Knowledge Sharing: Transferring Business Knowledge from One Person to Another

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Knowledge Sharing: Transferring Business Knowledge from One Person to Another

Knowledge sharing isn’t just an important part of business; it’s essential to the success of any company. Knowledge sharing happens in all companies, large and small, whether they have formal knowledge-sharing strategies or not, and when it’s done right, it can lead to high levels of employee engagement and increased productivity within the whole company.

When you start thinking about productivity and efficiency, one of the key things you need to consider is how to organize your employees and their knowledge in order to ensure that everyone has access to the information they need to do their jobs well and keep the company successful. One way to think about this process is as knowledge sharing, or transferring business knowledge from one person to another so that they have everything they need, while still remaining flexible and adaptable in case new information comes up that might change things.

In any business, knowledge sharing plays an important role in the growth and development of employees, as well as to ensure that the company remains successful and profitable. The success of any company is dependent on the knowledge sharing process. Knowledge is power.

What is meant by knowledge sharing?

Knowledge Sharing is how it sounds, exchanging and sharing formal and informal knowledge, skills and understanding with others. 

Knowledge sharing is the process of transferring business knowledge from one person to another with an aim of building strong processes and ensuring efficiency within a business and improving overall performance, which in return benefits profits. It is important that businesses recognize, value and nurture its employees’ knowledge for proper transfer and sharing so as to improve business performance in future.

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What is the purpose of knowledge sharing?

Sometimes people don’t understand how important it is for them to share their knowledge with others in their work area, work department, and even outside their organization. Even if you have been doing something a long time, there is always something new or different that you can learn and pass on to someone else who might find it useful one day.

A repository of business knowledge, best practices, business processes or a ‘Single Source Of Truth‘ which acts a guide of how things operate within the business, a manuel and how to guide. It is also important that knowledge can be accessed and stored in a single place for reference and available for training new members of the team moving forward.

That is why every employee should be engaged in sharing his or her knowledge and helping other employees learn. That will make your business more successful now, as well as years down the road when you are no longer around.

Knowledge Sharing Importance

Business is built on knowledge, people use your product or service because of your knowledge.

Everybody within a business holds important knowledge from the cleaners to managing director. How they complete the job. This can be using equipment to how the HR department recruit. 

Bus Factor – What would happen to your business if a key person was ‘hit by a bus’? A little morbid and not a nice thing to think about but it happens and what would happen to the business. All companies  have a group of the most critical employees who are almost impossible to replace. Could it function without that essential business knowledge or skills?

Continuity Planning –  Planning and outline how a business will continue operating in the case of unplanned disruptive events (usually uncontrollable events) to avoid or reduce down time.  How would the business get up and running again after a natural disaster, business disaster or a cyber disaster? Think a flood, hurricane, fire or cyber attack to name a few.

Creating a step-by-step process of recovery to protect the business having to close. Using every team member knowledge of critical business functions to create a plan that will allow the business to continue operating, a recovery strategy.

Business Operations Manual – The manual  covers everything that needs to be done for the business to run. A handbook and how to guide of best practices and how the business runs for optimal and consistent results.

Types of Knowledge to Share

In any company, knowledge is shared and transferred between employees in many different ways. There are three types of knowledge that is essential for any company for each employee to share with others in order for a company to remain successful over time. These three types are conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and strategic knowledge.

Conceptual knowledge – Understanding concepts
Procedural knowledge – How to perform a specific task.
Strategic knowledge – Complexity emerging actions to perform next.

Business knowledge is broken in these three types:

Explicit Knowledge -Easily transferred and passed along because it’s written down and easily accessible, stored knowledge often in documents, training, and interviews.
Implicit Knowledge: Practical way to use, explicit knowledge  transferable like best practices and skills from one job to another.
Tacit Knowledge – Individual experience which means you gain Knowledge, but this is often difficult to explain to anyone else.

Benefits of Knowledge Sharing

Successful business operations is dependent on knowledge sharing that encourages open communication, transparency and collaboration among employees and management. 

The presence of a robust knowledge sharing system within a company empowers employees by enabling them to make informed decisions thereby impacting positively on its productivity, team engagement, innovation and profitability etc…

In today’s highly competitive business environment, businesses need their employees to have access to quality information in order for them to make effective business decisions that support profitable growth and continuous improvement. 

What are the benefits of knowledge sharing:

Experience – Knowledge gains through experience. Many people know how they complete their job the best way and know problems they have encountered and how they have managed to solve the problem. This tacit knowledge is not written down and the person leaves they take that knowledge with them if not documented for the future.

Best Practices – Guidelines on the most effective way to complete a task. This is also essential if you need to conform to regulatory bodies.

Problem Solving – Knowledge is key to finding solutions.

Innovation– Gaining access to valuable information can help innovate new ideas and potential growth,

Decision Making – A knowledge repository allows decisions making to be based on facts and  actual documented team experiences.

Training and Onboarding – The business how to Guide. Make knowledge sharing part of the whole onboarding process by showing how it benefits business and learning.

How do you share knowledge in the workplace? 

There are many advantages of knowledge sharing, but it is very difficult for a company to gain competitive advantage if they do not have knowledge sharing as part of their core business. The benefits that result from knowledge sharing are process efficiency and effectiveness, accountability, training and better decision making.

Documenting business processes with everyone’s knowledge and make it available online for constant access. Here at Checkify we can help you document processes in the form of checklists and be able to launch them at a click of a button. Continuously improve processes and guide everyone on how to best to complete a task to be more productive and efficient using accumulated business knowledge. 

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