other employees - all without costly tools or processes.
It’s as simple as hosting structured conversations where the knowledge has the opportunity to be passed on or publishing training courses on Alison, one of the world's largest online learning websites, and sharing it within your organization.
3. Spur innovation (Don’t reinvent the wheel) and make faster decisions
Companies with high levels of communication and interactions are more innovative than those without. It’s pretty obvious - we know that two heads are better than one. Organizations, where people talk to one another and share their challenges, thoughts, and ideas, will surely be more creative and capable of finding innovative solutions.
With knowledge sharing, businesses can effectively break down silos between departments and unlock potential innovations.
4. Knowledge sharing is inherently collaborative instead of solitary
Knowledge sharing and collaboration go hand-in-hand. By formalizing opportunities for employees to share their knowledge, they will undoubtedly start to collaborate more effectively. They’ll get to know each other and learn what their domain expertise is.
For this reason, organizations can’t have a lot of silos when they embrace knowledge sharing.
5. Empower your employees to be experts
By embracing knowledge sharing, organizations encourage their team members to lean into what they know and share it with others. In some cases, employees can feel that sharing everything they know will give away some of their value or make them replaceable.
The temptation to hide what you know may be because, in Robert Greene’s acclaimed book, The 48 Laws of Power, rule number four says to withhold information from others. Supposedly, it gives you an upper hand by making them uncomfortable with your mysteriousness.
But in an organization that thrives on open collaboration, employees stand to gain, instead of losing, by sharing what they know with others. Employees will be seen as experts when problems or opportunities arise in their particular domain. They’ll gain reputations as advisors. That sounds a lot better than hoarding knowledge and keep helpful information from being serviceable.
6. Transparency attracts talent
Companies that share knowledge are more transparent. Encouraging employees to collaborate and distribute what they know will invite a level of openness that attracts talent. Millennials, the majority of the workforce today, and Gen-Z, the future workforce, want to work for open and honest companies.
By sharing information and knowledge, companies will attract top talent from Millennials and Gen-Zs.
How To Introduce Knowledge Sharing Into Your Organization
Now that we’ve outlined the importance of knowledge sharing, let’s break down how you can implement it within your organization. If you recall above, there are three types of knowledge sharing: one-on-one, group, and document knowledge sharing. Let’s outline how to implement them.
1. Organize knowledge-sharing events each week or month where an employee delivers a presentation on a particular topic
To formalize knowledge sharing, it’s helpful to create a regular cadence where team members will share knowledge. It can happen once each week or month where an employee delivers a presentation on a topic that would be helpful for the rest of the organization.
Doing this will solidify that the company values learning and will incentivize employees to share what they know in the future because they’ll build their statuses as experts in their field. After you have a regular and formal knowledge sharing activity, you can also encourage individuals to share knowledge in a more personal way. This is where peer-to-peer mentoring and traditional mentoring come into play.
2. Organize peer-to-peer mentoring
Peer-to-peer mentoring is where companies create space and time for employees to connect and share the invaluable tactic knowledge in a more personal way than a formal presentation. Peer-to-peer mentoring is effective because it builds stronger cultures and encourages them to help one another solve problems and make better decisions.
Organizing peer-to-peer mentoring starts by finding enthusiastic employees who are willing to take the first step in sharing what they know with others. In this way, employees who are more hesitant or shy will become interested in the lively conversations and want to join them. In the same way that knowledge sharing attracts talent to the company, knowledge sharing will draw individual employees into the idea.
3. Start a formal mentoring program between leaders and junior employees
Peer-to-peer mentoring is effective, but it’s incredibly important for organizations to capture the knowledge of their most experienced employees and pass that on to the rest of the company. Capturing your most experienced employees’ tactic knowledge through formal mentoring programs provides junior employees with direct access to leaders - which can be uncommon for newer employees.
Without formal mentoring programs, it can be difficult for junior employees to connect with leaders informally. In a mentoring program, both parties can buy into the idea of sharing knowledge and exchanging perspectives for the purpose of growth. Senior leaders get a sense of fulfillment by giving back and develop a reputation as an advisor or mentor. Junior employees can tap into tactic knowledge that may have taken years for their mentors to learn themselves.
4. Create a knowledge sharing library
After your organization embraces knowledge sharing through mentorship and open collaboration, don’t lose all that valuable knowledge. Document it in a knowledge repository for other members of your organization to access at any time in the future.
Mentors and mentees can take notes and record what they learn from one another and save them in some kind of shared drive. Likewise, make sure to record the presentations made by employees on their topics and document the conversations during the presentation. It’s helpful to have the recording, but even better to have key takeaways saved as well.
Not everyone will be willing to rewatch a 45-minute presentation, but they will read a quick round-up or list of key learnings.
Conclusion
Knowledge sharing is arguably the foundation that a company builds employee engagement, company culture, innovation, and ultimately, their success.
Without it, silos go up, companies become less transparent, and morale begins to plummet. Organizations will begin feeling the effects of this only after it’s hard to change. The culture has become stuck by this point.
In contrast, companies that embrace knowledge sharing will spur innovation and decision making by creating workplaces open to collaboration and transparency. In turn, these companies will capture the knowledge of senior employees and pass it to others. As the company becomes more effective because of its transparency, more people will want to join their teams.
Knowledge sharing starts a flywheel that can propel a company forward. And companies can implement knowledge-sharing practices simply by organizing opportunities for mentorship and collaboration.
There’s no excuse not to have knowledge sharing within your organization.