Productivity Comes From Within

Smart companies gather ideas for productivity from their own employees. They adopt techniques and technology that people are already using and scale them throughout their organizations.

But it often takes someone to lead the adoption. Sometimes, that’s an executive, but not always. Sometimes, it’s someone who is interested in seeing a job done better and faster, or who likes innovation and learning for its own sake.

We found one such person among our community: Jade Phillips.

She started using Kifi personally because she likes to be able to share knowledge with other people — and learn from them. In the fast-paced world of marketing, Kifi also saves time by keeping things she’s learned once at her fingertips.

She’s introduced Kifi at her company, PPS Group, a London-based pr agency, where her team uses it to share knowledge.

“It’s been quite a lifesaving tool,” she told us. As people respond to what she shares, she learns more about the pieces she shares. “I love the fact that you can create libraries based on topics,” Jade Phillips said.

As the company absorbs employees from a recent acquisition, she thinks it will help to quickly bring new people up to speed on the company’s culture and knowledge base.

In fact, the kinds of organic mini-communities like those built around Kifi libraries are key to creating change. Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao, Stanford professors, wrote about this in their business bestseller, Scaling Up Excellence. If you want to grow successfully, it’s crucial to create communities where knowledge and feeling are easily shared, they write in their book, which talks about how organizations from Starbucks to the Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel scaled up. Repositories of knowledge about what works, and the easy and regular transfer of that knowledge, are key, they write.

Phillips recently started a collaborated library with her line manager called Brand Guidelines.

“We’re in the midst of creating our own brand style guide and have been saving all of the great examples that we’ve stumbled across on the web. This is great because we can refer back to them at a later stage and keep building the collection whilst we brainstorm the ideas for our own brand guide.”

Phillips also has libraries around Ted Talks, one on social media marketing, and some built around industries that she can share with different teams in PPS, which is organized around industries. So, for instance, one team of about five people — the typical size — will handle accounts in the property industry.

The Kifi browser extension‘s integration with Google search results helps her save time by helping her identify information that’s already been vetted by Kifi’s 80,000-strong community. “If it rises to the top, I know other people have kept it and found it useful,” she said.

And having content that she’s already found useful at her fingertips. saves time, too, especially with the contextual communication Kifi has built in. Kifi has notes, which allow you to collect your thoughts. And Kifi chats allow you to save your discussions with others. Our highlighting feature also allows for very targeted communication (something AgilOne talked about in this blog post.)

“The most important thing is having a place to refer back,” she said. “I don’t want to waste time digging through pages of links to remember what I found useful or why I found it useful. Kifi helps solve that problem.”

Here’s how the contextual communication — the highlighting feature — works on a Wikipedia page:

Originally published at blog.kifi.com on July 16, 2015.