You are working on an important project when you hit a roadblock. Suddenly, you remember an email you got a few weeks ago that had an article on a very similar issue!
You open a new browser tab and log in.
Ten new emails are impatiently waiting in your inbox. Three of them are about a crucial new development.
You glance at your current project, then back at the emails. It won’t take long.
Thirty minutes and eleven sent emails later, you are ready to get back to the project. You close out your email and open everything you need.
Then you remember: you still need to find that article! And the whole thing starts again.
This is a common scenario that plays out across companies everywhere.
We share crucial knowledge with our team members through email. The insights get buried and languish in the inbox to be looked at later. In time, they get lost.
Even if you did try to unearth an important email, you have to fight through the incoming distractions and remember who it was from, what it was about and where you put it in the first place.
This process is long, laborious, inefficient and wastes thousands of hours (and millions of dollars) every year.
What lost knowledge and wasted time are costing you
You are what you know. So is your team.
Your company’s know-how is a vital competitive advantage.
One of the reasons so many of us check email constantly is to make sure that we aren’t missing out on any vital news and to track down specific bits of information that will help us be better.
The McKinsey Global Institute found that, on average, workers spend 19% of their time looking for the information they need to do a good job.
Two hours out of your team’s day are spent searching for knowledge.
That’s without accounting for the time spent reading and answering emails and talking to coworkers. When you add those up, the numbers are even more worrying leaving just over 3 hours a day for actual task based work.
This has a major impact on your company and it isn’t confined to a specific industry. Even the average construction worker spends an hour and a half every day, looking for the stuff they need to do their job.
Knowledge waste affects organizations of all shapes and sizes.
It’s time to build a process that moves knowledge out of the inbox and create a knowledge flow system that saves time and increases your productivity.
Setting up a knowledge flow process that works for you
You share knowledge and links so that they can be discovered and used by other people and to prevent knowledge loss.
Instead of helping you to achieve this goal, using email as a knowledge repository is actively keeping you from it.
What happens when a person leaves the organization or simply forgets about a specific email?
A potentially crucial bit of knowledge is lost to your team and will have to be re-learned.
By trapping knowledge inside individual inboxes, you are limiting access to important information. It’s time to remove the gatekeeper and make information available to your whole team.
By taking it out of the inbox, you are preventing knowledge loss, saving time and increasing your team’s assets.
Laying the foundation
Big changes don’t happen overnight.
To build a solid, effective knowledge flow process you need the right tools. If you move knowledge out of the inbox it needs to go to a specific place where it can be found easily.
That’s why we built Skore.
With Skore you can store, share and access a huge variety of materials. You can share links, upload files, make notes and share insights all within the platform.
Once a file has been shared, you can see who’s read it, tag team members and discuss the content all in the same space.
Instead of trapping discussion into inboxes this lets everyone benefit from the shared knowledge. It’s a step toward capturing vital tacit knowledge that will get lost otherwise.
What about searching for files when you need them?
Skore has a powerful search functionality that lets you find what you are looking for by using tags to define content based on long tail keywords and likely search terms.
But, finding and using aren’t the same thing.
A lot of companies struggle with too much choice and too many links that don’t fit together in a common sense way.
To prevent overwhelm, you can create spaces and assign specific bits of information to them. So, when you need an article on marketing, you can just jump over into the marketing space and not waste time going through everything else.
By using a designated piece of software to manage your knowledge flow, you can create a learning space that’s free from distraction.
Know more and be better
By making information easy to access you will drastically reduce the time wasted searching for it.
You can harness that extra time and use it for the type of projects that will benefit your team and your organization.
Don’t waste knowledge. Don’t confine it. Use it.
Give your team the power to have your whole organization’s know-how at their fingertips in an organized way.
Too much unorganized knowledge is ineffective. It leads to overwhelm and wastes time.
Structuring knowledge flow can help your entire company grow and prosper and increase employee happiness and engagement.
Manage your team’s knowledge and give them the tools they need to make a real, measurable difference.
