3 Tips To Share Knowledge Across Teams Easily

Knowledge sharing and learning is the bread and butter of an organization… and most of us are in Germany and Portugal, so bread is very important to us! At KI group, we’ve divided learning in five main pillars:

In this article, we’ll focus on the first pillar. Knowledge sharing across teams is a great way to:

• Circulate information through the organization.
• Create bonds across teams.
• Create a high-level understanding of work and skills across positions and teams.
• Provide more opportunities to work on new skills and therefore create more career opportunities.

Creating a knowledge sharing program across the entire organization can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be! Our advice is to connect, scale and promote.

1. Connect

When you give teams ownership, they usually have a wonderful disposition to create their own rituals, a lot of which you may not be aware of. Our first tip is to connect with people from different teams and ask them what type of training and knowledge sharing initiatives they already have in place.

This is exactly what we did at KI group, a group of around 250 entrepreneurs, creators and solvers spread over different companies with their own focus areas. We found 3 different initiatives across the teams, which the other teams had no idea about:

• KIXchange by KI professionals: Hands-on or interactive workshops that can go for example from Data Science Basics to the details of PI Planning with SAFe to Powerpoint Pro Tips.
• Xpert sessions by xgeeks: Informal conversations with external speakers from several technological backgrounds, with space for Q&A from the team.
• Tech Talks by xgeeks and KI performance: 15–30 minute talks where a technical topic is presented in an informal fashion.

2. Scale

After connecting with the teams, you should have an overview of already proven, but all separate initiatives. Now you can start thinking about how to scale them so that they are available to the entire organization. Scaling separate initiatives probably results in a program with lots of diversity in topics and formats, with something for pretty much every learning style. Our tip: Keep it as simple as possible and don’t create unnecessary work for anyone involved.

We approached scaling our knowledge sharing initiatives this way:

We first checked what current barriers there were for people from other teams to join the initiatives. Our main barrier was that other teams simply didn’t know about these initiatives. A smaller barrier was that one of these initiatives was in German and not everyone in our organization speaks German.

To get rid of our transparency barrier, we set up a #knowledge channel in Slack, where the owners of the different initiatives give updates on upcoming sessions, including date, time and a link to join. We decided to work with a join link in Slack to make it more self-service. This way we’re not spamming everyone’s calendars and the organizers also don’t have to add every interested individual to the relevant calendar event. The Slack channel is the main point of contact for our team members. Additionally, we’re creating a space in Confluence with a calendar where all knowledge sharing sessions are added and where we will also store the presentations, recordings etc.

To get rid of our language barrier, we agreed that any sessions that were already planned to take place in German will stay that way and sessions that we plan in the future will all be in English. Until then, we clearly add the language of the session when we send an update in our #knowledge Slack channel.

3. Promote

Having all information of different knowledge sharing initiatives in one place doesn’t add value unless the team knows where to look. Now it’s time to promote! Let your team know where to find the information and how to participate.

At KI group, we shared an introduction message to our new #knowledge channel in a company-wide Slack channel and invited everyone interested to join. We also share messages from our knowledge channel in other relevant channels. Additionally, we plan on re-introducing the #knowledge Slack channel to the team on a regular basis for our new joiners and anyone who may have missed it before.

Up next

We see a lot more opportunities that we can dive into for the future. For example, we’re already planning to scale up the program even more by making (part of) the materials available externally or having other external people and alumni join more of our knowledge sharing events.

Summary

1. Connect with different teams to learn what knowledge sharing initiatives are already set up.
2. Scale existing initiatives so that they become available to the entire team by understanding the current barriers. Keep it simple and pragmatic!
3. Promote your knowledge sharing program to let the entire team know where to find the information and how they can participate.

Hopefully this short article inspired you to connect with people in your organization and leverage what’s already set up!

At KI group we are looking for entrepreneurs, solvers and creators who want to make a difference by building sustainable, user-, customer- and planet-driven business models & solutions in a constantly evolving world. If you’re interested in working in a fast-paced diverse environment on a variety of projects, companies, products and technologies be sure to get in touch with us — we are looking forward to meeting entrepreneurs, solvers and creators from tech, data, product, design, strategy and company building.