Can SharePoint foster Knowledge Sharing?

Creating a knowledge sharing culture within an organization requires efforts from all its members including upper management. A strong knowledge sharing culture not only creates a positive and innovative work environment but also saves the organization money.

A great tool to foster knowledge sharing is SharePoint.

Knowledge sharing in an organization

Knowledge sharing is the transfer of knowledge among peers in an organization. Plain and simple, it is sharing your know-how with your colleagues. As a result, knowledge sharing enhances collaboration in teams and allows important information to be found with minimal effort and time.

Now that we understand the benefits of knowledge sharing in an organization, we should know where to store these information so they can be easily accessible. One great tool to use is SharePoint, as mentioned above.

SharePoint as a knowledge sharing tool

SharePoint provides a virtual space to share expertise, create and manage content. As a virtual space, SharePoint eliminates time and frustration to find important information relevant to daily work activities. For example, if you need instructions from a colleague to complete a task while the latter is in a meeting, you may have to wait one hour or two to get hold of that colleague. However, if the instructions are stored online, it would take you a couple of minutes to find them. This scenario illustrates how using SharePoint for knowledge sharing saves time, eliminates frustrations and increases productivity .

Some out-of-the box features in SharePoint to consider for knowledge sharing are wiki pages, lists and blogs. These features are easy to manage and available in almost all SharePoint versions. If not, ask your SharePoint administrator.

Wiki Page: Easy to manage, a wiki page allows multiple users to contribute their knowledge and collect information.

List: Create a list with all relevant metadata about the knowledge to share. Grant access to a selected group of users to update the list. A list can be grouped by topic and users can easily filter contents.

Blog: Each section within an organization can have a blog where they share information about their different projects. A blog prevents teams from working in silos.

Rewarding employees for engagement

Rewarding employees for their engagement ensures the longevity of knowledge sharing programs. Organization should consider implementing reward systems to motivate employees to participate such as knowledge champion certificates for employees who share the most on the virtual space.

Knowledge sharing can be implemented in any organization regardless of industry. It involves the engagement of all, an effective rewards system and a great tool such as SharePoint.