A company possesses various assets, and one of the most valuable is the individual knowledge and expertise held by its employees. In order to enhance human resource development and strengthen the organisation, it is crucial to recognize the significance of knowledge sharing. In today’s fast-paced and adaptable work environment, e-learning has emerged as an indispensable tool for facilitating knowledge sharing, making it essential for organisational growth. The process of consolidating knowledge within a company, promoting its sharing, and utilising it to enhance organisational capabilities is known as “knowledge management.”
Knowledge Types
Tacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge is subjective knowledge based on personal experience and intuition that is difficult to verbalise or diagram. Tacit knowledge includes rules of thumb acquired in the field, sales techniques used by top salespeople, etc.
Explicit knowledge
Formal knowledge is the formalised tacit knowledge. The specialised knowledge and skills possessed by talented personnel can be easily understood by others and applied to business strategies.
By engaging in knowledge sharing, the successful business rules possessed by individuals can be disseminated throughout the company, leading to improved business efficiency and productivity. It also improves organisational performance as a whole.
Advantages
1. Strengthen cooperation with other teams
Knowledge sharing enables visualisation of knowledge that has been understood only by individuals or specific teams, which helps to strengthen cooperation with other parts of organisation.
2. Accumulate business know-how in the company
By utilising the know-how accumulated in the company, it is possible to efficiently train excellent human resources even in the age of increasing job mobility.
3. Effective for diversified employment patterns
Knowledge sharing is also an effective measure for companies with employees with various work styles.
Challenges
1. Cost
In general, many companies tend to implement information sharing tools or chatbots for knowledge sharing, but while some services are free, many tools require initial and running costs.
2. Lack of commitment
Veteran employees who potentially possess a lot of knowledge are too busy and find it difficult to devote time to knowledge sharing. At performance-based approach companies, employees will refrain from sharing their own know-how with others.
3 steps to start knowledge sharing
Hiring a Knowledge Sharing Manager
Ideally, knowledge sharing should be promoted by selecting a dedicated person or team, called a knowledge manager.
SECI Model
The four processes required for knowledge sharing are “Socialisation,” “Externalisation,” “Combination,” and “Internalisation”. It is a framework to share tacit knowledge as explicit knowledge within an organisation, and to discover new know-how by combining explicit knowledge.
Knowledge sharing tools
Find a knowledge sharing tool. Knowledge management tools or knowledge bases, are useful for smooth knowledge sharing because they include SNS and FAQ functions, or allow users to ask and answer questions among themselves.
In this post, we talked about the advantages and disadvantages of knowledge sharing. In fact, we use our own e-learning platform learningBOX for knowledge sharing at the workplace. For instance, the information security department or the human resources department share some latest information with their employees through digital content they made by themselves within learningBOX. In that way, it is easy to share and easy to monitor who checked the information.
We also have a free plan that allows you to use almost all functions for free for up to 10 accounts, so please feel free to contact us or sign up for our free plan.
Author
learningBOX, Inc.
We are the provider of a learning management system, born from our customers’ feedback in 2012. Our mission is to provide an easy and low-cost e-learning platform so that as many users can access education that suits their lifestyles; whatever, whenever and wherever they are. Create, deliver, assess, analyze and evaluate. learningBOX is an all-in-one e-learning system with many handy features including authoring tools, auto-scoring and gamification.