47 million dollars per year is the estimate of the cost of the ineffective sharing of knowledge in the United States in 2018. Learn how to create a knowledge-sharing culture that works in 4 steps.
A trend reinforced by the pandemic, companies are often focused on their short or medium term results and struggle to invest in “knowledge management”, which requires a long time horizon. How to remedy the loss of knowledge in business? But above all, what strategies should be adopted to limit this impact?
Here are 4 easy steps to follow in order to engage in a capitalization process and then knowledge sharing within the company.
According to an INSEE study, turnover in France has increased almost fivefold in 30 years. In 2022, the average rate reached 15%.
Retirements or resignations, turnover has several facets. Businesses tend to minimize the consequences associated with these departures. The disappearance of essential knowledge can lead to a decrease in productivity or even endanger an activity. In order to anticipate these departures, operational staff and HR must above all identify the holders of the most critical knowledge.
By mapping all the profiles in a given area, managers can easily identify talents with critical knowledge. Identifying them can result from several observations:
“50% of HR decision-makers say that the training of their employees is their main objective for the future.”
Highly competent personnel who are not motivated to carry out their missions represent a threat of hasty departure. The risk is high because their skills are expensive for the company if they are rare. Mentoring offers the opportunity to promote the professional career of these employees. These courses can help new entrants or existing teams discover and integrate best practices from their peers.
“Mentoring” takes the form of a personal development relationship between a “mentor”, who is generally more experienced, and a “mentee” or “protege”. ”
Mentoring can be provided by a professional internal or external to the company. In the case in which we are interested, the professional internal to the structure relies on his experience to accomplish his mission.
First of all, managers, HR and operational managers are collectively involved in identifying the mentor. In a second step, they will determine the objectives of the mission.
Whatever the area of knowledge - project management, rare know-how, use of an internal tool, etc. - these are most often based on experience. They are acquired through reflection and their recurrent implementation over a given period of time. Mentoring does not make it possible to quickly solve specific operational problems; rather, it makes it possible to engage employees in a long-term collaborative learning process.
57.5% of employees surveyed say that the lack of appropriate tools is responsible for a lack of knowledge sharing.
Business processes, in all functions, tend to be digitized. Yes”more than a fifth of HR management processes are still done manually (22%)”, The trend is no longer paper.
The aim is to only capitalize on the knowledge that is most valuable. Those that, in the event of unavailability, would have a direct impact on the company's performance. HR and operational managers can draw up a list of critical knowledge on which the activity is “at risk”. In a second step, these can be formalized and then shared using external tools or internal methods.
Long video formats, poorly written content, or simply poorly structured content discourage the readers with whom they are shared. A good format can take the form of a PowerPoint presentation as well as a video made using a SaaS solution. Standardization of internal processes, time savings, sharing of best practices, employee engagement [...] the benefits are numerous.
76% of business leaders against 39% of employees think that the internal managerial climate of their company is favorable to the implementation of collective intelligence actions.
Collective intelligence is based on the maximum use of everyone's abilities, skills and thoughts for the benefit of the collective. Unfortunately, there is a strong dissonance between what the General Managers and the teams think. And it is up to the former to create a climate favorable to collective intelligence.
In short, a company is full of knowledge, expertise or personal stories. Each employee has their own experience to share. Unfortunately, some skills are inevitably lost over time. The action of companies lies in minimizing this risk through long-term Knowledge Management strategies. According to the Technology Services Industry Association,” effective knowledge management allows more than 70% of businesses to improve their productivity by at least 20%.
“With Komin, we documented our operating procedures 10x faster than with paper”
- J. Cerruti (Methods & Industrialization Manager)
