Knowledge is everywhere you look.
Every
employee has something valuable to contribute to the organization.
Whether it be a new business idea, a new process for fixing a broken
one, or valuable advice on how to work with a particular client, this
knowledge should be captured and analyzed.
Further, if this knowledge can result in a more efficient process or a happier customer, this knowledge needs to be shared with other employees.
What are you doing to capture, share, and make accessible your employees’ knowledge?
In a perfect world, when employees are stuck trying to solve a problem, or when managers want to re-skill their teams, they would simply look inward rather than outward, turning to their knowledge management repository rather than Google.
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) sought to explore this concept further. Along with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the ATD released the research report Building a Culture of Learning: The Foundation of a Successful Organization. The report provides insights on the organizational benefits of a thriving internal learning culture and how talent development professionals can build such a culture.
Here’s the good news: ATD and i4cp surveyed 832 talent development professionals and found that employees at high-performance organizations are four times more likely to share knowledge with their colleagues as workers at low-performance organizations.
The bad news is that although 87 percent of participants report that their organization provided tools or resources to encourage employee knowledge sharing, not all of these organizations are providing employees with guidance on how to best leverage user-generated content to help achieve learning goals.
This is where the L&D manager can have a huge impact: don’t simply provide the tools, but also provide the guidance. Provide the how-to and explain the benefits of using internal, employee-generated content. Case studies, whether formal or informal, can demonstrate to employees or even whole departments past success when using content and courses based on internally-sourced knowledge.
In fact, this guidance can be delivered with an automation tool: with Cognota, you can not only easily create courses from your employees’ knowledge but also build the documentation, instructions, and other support materials necessary to further develop your learning culture.
