Effective communication is the lifeblood of any successful organization. However, as companies grow and add locations, employees, products, and complexity, ensuring messages get conveyed across all teams, departments, and geographies can become increasingly difficult.
This lack of alignment on everything from company values and goals to specific product information and best practices can negatively impact productivity, morale, and business outcomes.
Employees and customers become frustrated when expectations don’t match the reality of poor communication.
Understanding Knowledge Bases
A knowledge base is an online repository containing an organization’s documented information, best practices, standard operating procedures, troubleshooting guides, training materials, FAQs, and overall tribal knowledge.
There are a few main types of knowledge bases, including:
- Internal – Used strictly by employees to access company information
- External/customer – Store public information customers can access
- Hosted – Hosted by a third-party provider
- Self-hosted – Hosted on a company’s servers
- Open-source – Publicly accessible and customizable
Well-designed knowledge bases organize content into intuitive categories and subcategories with robust search functionality. This enables any employee to quickly find answers to their questions regardless of department or location.
Knowledge emerges organically within growing organizations as workers share advice across teams, document processes during projects, and collaborate to solve customer issues. Traditionally, these details lived scattered across local drives, email chains, chat logs, and people’s heads.
There needed to be a way to track or share this informal knowledge efficiently. Knowledge bases provide a structured approach to content management by facilitating discoverability and simplified access to information when needed for reference or training. Here are some ways knowledge base improve communication in the workplace.
Streamlined Onboarding for Distributed Teams
Swamping new hires across multiple offices with endless emails and Slack channels becomes overwhelming fast. Knowledge bases shortcut this by centralizing training content, company folklore, and onboarding checklists into on-demand modules accessible globally.
Rather than pinging co-workers with basic questions on policies or procedures, new employees can self-serve the knowledge base as a go-to resource. This is invaluable for remote workers who lack impromptu opportunities to ask peers clarifying questions face-to-face. The knowledge base provides supportive information as teams scale.
Consistent Messaging Across Functions
Every growing organization ends up with specialized vocabularies within its departments. Acronyms, project code names, and industry jargon can feel like foreign languages. This breeds miscommunications and ambiguities in messaging when coordination occurs cross-functionally.
Knowledge bases function like an internal dictionary – explaining crucial language so everyone involved in collaborative initiatives understands processes similarly. They create clarity and alignment between groups needing help communicating efficiently.
Improved Searchability Company-Wide
As companies expand, details about vendors, internal tools, client preferences, or next year’s strategic objectives often get buried across sites in old emails and file folders. This turns information sourcing into frustrating spelunking across knowledge silos. Even experts become unable to locate specifics lacking centralized access.
Knowledge bases solve these search woes through intuitive IA, tagging, and powerful keyword lookups. Any worker can obtain answers in seconds rather than days of wasted digging through decentralized repositories. This simplified access saves massive wasted productivity trying to find information via outdated modes.
Enhanced Knowledge Sharing Between Offices
Critical details in companies without knowledge bases leave when employees exit or transfer to new locations. Alternatively, overburdened subject matter experts get bombarded with the same fundamental questions from all corners of the organization. This duplication of efforts risks burning out your best talent’s bandwidth.
Centralized knowledge bases capture specialized expertise through structured templates, helping contributors share insights and advice concisely. Simplified access also means anyone at any site can leverage this hard-won experience rather than constantly reinventing the wheel locale by locale. This eases the friction companies experience in trying to sustain institutional knowledge.
Implementing an Impactful Knowledge Base
Launching a basic knowledge base is simple, but driving adoption across a distributed workforce requires finesse and ongoing governance. Workers only commit to new tools providing outstanding user experiences that save them notable time or frustration. Follow these expanded best practices for knowledge-base success:
Secure Leadership Buy-In
Executive sponsorship gives validation and urgency towards driving usage at scale. Have champions across multiple departments visibly model behaviors like actively contributing content relevant to their specialties while publicly referencing the knowledge base when sharing information or addressing team questions.
Incentivize Power Contributors
Gamify engagement by recognizing teams and individuals demonstrating heavy utilization and contributions. Develop leaderboards highlighting authors serving up popular content used broadly by colleagues globally. Consider shout-outs or monetary rewards reinforcing the honor.
Integrate Into Existing Tech Stacks
Reduce friction by allowing convenient one-click access to the centralized knowledge base from platforms employees use daily, such as their payroll portal. No one wants to juggle another standalone dashboard, losing productivity through disrupted workflows. Meet workers within their habitats.
Facilitate Mobile Functionality
On-the-go teams require answers as urgently as possible when they’re onsite with clients or partners. Opt for knowledge-based solutions offering robust native mobile experiences across iOS and Android. For international companies, ensure the platform provides offline functionality for unstable connectivity.
Curate Killer Content
Quality far outweighs quantity when establishing knowledge base trust and credibility as an authoritative hub. Structured streamlined templates help subject matter experts share advice clearly and concisely without getting tied down by minute stuff. Guide contributors to highlight in-demand insights in solving real-world problems employees and customers face.
Designate Site-Specific Leads
Reduce the risk of departmental silos forming their fragmented content hubs by designating regional or divisional-specific admins shepherding localization. Have dedicated points of contact guiding teams on relevant content needs while addressing access issues and monitoring adoption metrics specific to their reporting sphere.
Analyze Usage Metrics
Treat your knowledge base like any other business intelligence tool dedicated to improving operations. Review traffic dashboards illuminating popular versus overlooked content categories and geographies. Where do teams exhibit knowledge gaps?
Double down on what’s working while rethinking what isn’t being leveraged to fine-tune enhancements that ensure global ROI.
In Sum
A thoughtful approach to establishing, iteration, and using knowledge bases unlocks immense potential for improving communications enterprise-wide. They remove silos plaguing remote-centric work while empowering employees through access to information that saves time and prevents redundancies.
