Did you ever give any consideration to what you should do if your top employee who has served more than five years gives their notice or resignation? Or perhaps when you have to recruit and train a huge crew because of your company’s rapid growth? Well, although terrifying, this is a probability. According to research, the average yearly rate of high-performance turnover is 3%. In fact, individuals don’t even remain in their positions for very long periods. The average tenure of paid and wage employees with their current employers is only 4.1 years. Moreover, retirement should not be overlooked. This all brings us to the concept of knowledge transfer. This blog lists 5 effective strategies required for a successful knowledge transfer in the workplace. Let’s have a look.
What Does Knowledge Transfer Mean and What Does It Not Mean?
Knowledge transfer is a systematic process used by experienced individuals to impart their knowledge, abilities, and procedures to subordinates in order to enhance operations and the performance of the staff. You may structure, preserve, and transmit knowledge to anybody who can profit from it with the help of a solid knowledge transfer plan. As a result, this leads to a significant reduction in the risks connected with skill and knowledge loss.
However, note that knowledge transfer goes beyond straightforward communication. Additionally, ideas, habits, tasks, tools, papers, and a lot of other attributes must be transferred in order to build an effective knowledge transfer process.
What Happens When Knowledge Transfer Takes Place at Work?
You shouldn’t make the mistake of minimizing the importance of knowledge transfer given that baby boomers will soon enter retirement and younger workers will wish to shift jobs within 3 years.
Hence, having a strong knowledge transfer strategy handy will help you when:
- A sizable portion of your personnel is about to retire.
- You’re starting an internship program to improve your welcome package.
- You feel that important employees are leaving the organization.
- The business wants to preserve crucial information despite downsizing.
- You’re recruiting for a well-known position to address an internal issue
- You are looking forward to scaling and uniformly implementing a corporate knowledge transfer strategy
- Cross-team cooperation is necessary for your remote staff.
How Can Knowledge Be Effectively Transferred?
Knowledge transfer takes place in various ways. However, there are certain rules and regulations that, if employed, can turn out to be advantageous. The four guiding principles listed below form the foundation of successful knowledge transfer. Have a look.
- For the purpose of fostering collaboration, establish trust and relationships through in-person and virtual interactions.
- Keep in touch consistently and clearly.
- Be sure to incorporate knowledge providers and receivers in each stage of the transitioning process.
- Have a comprehensive strategy for information transmission that takes into account all the learning preferences, cultural diversity, and generational disparities in your organization.
Here is a step-by-step way to develop a successful knowledge transfer strategy that spans numerous departments and employees.
Step 1: Locate and Gather Relevant Information
Establishing a strong culture of knowledge creation in your business is the main goal in the initial phase. All in all, the environment you want to establish should encourage everyone to contribute their knowledge, ideas, and competence.
Considering this, it is important that you discuss business issues with your team and search for suggestions and solutions.
Moreover, to develop new projects and learn new skills, promote cooperation and teamwork. Additionally, if you can bring professionals to guide and train personnel, it could offer you with great help. Eventually, you can gather, record, and share the resulting “intangible” information with your team. This will keep a sense of transparency and clarity among the staff.
Step 2: Record and Store Knowledge
You need a solid system in place that allows for easy and quick accessibility to knowledge when needed in case you want to implement strong knowledge documenting and knowledge management.
In simple terms, create a strong knowledge base to handle the explicit and tacit information of your business. This knowledge base can include reports, information portals, how-to videos, CRM systems, and much more. Further, try purchasing quality knowledge management tools. These will allow you to easily organize data and make it accessible when required. As a result, this will result in nothing but an improved organizational processes, productivity, and a smooth flow of information.
Step 3: Sharing and transferring knowledge
You currently possess the skills and infrastructure necessary to arrange and store it. Following that, you should distribute the material to other divisions and/or your workers. Moreover, you must create a knowledge transfer strategy that considers the following:
- A methodically laid out process outlining how knowledge will be disseminated within your organization.
- Utilizing document management tools, such as Google Drive, to arrange knowledge and maybe streamline knowledge sharing.
- Slack or Google Hangouts can be used as communication platforms to promote collaboration and communication.
- Dedicated individuals to disseminate information to the proper personnel or department.
- Tracking processes to make sure that information is delivered to the appropriate parties at the appropriate times and in the appropriate ways
In fact, to build a successful system for effectively distributing knowledge, it is advisable to deploy a knowledge base application and engage an operations specialist. That will make the process pretty much easier.
Step 4: Evaluate the effects of knowledge sharing
After that, use knowledge management technologies to put the shared information to use and evaluate the outcomes using a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs). Therefore, ask the sales team to put the knowledge into practice and evaluate the outcomes if the knowledge presented was intended to assist your salespeople in identifying higher-quality prospects. The next step is to document and inform the necessary parties of the results.
Step 5: Develop New Knowledge
Apply a strategy or concept to other divisions of your business if you discover that it is effective. But if the outcomes aren’t what you expected, take the chance to be creative and start drawing something innovative.
Your firm won’t skip a beat when the matter is about fresh thinking and problem-solving if you have a knowledge transfer mechanism in place. It will in fact assist you in developing an atmosphere that encourages the ongoing pursuit of useful knowledge.
How Do I Write a Knowledge Transfer Plan That Works?
A key component of properly sharing and transferring knowledge is understanding how to develop a knowledge transfer plan in the first place. The process for creating one for your company is outlined here.
Step 1: Determine Key Personnel and Their Duties
You must choose which data is pertinent for your business scenario and from whom to gather it because not all knowledge is significant. To do this, make sure you take into account the following factors:
- Which individuals are the key players in your company?
- What do they typically do for your business?
- What specific duties are they assigned that only they are capable of handling?
- Can someone else take on these duties if these individuals quit immediately?
Step 2: Gather Information Using Knowledge Management Technology
Organize your company’s knowledge into a sustainable structure, and subsequently fill in the data that has been gathered in accordance. While you can accomplish this by creating a matrix or spreadsheet, it is advisable to use technology to capture and distribute massive volumes of data. This allows you to automate procedures as necessary and is quicker and easier.
Step 3: Implement out and Disseminate the Knowledge Transfer Strategy
In this step, the proper communication of information to the appropriate individuals is the main objective. To transfer information within your organization, pick a knowledge transfer strategy, like mentorship, simulation, work shadowing, instructor-led training, or guided experience. Note that you can utilize these strategies individually, or in groups as well. The choice is yours.
Wrapping It Up
In conclusion, it is important that business organizations spend money on knowledge transfer systems. This solution makes it easier and more automated to collect, store, and analyze data about the systems and culture of your company. As a result, organizations become better, healthier, happier, and wealthier when knowledge transfer is done effectively. A strong knowledge-sharing culture must be developed through a number of crucial phases, including information identification and gathering, knowledge recording and preservation, knowledge transfer and exchange, and knowledge application.
In order to eliminate any redundancies, firms must also periodically evaluate the knowledge-sharing strategies they have employed. If you find that a certain strategy, for instance, your social media strategy isn’t producing the desired effects, make sure you don’t waste time adjusting the plans. If you have experienced employees who are set to retire or reach the end of their contracts, don’t wait until the last moment to replace them. Be wise and create a culture of information sharing and skill replication within your company right away.
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