14 Steps and Best Practices to Enable a Knowledge-Sharing Culture and Avoid Information Silos

Your greatest asset is the expertise, skills, and experience your employees bring to the organization. But how do you ensure that knowledge is not siloed beyond reach? 

Using the right approach, you will encourage your departmental teams to enable a knowledge-sharing culture to share information and innovative ideas.

Discover the steps and strategies that will help you and your leadership team to create a knowledge-sharing work culture and deeper collaboration between managers within your organization.

📚 What is a knowledge-sharing culture?

A knowledge-sharing culture is where employees freely share their ideas and expertise. 

A typical example: Suppose your team is switching to a new software program for task management. However, another department has already piloted the transition and already has experience using that new tool for work management.

Rather than being in the dark over how to use the tool, you'd ask someone who has already experienced the product to share insight into optimizing the use and avoiding mistakes. 

This approach is the opposite of knowledge hoarding.

Another example: Suppose an employee uses the knowledge base to research how a competitor's product works and finds a better way of doing something similar in your company. Then, they could share that information with other teams or departments.

A knowledge-sharing culture has three top components:

• Methods and processes that enable the sharing of information and data. 
• Trust is essential for people to feel comfortable enough to open up about their own experiences and the lessons learned from those experiences.
• Leaders who are strong enough (and willing) to share their wisdom with others and do not fear losing power or control over their organization(s).

Research on the benefits of knowledge sharing revealed: "Today, knowledge-sharing is widely-held to be inherently necessary to the health of most enterprises. Research shows that a 'willingness to share' is positively related to profitability and productivity and negatively related to labor cost."

So sharing knowledge benefits your company and people:

• Sharing ideas with others builds one's sense of self-worth and encourages one to share ideas further.
• Employees share their thoughts and experiences, which leads to finding better ways to achieve goals.
• New hires will make fewer mistakes as everyone shares their expertise and learnings.
• Learning from internal best practices will lead to higher-quality work.
• A knowledge-sharing culture will enable a high level of trust among employees. 
• Employees will feel more connected and engaged with your company and its mission.

🏆 4 Key benefits of a knowledge base for employees

a) Helps reduce stress and burnout by reducing employees' time searching for answers.

b) Helps reduce the time to onboard new employees: When your organization has a clear picture of its knowledge assets, it's easier to identify employee needs access from day one.

As a result, your managers and HR teams will stress less about putting together all the information new hires need before starting their first day.

c) Helps organizations to manage change. When employees are aware of upcoming changes and how they will affect them, they are more likely to accept them as part of life in their organization. The result? Less employee resistance and increased satisfaction.

d) Allows a team member with an idea for improving your product or service to use the knowledge base to quickly find out if someone else has already implemented it or, even better, get a head start on developing their version.

Richard Nolan, Chief People Officer at Epos Now, lauds the culture of knowledge sharing and actively promotes it within:

"We approach creating a knowledge-sharing culture through empowerment and collaboration. We believe that every employee should have access to resources and tools to help them develop their skills, stay knowledgeable about industry trends, and achieve success within their role."

🆚 Knowledge sharing vs. knowledge management

In most companies, dedicated knowledge managers are responsible for the creation, storage, and ease of retrieval of all relevant company knowledge. Therefore, it's important that departments immediately transfer the knowledge gained to relevant members of your organization.

Research on how knowledge sharing influences knowledge management revealed that knowledge sharing creates a more efficient knowledge management environment in companies.

We can split knowledge management into four main elements:

• collecting and archiving information;
• organizing and storing information;
• providing easy access to information, including tacit knowledge;
• using this knowledge to improve decision-making capabilities.

However, knowledge management alone does not allow all employees to access and share information.

Many employees often feel it's not worth their time to share information. Many believed that sitting on valuable information would make them appear more important to their employers. 

That's where a knowledge-sharing culture adds value to the long-running knowledge management system. 

Let's summarize the key differences for clarity:

• Knowledge management is an organizational process that focuses on collecting, organizing, storing, and retrieving information to improve decision-making capabilities.
• Knowledge sharing is a social process of knowledge creation where people share their experiences to learn from one another (and build relationships). It creates a collaborative work environment.

💸 8 Ways a knowledge-sharing culture improves your bottom line

1. Increasing innovation and productivity

When people feel connected to each other, they are more likely to collaborate—this is especially true when your organization has a robust knowledge-sharing culture. 

When employees can access their organization's collective wisdom, they can innovate and develop new ideas.

Tomasz Niezgoda, Head of Marketing & Co-Founder at Surfer SEO, innovates through active knowledge-sharing sessions. He explains his process:

"To further promote knowledge sharing, we have established a number of initiatives and practices. For example, we have created a weekly "Knowledge Sharing" session where everyone can come together to discuss their current projects and ask questions.

We also have an internal newsletter where employees can publish articles and share their insights. Additionally, we have implemented a "Lunch and Learn" program where employees can come together to discuss topics such as SEO, content, and analytics."

2. Improving employee retention 

A company improves retention rates by creating a collaborative, engaging, and supportive corporate culture. 

And in the age of the Great Resignation and the Great Reshuffle, bad culture has been driving employees away more than ever. 

A study from MIT Sloan revealed that: "A toxic corporate culture, for example, is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate compared with its industry." 

So, to stay ahead of the curve, you must enable a positive and collaborative company culture. 

💪 Learn from 7 examples of outstanding company culture.

3. Enabling employee growth

Knowledge sharing enables learning in the flow of work. 

Employers who invest in the growth and development of their employees with learning opportunities develop high-performance teams, albeit in-house or remote teams. 

💡 Access to growth opportunities creates more employee engagement.

As a result, employees feel happier, valued, appreciated, and more willing to invest energy into the organization.

4. Preventing repetitive mistakes

The ability to learn from the mistakes of others and avoid repeating them is a benefit of having access to a knowledge base. 

When people share experiences and insights that have not worked with their teammates, they prevent others from making the same mistakes. 

5. Building a learning culture

Community members can share and help each other through collaboration and feedback. Colleagues' insights can be extremely helpful to others in doing their jobs.

6. Increasing your customers' satisfaction and loyalty

Customer-facing employees often rely on their knowledge of a company's products or services to answer customer questions. You can invest in a sophisticated contact management software, but that won't be enough. A knowledge base provides quick answers to customer queries, which helps them respond more efficiently.

📈 73% of all people point to customer experience as an essential factor in purchasing decisions. 

Faster response times are part of the whole customer experience. So if you're a customer struggling to get the information you need from 9 out of 10 companies, but one company proves helpful and fast to respond to your queries, that's the one you choose. 

It won't matter if the price is higher, as the customer experience is the foremost aspect that the customer remembers.

Suppose your customer-facing staff has access to an updated knowledge base fulfilling all likely queries from prospects and customers. In that case, they will be able to offer a positive experience to your customers. And, as a bonus, your customer reps will also have a better experience working for your company. Win-win. 

If a customer is kept on hold waiting and wondering if the information is coming, you're not even competing with companies providing speedy responses using internal knowledge bases.

7. Improving organizational alignment

The more employees are familiar with the company's products, services, and strategies, the better they can align their decision-making efforts to support company goals. 

Alignment is critical in large organizations that have multiple departments or locations. It also helps to enhance change management as it minimizes employee resistance by documenting company-wide changes.

➡️ Is your company about to go through a major change? Take a look at our guide on how to drive effective change management.

8. Reducing training costs 

Many companies require employees to attend formal training programs to learn a skill in detail. 

Recent data indicates that global spending on employee training reached $370 billion in 2019, and the average per-learner spend was nearly $1,300.

But a company's training costs are not just financial. They also include the time employees spend learning new skills during a training course.

Also, for new hires, there is a cost of limited productivity as they struggle through learning curves and work to become proficient with their new roles, tools, and responsibilities. 

Knowledge sharing allows employees to gain access to relevant information on the job rather than requiring them to leave their desks for training sessions.

🔍 7 Factors that impact knowledge sharing in teams

The willingness to share information and data between departments contributes to a company's future.

People bring their personalities and work styles into the workplace. As a result, companies must react to behavior-related obstacles that stand in the way of a knowledge-sharing culture.

These are the top barriers that impede the knowledge-sharing process.

1. Lack of trust

Trust is the foundation of a knowledge-sharing culture. Trusting your peers, employees, staff, and superiors is necessary to reach the next level in a company.

➡️ Discover 17 ways to build trust in your workplace and set the foundation for a knowledge-sharing workplace.

2. Cultural barriers 

Your company culture might entice or discourage knowledge sharing. Here are some instances of cultural barriers:

• Hierarchical culture: In companies with a strongly hierarchical culture, lower-level employees may be reluctant to share knowledge with their superiors or vice versa. This attitude can be due to a lack of trust, a fear of being judged, or a lack of perceived value in sharing knowledge.
• Competitive culture: Some organizations' competitive culture may discourage knowledge sharing, as employees may feel that sharing information with others could put them at a disadvantage.
• Fear of rejection and judgment: In a culture that does not encourage giving feedback or where people fear rejection and judgment, employees may hesitate to share their ideas or knowledge openly. As a result, people can feel a lack of motivation to offer or ask for help. If people are afraid of looking stupid or making mistakes, they might be less willing to share their knowledge with others.

3. Knowledge hoarding

Some leaders are willing to share their wisdom. But there are some unwilling to share information.

Some leaders want to keep what they know hidden to keep the top position and reap all the benefits. But unfortunately, this mindset is a path to mistrust, hoarding, and a silo mentality.

Knowledge hoarding is not conducive to a growth mindset facilitating a long-term knowledge-sharing culture. Quite the opposite—knowledge hoarding will lead to destructive internal competition and power disputes. 

4. A lack of leadership

Department heads and managers need leadership skills to keep knowledge-sharing activities across teams.

All staff must understand what knowledge needs exist across different departments and how others can meet those needs throughout the organization.

➡️ Learn how to use leadership skills to foster innovation at your workplace to maintain a strong culture of learning.

5. Lack of tools to share information and data

With no support from technology or platforms to share knowledge, employees may find it hard to share and access information efficiently. 

You should make it easy for your employees to document and share their knowledge. However, you should not blame employees for not wanting to go out of their way to document their learning.

6. (Geographic) distance between teams

When your team operates virtually, some specific challenges may arise:

• Communication barriers: it can be more difficult to communicate and collaborate effectively. As a result, it will be harder for team members to share ideas and information and build trust and strong working relationships.
• Cultural differences: Geographic distance can exacerbate cultural differences and can make it harder for team members to understand one another and collaborate effectively

Here are some solutions to address these challenges: 

• Encourage video conferencing and other technologies to help team members stay connected and collaborate effectively.
• Encourage team members to establish regular virtual meetings and touchpoints.
• Provide training and resources to help team members navigate cultural differences.
• Consider rotating team members to different offices or locations to promote face-to-face interactions.

7. Lack of communication between department managers

The lack of communication between department managers can impede knowledge sharing within a company by creating siloed information, leading to: 

• a lack of understanding about what other departments are working on;
• duplication of efforts; 
• lack of coordination; 
• difficulty coordinating efforts and aligning strategies;
• difficulty building trust and sharing sensitive information;
• inefficient use of resources (i.e., wasted time, effort, or resources).

If this sounds familiar, here's how you can overcome these challenges: 

Tip #1: Establish effective communication channels between department managers, such as regular departmental meetings and cross-functional team meetings. 

Tip #2: Adopt collaboration tools and technology to facilitate cross-departmental communication. 

Tip #3: Consider assigning a dedicated person or team to liaise between the different departments.

🪜 9 Steps to creating a knowledge-sharing culture in your organization

Let's look at how to create a knowledge-sharing culture in your organization. 

The processes will help to remove barriers such as knowledge hoarding, where employees are reluctant to share information with other team members and departments.

The aim: Create a culture of openness and collaboration that encourages employees to share their expertise, ideas, and experience openly with others.

1. Identify team experts to help with sharing knowledge  

The suitably chosen experts can lead employees on how and why to share knowledge. This expert needs to promote knowledge sharing from an employee's first day at work. 

New hires can shadow that expert. 

This process will allow the new hire to learn about your organization's culture, processes, and procedures firsthand. 

Tip: Learning from internal experts will motivate your people to grow.

➡️ Discover 12 other factors that drive employee motivation and ways to harness them.

By observing how more experienced employees interact with colleagues, new hires will see that sharing their opinions is acceptable. 

The expert's long-term goal is to encourage new employees to offer their views while respecting other people's opinions and concerns.

2. Share knowledge from the top

By sharing ideas from the top down, you help create a culture where everyone embraces collaboration and knowledge sharing, including management.

One of the best ways to encourage others to share knowledge is to do it yourself.

Employees who see their leaders actively sharing their expertise are more likely to follow suit. Ensure that your leaders share information about industry developments, best practices, and case studies, as well as provide training and mentoring to junior staff.

3. Implement a cloud-based knowledge-sharing platform

The benefits of a knowledge management tool are twofold: 

• Reduce the demand for in-person training. 
• Save time, money, and resources by allowing employees to learn on their own time, i.e., training on-demand. For example, they can learn how to use a new tool. 

A shared cloud-based information system improves your organization by organizing files like wikis, e-mails, and calendars. 

Direct access to a knowledge base makes it easy to work with your team members on projects, regardless of location. Therefore, the system must include all relevant internal sources of knowledge - such as a database, seminars, or websites.

Lindsay Karny, Career Coach and HR professional at Resume 2023, makes knowledge sharing a daily employee responsibility:

"One of the most important things we did was to make it clear that sharing knowledge was the responsibility of everyone in the company. We made sure that everybody understood that they were responsible for sharing what they knew—and helping others share what they know—and then we held them accountable for doing so."

Lindsay's workforce makes use of an internal wiki for access to updated information which bolsters their knowledge-sharing culture:

"We have an internal wiki with information on all of our products, as well as an internal social media platform where employees can post questions or suggestions for improvements in our processes or products."

4. Establish an open-door policy

Create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing ideas and collaborating and that making mistakes is not the end of the world.

Employees should feel free to approach anyone in the company for help. They should feel comfortable raising questions or admitting ignorance without being penalized.

When someone asks for help in a meeting, they should feel supported and understood. As a result, they will then be more willing to share knowledge.

5. Come up with a list of knowledge-sharing activities (encourage employee contributions)

Encourage employees to get together and exchange ideas.

Boost motivation with an incentive, such as recognition or monetary rewards, to encourage them to speak up about what they know and share it with the rest of your team.

Offer contributors a small gift, such as a gift card, at the end of each period.

6. Host meetings to discuss new information

You should regularly meet with department heads and project teams to exchange information.

These regular meetings offer an ideal opportunity to ask questions and share any new knowledge added to the knowledge bases.

Richard Nolan, Chief People Officer at Epos Now, represents an HR department that embraces a communication system whereby employees share ideas and encourage insights between departments:

"We support our teams in their development by maintaining an open communication style throughout the company. This means:

- frequently hosting departmental meetings where staff can exchange ideas openly and honestly among each other;
- encouraging team members to share relevant insights from outside sources with others;
- making sure information is freely available via digital channels like Slack or Google Docs;
- running monthly training on key topics relating to the business;
- facilitating shadowing opportunities so individuals can learn best practices from different departments within the organization;
- as well as providing accessible mentorship opportunities for employees wanting further guidance."

7. Choose a knowledge-sharing platform wisely - Know the best features

Knowledge management systems can help you improve your organization's productivity, efficiency, and collaboration. And there are lots of SaaS-based solutions. So how do you choose one?

Here are three features to look for when choosing a knowledge-sharing system.

A. It's important that your employees can access your knowledge management system from anywhere, i.e., cross-platform. Accessing information regardless of where you are is crucial for today's knowledge workers.

B. The platform should make it easy to share information through the use of labels and keyword tags and easy to highlight key points and add comments. 

C. You need reports and analytics data to help you make informed decisions about improving your knowledge management system, i.e., usage stats, popular topics, engagement periods, and areas for improvement.

➡️ Take a look at Zavvy's many free-to-use journey templates that help maintain collaboration and productivity.

8. Use effective knowledge-sharing tools

Various tools and technologies are available to make sharing knowledge within your company easier.

For example, you can use enterprise social networks or collaboration platforms to share information and documents or video conferencing tools to hold virtual meetings and training sessions.

Plus, you could consider investing in a knowledge management system, which can help to centralize and organize information, making it easier for employees to find and use the knowledge they need.

9. Use a system of metrics to measure the impact of your efforts 

Metric reports show the progress of your knowledge base functions. With metrics, you can predict and improve the performance of your knowledge-sharing system over time.

You can use metrics such as usage rate, the number of views, post clicks, and most active sharing users.

Because the time to store and retrieve information is a significant part of most businesses' budgets, many companies measure this time and its cost savings through their knowledge management system.

The system can track time spent on useful vs. unnecessary tasks, time spent finding the correct information, and training time per new hire during onboarding. 

During meetings, make this data available and also collect points raised on the quality of the knowledge base, i.e., how useful is the shared information.

🌟 5 Best practices for enhancing your knowledge-sharing process

Knowledge sharing is key to business success. 

While some companies rely on their employees to share knowledge, others have structured knowledge-sharing processes.

These strategies will improve your knowledge-sharing process and make it easier for your employees to learn new skills and increase productivity.

1. Ask employees for their input

Make use of a pulse survey on what they need to do their jobs better, and then incorporate that into your knowledge management system.

➡️ Discover the advantages of a robust employee pulse survey to gain feedback and boost engagement. Use our free template to get your pulse survey started.

2. Encourage and reward employees for sharing knowledge regularly (e.g., weekly or monthly). 

Give employees time during meetings to discuss relevant topics.

Offer gift incentives to employees efficiently using your knowledge system.

3. Pair new employees with a mentor and a buddy

As part of a supportive onboarding procedure, arrange for new hires to shadow a mentor, an experienced employee, who can help through the knowledge-sharing process. 

The mentor should be someone who:

• Is willing and able to share knowledge, ideas, and expertise.
• Encourages your new employees to offer their views.

The mentor provides the new hire with an ongoing resource who can address their concerns when sharing knowledge.

A buddy program will: 

• Help new hires feel welcome. 
• Enable them to know their new coworkers better and faster.
• Encourage them to seek and share useful knowledge. 

➡️ Create a positive and productive workforce using an onboarding buddy program with our free template and checklist.

4. Schedule social events for employees 

Active social events can focus on building trust and team cohesion. 

Trust and team cohesion are the firm foundation for a knowledge-sharing culture in the workplace, albeit physically or virtually. 

Cohesive bonds and working strategies are essential to a successful business.

When team members are skilled in complementary areas, they can build on each other's strengths to reach their goals by sharing ideas and experiences.

5. Create knowledge-sharing rituals

Encourage new employees to share their knowledge by creating rituals. For example, at the end of each day, have everyone in your team write what they learned that day.

Their learnings could be something they experienced or observed during a meeting or project or a new idea that occurred during brainstorming sessions with colleagues. Or anything else that is relevant.

Once everyone has written their thoughts and experiences of the day, share them during a team meeting. 

This exercise is an excellent opportunity for catch-up sessions with employees and to encourage sharing of any success stories.

Talk about mistakes such as challenges not met in the week and why. By sharing this, other employees can offer their input on approaching challenges and offer insight by experience.

Rituals help to prevent knowledge hoarding before it creeps up.

At Zavvy, the marketing team holds a weekly learning session to discuss various topics, read academic papers, and share knowledge and best practices that can be useful internally and for customers. Plus, colleagues from other teams sometimes join these meetings to promote cross-department knowledge sharing. 

As soon as you have more than one person on your team, there is a risk that some of them will hoard knowledge. Set up an internal Notion wiki or use tools like Slack where people can share knowledge without talking face-to-face.

Lindsay Karny, Career Coach and HR professional at Resume 2023, explains the importance of regular meetings for sharing ideas:

"We also hold regular meetings where employees can ask questions about any topic related to work, and then we ensure those questions are answered by somebody with the expertise to answer them."

💪 On the topic of meetings, discover how we enabled Freeletics' leadership learning program. Their People Manager Roundtable is a peer learning activity to discuss leadership challenges and share best practices.

➡️ Enable knowledge sharing from day 1 with Zavvy

Our solutions are helpful for companies to not only onboard new employees but also create content journeys for training purposes and product updates.

With Zavvy's journey builder, you can:

• Create step-by-step guides that walk new hires through their first few weeks at a company.
• Document company changes so every employee gets access to the details.
• Train employees on the tools and software needed to do their job. Zavvy tools provide a clear path for new employees to get up-to-speed on company culture, values, and goals.

The product marketing team at our client, DataGuard, uses Zavvy to send out monthly updates on its products. This way, salespeople and others who refer to this document always have access to the latest changes.

Experience a live tour of our platform and see how Zavvy can help with knowledge sharing and onboarding new hires. 

We'll provide consultation and take you through Zavvy's uses for your company.

Try out a demo of Zavvy, and we'll show you how our tools can help your company manage your knowledge, processes, and people.