As a business operations leader, you need to enable your team to find and access essential knowledge within your organisation quickly and easily. But, your organisation's knowledge is stored across several different systems; in your Intranet, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft teams, email and more. This makes knowledge sharing and management a very time-consuming and inefficient process. Your team lacks the information required to effectively perform their tasks and gets frustrated and unmotivated. You know the feeling, right?
This scenario is familiar to operations teams at organisations of all sizes. Most wonder why finding information in their workplace is still an immense problem. While in their daily life, they are accustomed to excellent digital experiences. Why should work be different? It should be much better.
When we talk to businesses about their knowledge management, they mention the following common challenges they face:
Finding and accessing key knowledge is challenging, time-consuming and inefficient
Have you ever thought about how many systems and platforms you use to share, create, store and manage information? Are there 5, 10, 20? It could be more. From your SaaS platform and Intranet, to your Google Drive, Dropbox, ERP, One Drive, Slack, Microsoft Teams and email, so many different platforms within your organisation contain information.
With the knowledge spread across different platforms, locating and accessing information becomes challenging. There is often confusion about who has ownership or access to a piece of information. This is not only time-consuming and inefficient but also creates silos between teams and departments. It also makes it hard for your team to be independent and access the resources they need when they need them quickly and easily. They spend an enormous amount of time in back-and-forth conversations, emails and instant messages asking for information, especially whilst remote working.
💡 Did you know that the average knowledge worker spends 2.5 hours a day searching for information? That's more than a week lost every month!
It is time-consuming and challenging to onboard new employees.
Your new team members require a wealth of information and resources about their role, the company and the culture. You also need to gather material to train them in their new role and monitor compliance and progress. But, when your organisation's knowledge is stored in several different places, and there is no easy way to monitor their onboarding progress, the process becomes ineffective, and the onboarding experience is not great for them or you.
Problems maintaining business continuity when employees leave and information is only in their head
Imagine one of your most valuable and experienced team members leaving the business and taking their critical knowledge with them. Perhaps you do not need to imagine it because you have already experienced it. When employees hold the essential knowledge, processes and experience of your organisation in their head, most chances are that you will lose it when they leave or retire. Without capturing key business knowledge from your team, you risk having major business continuity issues and face knowledge shortages when they leave the business.
People make poor decisions as they cannot quickly find the latest information and guidance.
As a business operations leader, you need to make decisions daily, from assessing which processes to implement and procuring technology solutions to budgeting. But, with the information spread across several different systems, you cannot find the knowledge and guidance you need quickly, which makes decision-making very slow and inefficient. In some cases, you may never find the data you require as it is buried somewhere or it is just in the head of an ex-team member. You risk making poor decisions that can seriously impact the business and your position.
So, what can be done to address these common challenges business operations leaders face? The answer is to invest in a robust and centralised knowledge management system. A knowledge management system will help you map your data and information, understand what information is being stored and where, who is responsible for maintaining the knowledge, and who needs access to it. It will also help you identify the issues preventing you from using your organisation
How we can help
- Map your data and information: We can help you understand what information is being stored and where; who is responsible for maintaining the knowledge, and who needs access to it. We will then identify what works well with the current approach and what needs improvement and create a knowledge management strategy built around your needs.
- Restructure the knowledge in your organisation: We can help you identify the issues preventing you from using the organisation's knowledge effectively and efficiently. We will then restructure the knowledge base to improve its reliability and performance. This involves categorising information, determining ownership and access, finding the best place to store the knowledge and shutting down systems that are not essential to your knowledge management, saving you from unnecessary costs.
- Centralise your knowledge with Calls9 Nucleus: Our knowledge management combines content and information from all your company's disparate systems. It empowers you to create, manage and publish essential information quickly and easily and generate key documentation on demand. Using it, you ensure everyone has access to precisely what they need to know and receive personalised push notifications when new content is added. At the same time, you can access insights on content engagement.
