Generally speaking, knowledge management translates to converting all the raw data you have at your disposable into digestible information, to which everyone within your company should have access.
However, sometimes this can prove difficult.
From a manager’s perspective, there are several knowledge management challenges you have to deal with. This process is more than just knowing everything the organization has learned and devised in the past and putting everything in one place. Let’s take a look at the most common challenges you may come across, and how to overcome them.
1.Making it easy for people to find what they are looking for
Nobody likes searching for something that they need for a long time, so as a manager in charge of knowledge sharing, you need to make sure that all information is put together in one place, but it’s also easily accessible.
By doing this, you’re helping users find what they’re looking for in an instant. And this saves serious amounts of time, which can eventually be used for completing other tasks.
Wondering how you can overcome this challenge? It may be simpler than you think: add a search bar in your internal knowledge management platform.
2. Managing community engagement
If you’re one of the forward thinking companies that have an internal knowledge sharing platform, it doesn’t mean that it will solve all your problems by itself. The next step in your mission is to start engaging with your team by answering questions and recognising those who play an important role in the growth of the platform. After all, they’re those who add value to the community.
Keep in mind: several studies have proven that gamification is one of the best ways to recognize efforts and promote engagement.
3. Encouraging people to share their knowledge
There is one core principle in this case: the more people participate in and receive benefit from the knowledge management platform, the more they will contribute. People like helping others, so they will also like the idea of sharing knowledge and information of value.
But how can you convince your team to start sharing their experience? Again, the answer is simple: people like having their efforts recognized.
Put together a simple gamification process, where the most active users are recognised for their knowledge and efforts, and you will see participation and involvement rates grow. This is also a great way of keeping an eye on your most valuable team members.
4. Facilitating collaboration among team members and different teams
Having a physical place where people from different departments of your company can collaborate is a great idea. But with an increasing number of remote workers, one of the knowledge management challenges you will constantly come across will be facilitating collaboration for team members, regardless of their location.
A great example of solving this is to customize the ideation process by identifying and clearly outlining its different stages. This can keep members updated and engaged, no matter what team they’re part of.
5. Measuring knowledge contribution and rewarding active users
Last but not least, you should be able to track whether the goals and objectives of your knowledge management efforts were met. And if the answer is positive, you also need to reward the most active users in such a way that everybody will be encouraged to take part and add content.
In order to do this, our recommendation is to start by defining your goals, then use advanced analytics to help you keep track of both your progress and the return of your knowledge investment. As you observe goals being met, make sure that those who helped to reach these points get the praise they deserve. This will encourage more and more members of the company starting to contribute.
As a manager in this fast-paced business environment, you will eventually deal with some knowledge management challenges. The good news is that you can gradually eliminate most of them by having a knowledge management platform.
This will make it easier for employees to add content and generate a huge database of intrinsic knowledge, not to mention how easy it will be to find the information they need. Collaborating will be easier, you can quickly see who the top contributors are and find out through analytics if your achieve your goals.
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