15 Knowledge Sharing Best Practices From Effective Hybrid & Remote Teams

By
Lauren Funaro
May 10, 2022
11
min read
Updated
December 19, 2023
Photo credit
Discover the top 15 knowledge sharing best practices for effective hybrid & remote teams. Learn how to optimize work productivity, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
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Introduction

Knowledge management is one of the top three issues that determine a company’s success, according to a Deloitte survey of 3,630 business leaders. However, only nine percent of those business leaders feel ready to address it.

Now that so many of us are working remotely, the ability to effectively share knowledge across an organization is more important and challenging than ever. 

With that in mind, we asked the leaders of the remote and hybrid teams at Officely, Yarooms, ResumeSeed, TeamBuilding, and Leena AI for their knowledge sharing best practices. Their advice includes real, lived-in tactics you can apply to improve the flow of information across your organization.

TL;DR: Knowledge sharing best practices

  • Use a cloud-based knowledge management system to document essential information and make it accessible to remote teams.
  • Conduct regular content audits to keep your knowledge base current and relevant.
  • Share video and screen recordings for effective training and information transfer.
  • Hold regular meetings and avoid impromptu calls for efficient communication.
  • Designate space for informal communication to encourage transparency and openness.
  • Build a knowledge-sharing culture to improve productivity and focus on work.

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1. Use a cloud-based knowledge management system

Virtually every respondent to our survey said they rely on knowledge bases to document essential information and keep their remote and hybrid teams in the know. Officely CEO Max Shepherd-Cross put it this way: “The three rules of managing a hybrid team are documentation, documentation, documentation.”

Even in-house teams rely on knowledge management systems (sometimes called an internal wiki or intranet) to make important information easily accessible to everyone, but they’re even more critical for dispersed teams. Remote workers can’t nudge a neighbor or poke their head into a manager’s office to ask a question. A digital, centralized repository of company information enables them to search for answers to on-the-job questions without interrupting their colleagues or poring through old emails to access information.

Your knowledge base can include anything, from your company directory to benefits forms to employee checklists and how-to guides to webinars and links to other professional development resources. You can use a straightforward tool like SharePoint or Google Workspace to store and share documents or a more feature-rich platform like Guru, which enables your teams to tag and categorize entries.

Shepherd-Cross, whose teams use Notion, said their documentation process has brought them to a place “where we are more transparent than when we were in the office.”

2. Conduct regular content audits

A knowledge sharing platform is only as useful as its contents. Conduct knowledge audits to identify outdated or inaccurate entries and keep your wiki current and relevant. Content reviews can also help you identify knowledge gaps and where you're lacking resources.

Maintaining a knowledge base isn’t always fun and takes time away from your employees’ daily work. People get busy and forget to update it when a new process or software program is implemented, so content can grow stale quickly. And when a company’s knowledge base contains inaccurate or outdated information, employees quickly learn not to trust it and stop using it. That’s why regular content audits are crucial to ensuring your teams are continually getting value from your wiki.

Yarooms’ CEO Dragos Badea advises: “Formalize a content review process that happens on a regular basis to weed out old and irrelevant documents, make updates and keep things from getting too bloated.” Two ways he suggests doing this are to either create a dedicated auditing team or to designate “content champions” from each department for whom updating the knowledge base becomes part of their job.

You can also choose knowledge base software that lets users provide feedback and ask for updates or additional information from within the page. That way, when someone faces a challenge, turns to the knowledge base for answers, and comes up short, they can signal to the page owner that it needs attention.

3. Share video and screen recordings

You’ve heard the statement, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Don’t rely solely on documents for training and information transfer. Video and screen recordings will enrich your knowledge sharing capabilities.

TeamBuilding uses video for training and knowledge sharing among its more than 200 remote workers. “The reason this video is so useful,” said CEO Michael Alexis, “is that it captures nuances that supplement written communication, working as a ‘show and tell.’ When new employees onboard with us, they can watch the videos to learn exactly how to do tasks and procedures like our more senior team members."

With webcam and screen-recording tools like Loom and Soapbox, veteran employees can document their processes while talking the viewer through them. Then, trainees can watch the videos repeatedly until they feel comfortable doing it on their own. Likewise, a knowledge sharing tool like Scribe captures the user’s expertise while working by recording their process and converting it into a step-by-step guide with text and screenshots.

Both ways enable experienced workers to share their know-how with minimal disruption to their workflows, which makes training new hires less of a burden — even enjoyable — so they’re happy to do it. Alexis also offered this video tip: “Keep it as short as possible. Nobody wants to watch a 15-minute video about how to do a simple thing — if you can make it 15 seconds instead, do it!”

4. Hold meetings regularly, but avoid impromptu calls

Almost all of our survey respondents also mentioned Zoom chats or standing meetings as a way to keep everyone in the loop.

Chirayu Akotiya, Director, Product & Growth at Leena AI, said a regular standup call where everyone discusses their daily and weekly goals, blockers, and updates “helps to break that communication vacuum, and that means increased accessibility and transparency.”

How often your team meets will depend on your product and workflows, but whether it’s daily, weekly, or monthly, having it on the calendar helps team members prepare their questions and updates when the time is right.

And dedicating specific times for Q&A is key to avoiding disruptions and collaboration overload that can sink productivity. Says Shepherd-Cross: “When working remotely you don’t have the luxury of tapping someone on the shoulder to get status updates or ask a question. The knee-jerk solution is to arrange lots of update calls, but this is inefficient. Our golden rule is that calls should never be organized for data transmission, only data transformation.”

5. Designate space for informal communication

Knowledge sharing best practices include more than just creating a corporate wiki and documenting workflows and approvals. Implementing informal communication policies and tools that create a sense of psychological safety and enable employees to ask one-off or private questions is essential.

Some of the most important types of knowledge don’t lend themselves to being stored in a knowledge base — or even shared in a large group. Tacit knowledge is ephemeral and more difficult to share than explicit knowledge, which is codifiable.

“You’ll want to set up some sort of internal social network like Yammer as a way for employees to ask questions about particular topics and be directed to where they can find the answers they need,” said Badea. Hundreds of thousands of companies use Slack for this purpose.

Diane Cook, HR Specialist at ResumeSeed, has also instituted town halls, coffee chats and office hours, “giving my team the sense that ‘my door’ is always open and a clearer direction of best times to ask questions/ping me for advice.”

Finally, allow employees to ask questions — even the ones they’re embarrassed to bring up — without being ridiculed or shamed. This encourages transparency and openness, allows your subject matter experts to support and educate their colleagues, and creates a company culture that values and prioritizes internal knowledge sharing.

Tips for building a knowledge sharing culture

Building a strong knowledge-sharing culture will help your employees spend less time searching for answers and more time focusing on the work at hand. These knowledge management best practices and tips will help you successfully implement internal knowledge sharing.

1. Set clear goals and objectives for knowledge sharing

Setting clear goals and objectives objectives ensures that shared information aligns with your organizational goals.

Defining the purpose and key benefits of knowledge sharing helps also gain buy-in from colleagues at all levels.

2. Choose the right knowledge sharing tools

Choose the knowledge-sharing platforms and tools that meet your specific needs. This could include document management systems, social media platforms, knowledge management platforms, or collaboration tools. AI-powered knowledge sharing tools like Scribe automate captured knowledge and information sharing.

3. Create and organize content

Scribe is the fastest way to share knowledge - knowledge sharing best practices

‎Creating and organizing content is another essential step. Procedures, policies and knowledge-sharing processes should be organized in a way that is easy to find and use.

Scribe is the perfect tool to help you overcome knowledge-sharing challenges at work. Scribe automates the authoring process — simply turn on Scribe as you work. When you're finished with a process, click "Stop Capture," and Scribe auto-generates a comprehensive step-by-step tutorial in seconds, complete with text and annotated screenshots.

‎With Scribe, you can quickly create and share knowledge-sharing materials like:

Scribe user Stewart Gauld shares how he uses Scribe to save time by creating easy-to-use guides.



You can easily edit or customize your Scribes, ask AI to add titles, descriptions, and additional context, and redact any sensitive information. You can even ask the AI to write knowledge articles for you!

Use AI to write knowledge articles - knowledge sharing best practices

‎Use Scribe Pages to combine individual guides with videos, images, GIFs and more to create comprehensive knowledge resources.

Scribes can be easily embedded in any shared documentation, knowledge base or LMS, or quickly share a link with one click.

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4. Make knowledge sharing easy and accessible

Organize your information in a well-defined and easily searchable location. Use tagging and keyword systems to allow users to perform advanced and contextual searching.

You can also integrate your knowledge resources into existing workflows and tools employees use daily. Embed relevant knowledge articles or FAQs within project management tools, customer service platforms, or internal communication channels.

5. Train your team on the knowledge-sharing system

Training team members to use and contribute shared knowledge is essential to building a continuous learning culture and increasing user adoption. Providing employee training to ensure they know how to use your knowledge-sharing systems effectively.

6. Address common objections to knowledge sharing and solutions

Employees often have concerns and objections regarding knowledge sharing within organizations.

Common objections to knowledge sharing include:

  • Balancing working time and knowledge-sharing activities.
  • Lack of motivation.
  • Concerns about personal benefits.
  • Negative consequences.

You can address these objections by encouraging participation in knowledge-sharing activities. Promoting a collaborative and digital environment can encourage employees to learn and share knowledge freely.

7. Pair up new and experienced employees for knowledge sharing

Pairing up new and experienced employees can be an effective strategy to maximize learning and tap into tribal knowledge.

Pairing up new and experienced employees facilitates knowledge transfer, builds relationships and encourages knowledge exchange.

8. Recognize and incentivize employees

Recognizing and incentivizing employees for knowledge-sharing activities encourages participation and creates a culture of collaboration.

Recognizing and rewarding employees for their valuable contributions motivates them to actively participate in knowledge sharing.

9. Keep your knowledge-sharing system up to date

Regularly review your knowledge-sharing system, updating outdated content as needed. Encourage employees to keep contributions current and to share feedback on content quality.

10. Measure the success of knowledge sharing efforts

Tracking metrics and KPIs can help your organization gain insights into the effectiveness of your knowledge management process and make data-driven decisions to improve knowledge accessibility and team productivity.

Measure the effectiveness of knowledge sharing efforts with metrics like:

  • Usage.
  • Employee engagement.
  • Search success rate.
  • Time savings.
  • Quality of contributions.
  • Employee happiness and satisfaction.
  • ROI.
  • Business performance.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) performance include:

  • Knowledge accessibility.
  • Resource utilization.
  • Time to resolution.

Quantitative metrics for measuring the impact and success of an internal knowledge base include:

  • Page views.
  • Search success rate.
  • Top search terms.
  • Time spent on page.
  • Time to resolve support tickets.
  • Number of tickets deflected thanks to self-help resources.
  • Time to complete tasks and processes.
  • Error rates.

Conclusion: knowledge sharing best practices

These knowledge sharing best practices will help you build a culture of learning and improve efficiency, productivity and employee engagement. Starting small and implementing one or two of these best practices at a time will continuously improve your teams’ ability to share relevant information. Sign up for Scribe today and streamline your knowledge-sharing process today!


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