Every day, crucial conversations about important projects and developments take place online.
Your team shares dozens of links through Slack, messenger apps, email and social media. Colleagues mentor each other, share knowledge and help team members get out of a bind and do better work.
What you know and how well you retain and apply it plays a key role in your success or failure.
A lot of companies don’t have a robust enough process and lose knowledge when employees move on or change roles. You lose your team’s deep smarts: the skills and know-how that have taken a lot of time and effort to cultivate.
The cost of this loss is high.
Startups need a process to keep track of what we already know so we don’t waste time reinventing the wheel.
You need to put processes and tools in place that help you keep track of the conversations on multiple levels.
Let’s take a look at how you can do this.
1. Keep the conversation in one place
Your team has access to diverse communication options!
You’ve got specialized platforms like Slack, email, countless messenger apps, project management software and social media.
It’s easy to waste a lot of time jumping from tool to tool, just so you can stay on top of what’s going on!
That’s why smart companies put a process in place and use one specific platform to communicate. This keeps all important information in the same place and makes sure no one misses out!
We use Slack.
We set up different channels to contain specific conversations like content marketing, onboarding, product ops and tech. This keeps everything in the same place and makes it easy for team members to scroll through and catch up on what’s going on.
Keeping conversations to a shared channel adds a layer of transparency. Discussions are taken out of individual inboxes and into a common ground.
Slack also offers a lot of customization options! You can add various chatbots to different channels to increase functionality and integrate it with other tools you use.
The Trello integration has been incredibly useful to us! It automatically posts to our #content-activities channel every time a team member adds an update to our content marketing board.
This makes it much easier to keep up with changes and developments instead of jumping through multiple apps!
So, instead of fragmenting knowledge across a huge variety of apps and individual accounts using something like Slack can really keep your whole team informed.
2. Capture shared knowledge
We share a lot of important links on Slack and those can get lost in the noise. To stay on top of the links, we designed Paperbot.
Paperbot collects all the links your team shares throughout the day and organizes them into an easy to read digest.
And, it can do a lot more.
The desktop version of Paperbot beautifully renders links into a thumbnail board.
You can see:
- Who shared each link
- What board it was shared on
- Any tags
Then, when you click on the link, Paperbot renders the original text in an ad-free, easy to read format. If you want to go to the original source, just click on original link in the top left hand corner.
Paperbot makes it easy to search through articles based on keywords, tags or the name of the person who shared them.
We share links to help our team stay informed and achieve our goals.
But, staying on top of all the links is hard because we are busy and not every link is immediately relevant.
Paperbot helps remove some of the distraction and overwhelm that can keep us from deeper tasks by making the information easily searchable and accessible.
3. Create a robust knowledge flow process
Defining the conversation and gathering and sharing links is great, but it’s not enough.
Real learning often happens through debate and discussion with others.
That’s why we use Skore to curate, organize and share content in specifically designed spaces.
Content can serve a lot of different purposes in your company and it comes in all shapes and sizes.
Skore lets us capture a variety of files, links and notes and save them to a specific space. But, the real challenge isn’t finding quality materials and saving them to the cloud. It’s presenting them in a way that will engage your team and let you track that engagement.
When you save a document to Skore, you can tag specific team members, see who’s read it and have a discussion about the article all in the same space.
This helps you start real conversations and share your insights with others. It keeps relevant materials together and lets you organize them in an intuitive way.
Paperbot integrates with Skore through Slack and allows you to add critical links directly to a specific space, put them into context and start that discussion.
Keeping track of what you know
It’s hard to know what you know.
Your brain isn’t as efficient as a computer- information is stored in (often) illogical ways and grouped by association and importance.
Sometimes, you have deep knowledge of something but you can’t quite express it because you are exhausted or you just can’t find the right words.
At the individual level, we find ways to deal with it. But, what about at a company wide level?
What about a company that relies on its team’s knowledge to succeed and hone that competitive edge?
That’s why we need processes. A robust system for capturing, labeling and accessing information can help reduce the time we spend searching and trying to remember.
Knowledge should flow freely between people and within organizations and it should be easily available when you need it.
That’s why we use Slack to keep track of our conversations, Paperbot to capture important articles and Skore to store and discuss key points. All three tools complement each other and help us create a more powerful process.
The tools we use give our current (and future) team access to the knowledge they need to do a phenomenal job.
Because at Skore we don’t believe in hoarding or hiding knowledge. We believe that it should stay out in the open and help us build amazing things.
What are your team's main challenges when it comes to dealing with knowledge? Leave your comment below or subscribe to keep the conversation going.
