Knowledge management is often misunderstood

The true potential of knowledge management often remains misunderstood. It's not just about boring paperwork, plain documentation or following some rules; it's the lifeblood that keeps a company ticking, helping it come up with sustainable value creation and growth.

Knowledge management is often confined to a single team, typically HR or Operations, leaving other teams feeling disempowered or less responsible for ensuring knowledge is in good working order. However, if we stick to this partial vision, we miss out on the chance to use the large scope of knowledge management to spark creativity and reach effectiveness. To truly benefit from the power of knowledge, companies must embed this strategic asset in every part of the organization.

Sticking to a partial vision of knowledge management causes harm

Some businesses don’t implement knowledge management at all. It can quickly become chaotic: unprepared onboarding delaying employees’ impact; inconsistant processes leading to errors and loss of time; useless meetings lacking agenda and minutes. At the end of the day, those details add up and take a toll on business’ value creation and growth.

When businesses do implement knowledge management but with a limited or simplistic approach, they still face some problems.

Take, for instance, the onboarding of new employees. Typically, onboarding involves a checklist of administrative tasks and outdated, generic documentation, lacking personalization. New hires are also often left alone, or solely guided by their direct managers — who are usually not trained for that. This simplistic onboarding process may create the illusion of a proper welcome, but it falls short in offering adequate business and cultural context, hindering the new hires' ability to make a swift and relevant impact. In short, insufficient onboarding may cause bad employee experience and poor talent retention.

Work culture is a framework

Addressing these problems is a hardship. We’ve seen many businesses trying to build knowledge management by adopting a new tool set (eg. going from Trello to Notion) or by reordering their knowledge base architecture. Even if those initiatives are interesting and necessary, spoiler alert: it won’t make things move forward. Pushing collaborators to document their knowledge, their work, won’t be enough. Asking employees to collaborate in a better way won’t be enough. Preparing a perfect knowledge base architecture won’t be enough. Having someone teaching employees how Notion works won’t be enough.

Uh oh. “What is the right thing to do, then?” one may legitimately ask.

Our answer is: company culture. What experience taught us is that such goodhearted initiatives will only be fruitful if deeply rooted within the company culture. That means:

• to initiate a strong documentation dynamic → encourage and show a culture of transparency

• to improve knowledge tools’ use → advocate for a culture of distributed ownership

• to empower employees to collaborate better → nurture a culture of autonomy through self-learning and self-initiative.

Transform your knowledge potential into an actionable asset

You sit on a treasure trove of knowledge. Transparency, ownership and autonomy are, to us, this treasure’s revelation factors. Through adapting your company’s culture, our comprehensive knowledge management aims at transforming your hidden powers into powerful moves.

Our goal is not to help you simplistically manage your knowledge. Our goal is to help teams and individuals drive their company’s sustained value creation and growth, and by the same token find meaningfulness in their work.