Check it out what you will find on this article about the benefits of knowledge management strategy:
- Knowledge Management Strategy: The Various Types to Try
- What Motivates Employees to Share or Hide Knowledge
- What Type of Jobs Lead to Sharing Knowledge?
- When Others Depend on an Employee, Knowledge Hiding is More Likely
- Tips for Improving Your Company’s Knowledge Management Strategy
- How Runrun.it Software Helps Boost Your Knowledge Management Strategy
Knowledge management is known as the process where organizations create, utilize, manage, and share knowledge and information across their agency. Essentially, this entails making the best use of knowledge to benefit a company or organization. This leads small, medium, and large businesses to develop a knowledge management strategy.
Business managers and owners seek to ensure that their employees are sharing information and knowledge between each other. Sharing what you know between each other can lead companies to grow and prosper. Essentially, business leaders believe that a proper knowledge management strategy will ensure more creativity among departments, greater innovation, and improved performance. This is expected to proceed among individual employees and across teams and organizations.
However, while employers and business leaders seek to encourage employees to share knowledge, there are many workers who actually withhold their skills and know-how. This is known as knowledge hoarding or knowledge hiding. Below are a variety of techniques that employers and managers can use to reverse this process and improve their knowledge management strategy.
Knowledge Management Strategy: The Various Types to Try
The first knowledge management strategy to consider is one consisting of motivating employees by offering rewards and incentives to encourage the sharing of information, according to a post published on Medium.com. Setting up a new program at your place of business to change the company culture to embrace knowledge management is necessary.
This step will involve communicating with employees and setting up quarterly or yearly goals as well as monitoring progress and rewarding superior performance and knowledge sharing behavior. Monthly progress reports from managers and supervisors is recommended to ensure that all employees are on the right track in terms of the knowledge management strategy goals.
A second knowledge management strategy type involves networking and connecting people throughout an organization. Communicating among individuals can be a great way to bring new ideas to a project and gaining more insight. Team spaces, community expos and events, and various internal discussions can be a great step forward in achieving better networking as a knowledge management application.
The third method for improving knowledge sharing is called supply-side knowledge management, which involves collecting documents, capturing information, and storing data in folders and repositories. According to a Forbes article, organizational and data collection software has received less attention from the tech industry, but this does not mean this type of software is any less important.
Mind-mapping software especially has brought major benefits to companies worldwide specifically providing clear information for meeting various needs. Mind-mapping technology can help foster a more collaborative work environment among teams completing projects and it helps provide the data needed to make important business decisions at a company.
As a company manager or supervisor, if you’d like to implement a supply-side knowledge management strategy, you may want to implement mind-mapping software, which will essentially incorporate an app that creates a network of facts and connections into a visual system that allows employees to see the various links among concepts more easily.
Along with implementing some of these knowledge management strategies, it is beneficial for business leaders to understand what motivates workers to share or hide knowledge.
What Motivates Employees to Share or Hide Knowledge
One study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and cited in the Harvard Business Review found that:
- people will share or hide their knowledge due to a variety of reasons.
- workers are more likely to share knowledge when they have a cognitively demanding job and enjoy more autonomy.
- employees are more likely to hide their knowledge if they feel that their coworkers rely on them too much.
When it came to either sharing or hiding knowledge, the researchers found that people either choose one or the other based on either their own internal enjoyment or an external reward or punishment. Essentially, workers are either likely to consider sharing knowledge as fun or a problem depending on their work environment such as not wanting to be criticized or not wanting to lose their job (in case sharing private information could lead to a loss of employment).
You will want to make sure that all employees at your place of business understand how important it is to share knowledge in order to meet organizational goals. However, if there is too much competition between employees, it is much more likely they will continue to hide key concepts and knowledge.
In addition, it is vital for employers to understand how to create the right work environment and the right type of jobs that will lead to greater knowledge sharing.
What Type of Jobs Lead to Sharing Knowledge?
It was discovered that cognitively demanding work tended to be more stimulating to employees and they were more likely to enjoy sharing information among co-workers. A similar propensity for sharing knowledge and information comes from more autonomous work due to its more meaningful aspects.
“When people’s jobs involved high cognitive demands and autonomy, they shared useful knowledge more frequently,” according to the Harvard Business Review.
Additionally, job design can play a huge role in pooling employee knowledge, according to a paper published in the Human Resource Management journal. Self-managing teams can help foster communication and knowledge management. Essentially, it is important to understand that adopting certain kinds of job designs will result in specific factors that will motivate employees to share knowledge and impact knowledge-sharing behaviors among individuals.
Furthermore, the research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior uncovered that employees who felt others were depending on them too much tended to hide information and knowledge.
When Others Depend on an Employee, Knowledge Hiding is More Likely
It was found that, when people perceive that other employees depended on them too much, they felt pressured into sharing information and were more likely to participate in knowledge hiding.
There are plenty of jobs where one person could depend on another to share information in order for them to complete their work. The researchers believed that this type of contact and communication between co-workers would lead them to be more likely to share knowledge. However, they found the opposite to be true.
With more frequent requests from other workers, employees felt that their time was in more demand and tended to favor completing their own tasks over helping others by sharing knowledge. Some workers even pretended not to have the information being requested.
Now that you have a general understanding about what motivates employees to share information, it is vital to understand some key concepts for improving your knowledge management strategy. It is key to incorporate a variety of tips that will help boost your company’s knowledge management strategy.
Tips for Improving Your Company’s Knowledge Management Strategy
There are several strategies that will help improve knowledge sharing and effective team management at your company. First, it is vital to maintain good communication across teams. Managers will need to communicate their expectations to their workers as well as set up meetings where they set up goals for employees to meet.
Next, it is vital for employers and managers to delegate responsibilities across their team and trust your team members to deliver their assignments on time and completed efficiently. Delegating tasks will help your team members become experts at their pertinent subject matter.
Some managers try to take on too much and do not delegate effectively while others delegate many assignments with only a limited amount of directions. It is best to be a manager somewhere in the middle who delegates the right amount of tasks with plenty of directives.
Lastly, it is likely that conflicts are going to occur at your workplace and among your team members, which is why detecting and resolving conflicts is vital for running a successful business. Disregarding disputes and conflicts could be very disruptive to a functioning team dynamic. Some individuals may even quit a job if the conflicts tend to escalate.
Effective cross team collaboration is important for business leaders looking to run a successful company. Coming up with better solutions to a company’s challenges is why cross team collaboration is so important. Since many companies face a competitive landscape, organizations that provide the best solutions are the ones garnering a greater percentage of the marketplace. As such, to create the best solutions to industry challenges, it is vital to have as many minds working together as possible. Therefore, cross team collaboration and conflict resolution is essential.
A new technology platform and software product could be especially helpful for improving collaboration among the teams at your company. Runrun.it software is known to help motivate employees to share knowledge and improve collaboration.
How Runrun.it Software Helps Boost Your Knowledge Management Strategy
You will find that Runrun.it software is essential for boosting communication and collaboration at your company. It will keep your team motivated while boosting communication and transparency. Additionally, your workflow will be more streamlined with fewer kinks.
Your team’s communication will improve with Runrun.it software due to its ability to delete comments and attachments as well as the ability to add and hide system comments. In addition, you can even attach files within comments by dragging them into a comment box. You can even copy a meme or add a GIF if you want! Is there a particular YouTube video that may be helpful in explaining a particular process? You can add that to a comment as well.
If you’d like to see if Runrun.it software is right for you, click here for a free 14-day trial!
