Knowledge Management: The Best Way to Manage Your Employee's Knowledge
When managing projects, do you usually struggle with encountering and repeating past mistakes? Repeating mistakes and trying to solve problems when the solution could be at hand can waste countless hours. This is a very common scenario for companies everywhere, but one that can be changed by managing knowledge the right way.
Knowledge management is the conscious process of defining, capturing, curating, structuring, organizing, retaining, sharing, and effectively applying the knowledge and experience of employees within an organization. It is a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge: a company’s most valuable resource.
The main goal of knowledge management is to generate a culture of continuous learning and to enable knowledge to flow effectively throughout an organization. By sharing information and knowledge, companies can achieve their objectives more easily.
Benefits of Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is a crucial tool for any type of company because it ensures that employees have access to the expertise held within the organization, reducing mistakes to a minimum, and helping people make smarter, informed decisions. Moreover, knowledge management builds a more efficient workplace, enables faster decision-making, increases team collaboration, optimizes the employee onboarding and training process, and reduces turnover.
But how does knowledge management achieve all these benefits? By focusing and enable the following tasks:
Assessing, curating, and documenting knowledge.
Identifying where and in what form the knowledge exists
Ensuring the captured knowledge is accessible to everyone in a company.
Creating a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
Finding ways to generate new, relevant knowledge.
There are many different reasons why companies should focus on knowledge management. Overall, it creates a learning culture where people seek to gain a deep understanding of processes, where bettering themselves is encouraged.
Knowledge management also helps to:
Prevent knowledge loss by storing important information when experienced employees leave.
Centralize information and help employees waste time trying to figure out answers.
Accumulate best practices.
Boost productivity and efficiency amongst employees.
Different Types of Knowledge
Now that you understand why knowledge management is important, it’s helpful to consider the different types of knowledge and how to go about sharing that knowledge within a company.
Explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge refers to the type of information that can be codified and taught. Standard procedures are clear examples of explicit knowledge. Policies, guidelines, and handbooks would also fall in this category.
Tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge that comes from experience and intuition, and it is more challenging to manage and to share. Skills, how you communicate with others, and innovative thinking are examples of this type of knowledge.
Why Do Companies Usually Begin the Knowledge Management Process?
Companies start the knowledge management process for a variety of reasons. For instance, when employees face the retirement process or are imminently leaving the company, the need to capture their knowledge becomes urgent.
Also, an acquisition or a merger could spark the need to codify and share explicit knowledge for teams and employees.
Manage Your Knowledge With Instagantt
Knowledge management’s ultimate goal is to ensure the best possible use of knowledge, where virtually no information is lost. When companies invest in knowledge management, they begin creating and building a learning culture when sharing valuable information is highly encouraged.
However, the knowledge management process is a cycle. A cycle of creating, auditing, curating, storing, and finally sharing knowledge. And in order to maximize the effectiveness of an organization’s collective knowledge, you must have the right tools to ensure the process is executed correctly. The good news is that you can collect, retain, store, and structure your company’s knowledge in one single place by using Instagantt. Instagantt is an online Gantt chart software for project management that helps teams all around the world plan, coordinate, schedule, and execute their projects, from beginning to end. Teams can rely on Instagantt to create professional-looking Gantt charts in a matter of minutes and to manage their work efficiently by being able to visualize relevant project-related information such as deadlines, resources, and budget, and to keep tasks, conversations, and documents in a single, centralized location.
