Introduction
“Knowledge is power, yet has little value unless it can be easily applied and put in practice.”
- Melany Gallant
Data fetched from a report indicates that Fortune 500 companies lose around $31.5 billion each year due to a lack of a streamlined and optimized knowledge management process. In companies with poor knowledge management, employees often find themselves wondering:
- Who can help me?
- How does this even work?
- Who do I reach out to?
- Where exactly can I fetch the info I need?
And if you think your staff members are asking similar questions, that means they’re having a hard time finding, accessing and consuming the necessary information to tackle their tasks.
Remember, happy employees are the ones that stay. The Covid-19 pandemic fueled the Great Resignation in the US – where we saw millions of Americans voluntarily quit their jobs. More than 24 million people resigned between April 2021 and September 2021.
That’s insane.
These days, it’s common for people to switch companies. The old ideal of staying with a well-reputed organization for over 40 years is fading into the past.
When companies lose an employee, they’re also letting a lot of knowledge head out the door. But sometimes, despite offering a 50-70 percent hike, you may fail to retain employees.
That means you need to onboard and train — an expensive and oftentimes burdensome process.
But it doesn't have to be!
Strengthen new hires with a streamlined and effective internal knowledge management system. Implementing an effective knowledge management process helps ensure:
- Improved Organizational Agility.
- Lightning-Fast Problem Solving.
- Supported Employee Growth.
- Quick Decision Making.
- Better Communication.
- Streamlined Business Processes.
- And more!
And while the benefits of collecting, managing, organizing and retrieving valuable organizational information are endless, companies often find themselves experiencing some common challenges, which we’ll be shedding light on today.
Throughout this article, we’ll look at the four key challenges companies face in knowledge management along with their respective solutions.
Without further ado, let’s dive right in!
4 Common knowledge management challenges
companies face in 2022
The following are four common knowledge management challenges companies are facing in 2022:
- Poor Accessibility.
- Data Security & Privacy.
- Knowledge Verification.
- Employee Motivation.
Let’s touch on each of these challenges and look at the relevant solutions one by one.
Poor accessibility
Let’s say one of your new staff members is looking forward to logging in to the company portal yet isn’t really familiar with the process. And while you may have asked him/her to refer to the relevant documentation available on Google Drive or on a dedicated knowledge repo hosted on a secure server, he/she may find the process to be overly-complicated.
Having a poorly structured knowledge repository will result in them finding it extremely hard to access the relevant documentation. In the end, you’ll find them reaching out to the senior employees or managers.
And trust me on this one – millions of companies face this problem. Employees literally end up spending hours trying to find the right document – which not only results in a lack of productivity but also missed deadlines, lack of customer satisfaction and loss of revenue.
If people within a company are finding it extremely hard to access the right resources or information at the right time, there’s no benefit of having a knowledge management system in place. That’s the reason it’s critical to invest in the right knowledge management tool like Scribe.
Scribe empowers teams to spend less time looking up relevant know-how and more time actually tackling their tasks.
Data security & privacy
According to a report, even a single data breach can cost the world’s top brands up to over $223 billion. While the impact of data breaches obviously varies for different companies, it’s critical to ensure data security.
After all, you can’t afford to lose critical documents like confidential customer files, employee information, financial details, and more.
Additionally, having different levels of security and permissions is crucial. After all, it’s important to make sure that not everyone is able to access everything.
Investing in the right knowledge management system can help companies ensure data security and privacy. For example, Scribe’s advanced platform-wide protections can ensure your company is both efficient and safe.
This means – you don’t have to worry about sensitive information falling into the wrong hands.
Additionally, with the ability to assign permissions and enforce different levels of security, companies can ensure that everyone within the organization is easily able to access only the information they need and is of relevance to them – and not more.
Knowledge Verification
As much as we hate to say it, knowledge does have an expiry date. As time passes, you’ll experience a change in products, employees, technologies and strategies.
Not updating your knowledge repository will result in employees (who are not aware of the latest changes and updates) finding themselves confused. This may, in turn, result in missed deadlines, lack of customer satisfaction, loss of revenue and more.
We understand that it’s literally impossible to update documents every time you roll out an update or new feature. And while you may choose to hire a full-time employee (technical writer) whose core responsibility would be to update the knowledge repository documents, the problem is – it’d turn out to be a time-consuming process.
The person in charge of updating the knowledge repository would have to collaborate with the developer, understand the changes, make updates to the document, go through an aggressive review process, make the required edits and finally publish the changes.
Not only is it time-consuming, but it may get complicated for everyone. And while making updates to text-based how-to and step-by-step guides is time-consuming and boring, developers can tap into Scribe’s world-class smart-recorder and one-click sharing mechanism that’ll help them capture their processes behind the scenes while they work and share them instantly.
With Scribe, you can ditch those boring text-based step-by-step guides with engaging recorded ones, leading to a productive work environment.
Employee motivation
It’s no secret that people are comfortable doing things the way they have been doing for years. In terms of their way of working, you’ll find a world full of people against the idea of change.
It’s human nature. And if any of your employees aren’t used to sharing their knowledge in the form of written documents, you’ll have a hard time convincing them otherwise.
An efficient knowledge management process is a critical aspect of a highly-functional organization. Asking your employees to write and edit text-based documents will literally bore the and result in lack of productivity.
In fact, you’ll find them delaying such tasks. Getting your team motivated to share their knowledge and ideas in the form of written documents is tough, especially if they aren’t used to doing it.
But that doesn’t mean that you should ask them not to do so. No – knowledge sharing is important – but the way most knowledge management tools work doesn’t really focus on employee motivation and productivity.
At Scribe, we know how hard it is to share your ideas and knowledge via text-based documents. It’s super tough for almost everyone. At the same time, poor search functionality and structure can make things even harder.
We understand.
That’s the reason we allow people within an organization to share knowledge and ideas within one click – in the form of videos. With Scribe, your employees don’t need to go through the trouble of investing hours sharing their knowledge in the form of written documents. Instead, all they need to do is:
- Hit "Start Recording."
- Share their knowledge while Scribe captures their processes behind the scenes.
- Click on “Stop Recording.”
And you’re done.
Easy-peasy!
Conclusion
At Scribe, we believe that employees don’t need to go through the trouble of investing hours in building text-based how-to or step-by-step guides. While text-based documentation has been the preferred way of sharing knowledge for years, it’s not efficient.
And that’s where we come in.
With Scribe, whether you want to share information with your team members or customers, you can easily do so at the click of a button. All you need to do is record, explain and share. So whether you have mastered a certain process, found a relevant solution to a problem, or discovered a time-saving workaround, you can easily explain all of it with Scribe.
