As I finish my work for Communiqué PR, I want to set my replacement – and the company – up for success. To that end, here are some best practices for transferring institutional knowledge.
What is Institutional Knowledge?
Institutional knowledge is the cumulative knowledge that an organization requires to run smoothly. Because individual knowledge varies by role, assigned tasks, and experience, institutional knowledge is necessarily more encompassing than any one person’s knowledge.
People store knowledge in several ways based on the type of information:
- Explicit knowledge is typically stored in documentation and is the easiest to record and share; you can write it down or provide example end products.
- Tacit knowledge is more difficult to impart to a newcomer because it involves experience-based knowledge, understanding interpersonal relationships and resources, and gaining skills.
- Embedded knowledge lies between explicit and tacit knowledge and exists in rules, procedures and processes. Typically, these processes grew out of trial-and-error or a deep understanding of the business. You can explicitly store and share the “how-to” of these procedures, but the how and why they came to exist are not always readily apparent.
Individuals gain all three types of knowledge during their employment or tenure, making it essential to have retention strategies in place for if or when they leave. When only one person understands a particular operational element of your business or organization, it is often problematic, leading to the risk of mistakes, decreased productivity or subpar results.
Retaining Institutional Knowledge
Once leaders have prioritized intentional knowledge sharing and the maintenance required to preserve organizational memory, they can use various methods to share and store knowledge and promote knowledge retention.
You can create videos, reports, notes, and podcasts to share knowledge. Information technology (IT) systems like cloud storage platforms can help people classify, organize, and search for documents to enable future information retrieval.
It also may be helpful to share stories, explain the reasoning behind decisions, identify exceptions, answer questions, and offer tips for helping newcomers. Job shadowing and storytelling are also excellent vehicles for imparting tacit knowledge. Consider setting up situations where learners can understand what success looks like and you can address any questions they have.
Recommendations
It’s essential to think about what resources your organization can consistently apply toward institutional knowledge. Below are some tips and recommendations to keep in mind:
- Find IT systems that work for your business. To make it easier for members to find information, consider solutions that can make videos searchable, guide you through different workflows or tutorials, or allow people to see how a document progressed over time.
- Update and curate resources. Adding information to a repository can be helpful up to a point. Ensure that what you’re offering employees is up-to-date, relevant and essential to their current or potential roles.
- Support continuous learning. Spaced, repeated exposure to learning materials is crucial for individual memory, so ensure that staff always have access to resources and encourage them to review materials as needed.
- Develop guiding documents that can identify tacit knowledge gaps. Encourage employees to work together to amalgamate examples of different output quality, point out differences, and share steps they took to improve their processes. Suggest that new employees create “cheat sheets” to recap topics, techniques and helpful resources. Summarizing information can help people learn and identify subjects with room for growth.
- Enable people to explore new roles and expand their circle. Allowing people to work on different projects or with new teams increases socialization and supports knowledge transfer.
- Pair departing staff with their replacements for job shadowing. Job shadowing is often an excellent way for new people to learn. In addition, as the incoming employee takes tasks and responsibilities from the outgoing one, it can free up additional time to update documents for explicit knowledge retention.
An emphasis on learning and a dedication to sharing knowledge can help preserve your business’s organizational memory. By prioritizing these efforts, leaders can smooth over transitions, prevent people from making all the same mistakes, humanize the workplace by sharing mistakes and growth and support employees’ upward momentum.