Are you a knowledge snob?
Today’s workforce has a different set of expectations and attitudes. Here are five benefits of knowledge and skills sharing for you and your company
“You take away all my factories, you take away all my money, you take away all that I possess, but leave me my men and in the next 5 years they can get me everything I had or even more” — Andrew Carnegie
Strong statement? According to management at Adobe, people’s jobs in the past have directly related to their expertise, and for whom ‘what they know’ has become a kind of ‘insurance plan.’ This has fuelled an environment of knowledge hoarding, encouraging employees to say things like, “no one can help me because I’m the only one who knows how to do it.” These attitudes have cost organisations breaks in their innovation strategies.
Employees today need to be engaged intellectually and emotionally and doing to, will ensure they’re in a constant quest to innovate. Innovation requires collaborating with peers that are overseas, exchange ideas, keep current on global matters and have quick answers to each other’s questions. Competitors will innovate and whoever doesn’t, will fall behind. All of these examples form part of a knowledge sharing culture.
What is knowledge sharing?
In simple terms, knowledge sharing relates to transferring information, skills or expertise from where it currently is to where it should be. People used to think that by sharing their knowledge, they’d lose their ‘X-factor’ but with today’s changing workplace, where individual KPIs are based on teamwork and cross-departmental initiatives, individuals need to develop a habit of knowledge sharing.
Let’s look at why this is important and what benefits it can bring to your organisation’s success.
1. Employee career development, an up-skilled workforce and effective leadership planning
Skill sharing between co-workers serves as a platform for employees to speak about career goals, offer development opportunities and enhance the quality of leadership within key individuals. It is extremely imperative to engage high potentials by exposing them to different areas of the business, developing their leadership skills, and ensuring they’re learning what they need to excel in prospective new roles.
“The opportunity to learn and develop is a top driver of engagement, and is more important than leadership, culture, and compensation.” — Right Management, 2012.
2. Increased efficiency and productivity. Improves response times.
Re-inventing the wheel costs money. A question that comes up in Business Unit X may well already been resolved in Business Unit Y. Also, faster access to expertise increases the chances that decisions are made quicker, hence increasing overall team productivity.
“Organisations with career development programs demonstrate up to 250% higher productivity, 19% increase in operational income and 28% growth in earnings per share.” — Scales & Towers Perrin
3. Preserve existing knowledge & intellectual capital
Because 80 percent of learning is informal (as commonly cited by Bersin), skills sharing empowers learning in ways that manuals and training programs can’t. Skills and knowledge sharing shortens the learning curve, enhances productivity, and helps employees align to business strategy.
Knowledge transfer also fuels succession planning, ensuring that once executives retire or quit, someone with plenty of company knowledge will be ready to step into place. Social technologies are the ideal tool to pull tacit knowledge out into the open.
“Only 51% of employers feel confident about retaining top talent as the economy improves” - World at work research study, 2012
4. Awareness and a positive culture
Skill sharing plays a vital role in creating awareness amongst the people in an organisation. With an effective strategy execution plan, employees will be able to discover what opportunities are available for them to develop. According to research, the two key drivers of employee engagement is learning & development and leadership. Skill sharing opens that road map and increases employee commitment helping develop a stronger organisational identity.
5. Acceptance to new ideas & increased innovative capacity
Increasingly, the only sustainable competitive advantage today is continuous innovation. In other words this means the application of new knowledge. Sharing skills and talking through new tasks and projects with co-workers from different departments and different experiences creates a sustainable competitive advantage by leveraging the collective knowledge of two individuals or more.
“Organisations with excellent cultural support for knowledge sharing have 13% stronger business results.” — Bersin 2011
About Talking Circles
Talking Circles makes it easy to start, manage and measure a modern mentoring programme, i.e an effective knowledge and skill sharing strategy. Our matching tool connects employees based on skills they can give and want to take away. With Talking Circles, companies drive employee participation because everyone in the platform shares skills they can teach and skills they’d like to develop — hence giving everyone an equal opportunity to develop their leadership and communication skills.
For more information on how to execute an effective skills sharing strategy in your organisation visit www.talkingcircles.co or email Dimple Lalwani, Co-Founder & CEO at dimple@talkingcircles.co
