Knowledge Decay Series Part 2: How Organizations can keep Knowledge Relevant

Capturing and retaining institutional knowledge has been emphasized enough for organizations to maintain a competitive edge and increase their profitability. However, one factor that is not discussed enough is the need to continuously evaluate and evolve the existing knowledge to keep it relevant and prevent knowledge decay.

In the highly fast-paced and competitive landscape, knowledge constantly evolves. However, the fact of the matter is that it is the existing knowledge that leads to its evolution. Therefore, knowledge decay can be detrimental to the organization’s goals and profit.

Let us see below how organizations can prevent knowledge decay to stay competitive, innovative, and relevant to the clients:

Make a cultural shift to embrace learning and sharing: Learning, knowledge sharing, and collaboration should not be limited to the L&TD, and knowledge management teams. The organization should inculcate in the employees a culture of continuous learning and sharing knowledge. A well-defined and designed knowledge management framework integrates into day-to-day working of employees, tools to learn, share, and collaborate. Thus, making it easy to use and update the existing knowledge, preventing it from decaying.

Enable cross-pollination of knowledge and insights: Knowledge should be shared not from person to person but should flow across the organization. Your insights and experiences may benefit people from other teams and geographies as well so they should be documented and made available to all and across.

Buddy program: Pairing up a new joiner with a seasoned employee can make the transfer process of explicit knowledge seamless without disrupting the work.  At the same time new joiner can learn a lot from observation, thus enabling him / her to gain tacit knowledge which is no where documented. When the new joiner captures this tacit knowledge, it becomes explicit and is not lost to the employees or organization.

Creating knowledge repositories with search engines: Wikis, and Communities are a couple of examples of knowledge repositories that you can leverage to document and share knowledge. The key is to keep coming back to the knowledge repositories for review and updating to keep them refreshed and relevant. This will ensure that the knowledge is not lost or decayed. Also, to make the search easier and efficient, the key is to integrate it with a powerful search engine.

Deploy collaboration and knowledge management tools: Tools like teams allow employees to connect globally and share ideas and knowledge via calls, chats, and shared libraries. This makes it easier for people from different time-zones to understand the context of discussion, share their ideas and brainstorm virtually without losing the context.

The culture of continuous learning and collaboration ensures that the institutional knowledge stays refreshed, relevant and the employees are well equipped to perform their tasks efficiently. Thus, preventing the knowledge decay and enabling the organization to stay ahead of competition.

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