Every Friday, we prepare for you a short digest with news covering subjects related to employee engagement, collaboration, organizational culture, knowledge sharing, leadership and the future of work.
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Here’s this week’s brief:
Harnessing your employees’ knowledge…
…the right way is not easy – it takes a lot of work to create an environment in which they want to share what they have learned. But as a manager, you want to encourage your staff to share their knowledge with their colleagues. The first thing that you need to do is make it easy for people to share what they know. You cannot just tell them to share their skills with other people. You need to foster a culture that makes sense for them to spend their time teaching their colleagues. It is important to have a solid foundation of trust in the workplace. This will encourage knowledge sharing and allow you to have a healthy work environment. Read How to Harness Employee Knowledge at Your Company by Kenny Kline for Huffington Post to get more on the subject.
Sharing and distributing information…
…efficiently is key to unlocking the potential of your staff in the knowledge economy. Work is undergoing a fundamental shift as new ways of working – and new age Millennials – begin to dominate the workforce. Over the next five years, organizations will increasingly need a solution that will support a dynamic working style. So, companies need to keep their information flows simple. They are over burdened by ‘information fat’ and this slows them down. And this shouldn’t be the case given the number of technological tools at business leaders’ disposal that can be implemented to skim the fat. Now is the time to look for systems that are simple to use and have the ability to make your company more information-agile. Read How to design workplace tools for the knowledge-sharing styles of Millennials by Chloe Green for Information Age to learn more.
Meeting schedules, cancellations,…
…attendance requirements and related mishaps have a lot to do with your organization’s culture, its hierarchy, leadership styles and/or a lack of being collaborative. In fact, your meeting culture could be a leading cause of disengagement. Dan Pontefract shares with us a story about various senior leaders whose presence to a meeting was deemed critical and the messy results of this decision. The feeling from the meeting organizers that the senior leaders had to be invited is an after effect of a very hierarchical and closed culture. When a team believes individuals above them on the organizational chart food chain have to be part of a discussion, it is not only unhealthy, it can impede work from actually being accomplished. Read his post The Madness Of Meetings And How It Relates To Your Organization’s Leadership Culture for Forbes for a lesson learned.
Our organizations are awash in…
…information. But it seems as though we’re just filing it away – instead of using it to create and share knowledge. But if knowledge is so critical, why don’t we treat it as a process instead of locking it down in databases? And why is there an almost ingrained resistance to establish knowledge-sharing practices at the corporate level? The key to creating knowledge is through empowering people. Knowledge-creation begins when workers are engaged in their jobs and committed to the organization and its goals. We need to encourage and reward workers for sharing knowledge while discouraging them from hoarding it. Employees should understand that sharing is in their personal best interest because the more knowledge that is shared, the more that is created. Read Are We Creating Knowledge Or Just Turning Out Information? on Jabra’s blog to learn why sharing knowledge inside your company is so important in today’s workplace.
We won’t tap the collective brain…
…and heart energy of the brilliant people around us by remaining stuck in an old, crusty management mindset. Supervision is slow and expensive. Its day is done. We are learning to stop counting employees’ keystrokes and creating an environment ripe for innovation and collaboration, instead. In the new-millennium workplace, being the boss doesn’t mean being in charge. Management teams all over the world are experiencing the same quakes and tremors as the old working world gives way to a new one. We all have to learn how to step away from the oversight-heavy, factory-oriented management model toward a new model based on trust and possibility. Read Stop Measuring And Start Leading by Liz Ryan to learn why your culture is your most important and only sustainable competitive advantage.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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