Knowledge Sharing
Highly Effective Work Habits: Knowledge Sharing
Sharing knowledge should be a key aspect of working in any team environment. As I mentioned in a previous post, hoarding information is never a good thing. Sharing information/data helps people to view you as a “team player” and also helps build up the entire team’s skills. Do you really want to do the same things over and over again as part of your daily grind? If you keep everything to yourself, you won’t have 
any capacity to learn new things and take on new responsibilities.
If you have important knowledge that others on your team don’t, try some of the following ideas:
- Organize “brown bag” lunch sessions with a different topic each week/month. For the visual learners, make sure to prepare a presentation in advance. Topics can be anything from behavioral to business/technical.
- Share information on a Wiki. Our department recently started one of these and they are very easy to update and anyone can make contributions. Everything can be stored here from instructions, images, and documents. What makes this much nicer than storing documents on a network folder is that a Wiki is searchable. This allows people to find the information they need quicker.
- Conduct training session(s). If you need to teach skills to several employees (new or existing) so they can do their jobs properly, prepare a curriculum and flex your teaching skills. Give the class small “homework” assignments so they can get hands-on experience. The key is to make this interesting and engaging. If you don’t, you’ll see people’s eyes glaze over just before they fall asleep
- Create a department newsletter. I used to do this for a coding “tip of the week”. For the junior members of the team, this was extremely helpful to get insights into aspects of development they would not have otherwise known about.
- If your department is constantly looking for new tools or ways of doing things, schedule a monthly POC (”Proof of Concept”) or product/process overview where you discuss something helpful you have come across in your research that might help out the team.
- You could also do something as simple as sending out an email when you come across something that everyone should know about. If you don’t quite know what to do with the information, someone else might.
I hope these tips are helpful for you. Remember, when working in a team, knowledge is power only if you share it.
