Knowledge Sharing at Your Business and Why It Matters

Are your employees hoarding knowledge? It’s easy to hoard things. I’m hoarding bobby pins in my purse right now. If you ask nicely I might lend you one, or I might pretend I don’t have any because if I give you my bobby pins, how will I put my hair up later if I need to? This seems crazy, but it’s the same concept as an employee who doesn’t want to share knowledge because he or she thinks it will lessen his or her value as an employee. An employee might think, “As long as I’m the only one who knows how to do this, my job is secure.”

Don’t make your work week an episode of True Life: Knowledge Hoarders. Okay, that’s not a real show, but that’s what it would be called if there were a show about knowledge management in the office that combined all the elements of MTV’s True Life with A&E’s Hoarders show.

Knowledge sharing is vital to your company’s growth.

Knowledge hoarding results in increased training costs, process bottlenecks and—worst of all—a lack of innovation. You can’t grow and innovate if your employees don’t share their knowledge with each other.

Take a look at this interesting quote about the importance of harnessing company knowledge:

"If only HP knew what it knows it would make three times more profit tomorrow."

-Lew Platt, ex CEO Hewlett Packard

Certainly makes a good case for knowledge sharing, right?

Make it easy for your employees to share knowledge with each other.

You can start by setting up a centralized knowledge hub, where employees can exchange documents, PDFs, videos, share how-tos and more. Putting all these things in the cloud for everyone to access is a great way to open up the brains behind your organization. People love to share in a social context. With CourseMill® Wave, you can create an easy-to-use community for your learners to share information—and it only takes minutes to set up!

Sign up for a free trial of CourseMill Wave and see how easy it is to start sharing and stop hoarding knowledge! Plus, subscribe to the Lectora® e-Learning Blog for more knowledge management tips, course development resources and product info. And if you’re ever in the Cincinnati area and need a bobby pin, I’m your girl. Seriously, there might be an entire pack scattered in my purse.