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Learn effective technologically driven knowledge management solutions you can utilize.
Can you imagine a world where it's impossible to pass knowledge down from generation to generation? Now, picture that cluelessness in the workplace.
Knowledge is the most significant fuel for innovation.
In the business world, the ease of obtaining, storing, and communicating knowledge has become a critical determinant of organizations’ longevity. Knowledge management and transfer in the workplace are necessary for an organization to remain relevant and profitable.
Greater employee engagement and retention are also some of the motivations for successful companies to incorporate the principle of knowledge transfer into every aspect of workflow.
In essence, an effective knowledge transfer process can uncover employees' hidden talents and fully unleash the immense possibilities inherent in a robust, versatile workforce. Knowledge transfer also spurs skill-building and improvement among employees.
This article will explore the key roles knowledge transfer plays in an organization. We’ll also highlight practical knowledge transfer methods and the factors influencing knowledge sharing.
Knowledge transfer in the workplace is the conscious act of employees within an organization to exchange information, skills, expertise, experience, and resources to enhance the organization’s overall outcomes and results.
It involves sharing relevant problem-solving strategies with colleagues to help resolve work-related issues appropriately. Knowledge transfer ensures the preservation of the three basic knowledge types that define business growth.
Effective knowledge transfer is critical to ensuring the smooth running of a company’s operations. In fact, an organization's shared knowledge base is a valuable asset that distinguishes it from the competition.
According to a recent report by Deloitte, approximately 75% of the companies surveyed identified the creation and preservation of knowledge as key factors responsible for their success. The inability to instill knowledge transfer best practices in an organization bears heavy consequences.
A productive knowledge-sharing process thrives on the dedication of all stakeholders involved. It’s a conscious, consistent, and concerted effort to maximize the potential of an organization's immense wealth of information. As such, you should have a result-oriented knowledge transfer plan in place.
The importance of knowledge transfer in an organization can’t be overemphasized. It offers significant benefits to an organization’s overall productivity. As such, every effort made towards achieving efficient knowledge transfer is worthwhile.
The fundamental essence of internal knowledge transfer is ensuring the onward passage of important information from one team or employee to another.
Depending on the workforce's size, companies incur productivity losses ranging from $2.7 million to $265 million due to inefficient knowledge-sharing practices.
So, the main aim is to save costs and guarantee the retention and preservation of an organization's indispensable know-how. Knowledge transfer in the workplace serves the following purpose:
Knowledge transfer is a safeguard against intellectual scarcity in an organization. Having employees share expertise and experience within the company is a fast way to preserve the organization’s collective knowledge.
It guarantees the organization a steady supply of competent, reliable, skilled, and informed employees. This ensures the company can continue running smoothly despite leadership changes, unforeseen crises, and employee exit or leave.
Essentially, knowledge transfer in the workplace aids an organization's succession plans by equipping potential company leaders with the critical skills and information needed to ease their transition into leadership positions.
Knowledge sharing stimulates and boosts an organization’s innovation potential. A KT session encourages employees to utilize existing knowledge resources to generate new groundbreaking ideas. It serves as a meeting point for diverse perspectives, resulting in novel creative solutions.
Knowledge transfer provides a company’s workforce with many insightful problem-solving approaches to addressing challenges. It also enables employees to build on previous successes; this speeds up the innovation process and lessens the duration of product development and marketing.
Also, knowledge sharing fosters continuous learning and ensures that only the best practices are passed down.
Fostering knowledge sharing for business growth. Efficient knowledge exchange enables an organization to perform better than its competitors because it helps a company stay in touch with customer preferences and industry demands.
Awareness of the latest market trends, emerging technologies, and best practices is necessary in today's dynamic business world. For instance, sharing information about current market trends helps an organization spot new opportunities for growth and expansion.
Also, companies can use client feedback to improve product and service delivery, allowing satisfied customers to refer others to your organization, further enhancing competitiveness.
Knowledge sharing significantly streamlines organizational decision-making processes by providing employees access to relevant and critical resources.
Moreover, a broader internal knowledge base reduces feelings of uncertainty when making decisions. In a fast-paced business sector, timely and appropriate responses are the gold standard.
Also, knowledge transfer in a workplace reduces unnecessary decision-making time by facilitating interdepartmental collaboration and deliberation, ensuring proper resource allocation.
Knowledge sharing in the workplace is necessary to identify risks quickly. It is also crucial to adequately evaluate and mitigate risks.
This is because cross-knowledge transfer allows employees to share experiences and expertise on potential risks that characterize key aspects of workflow. This provides a company’s workforce with the necessary information to identify and assess risks accurately and lay a good foundation for executing risk management strategies.
Organizations can disseminate ideas, insights, and information via different means. The choice of transfer method primarily depends on the nature of the knowledge.
Different knowledge-sharing methods include:
This is by far the oldest method of knowledge transfer in the corporate world. It’s an active knowledge transfer process where a more experienced employee shows the ropes of skills and expertise to a less experienced employee.
Most successful companies pair top management staff with upcoming company talents to enhance the rapid transfer and preservation of internal knowledge. The mentees usually learn by focused observations, asking relevant questions, and receiving supervision.
This implies formal training programs organized with the sole aim of information exchange and capacity building. Ideally, these structured programs dispense specific skills to specific teams within the organization. They can either be conducted in person or online. Engaging internal and external experts as moderators for each training session for productive outcomes is good practice.
Collaboration is one of the surest ways to facilitate internal knowledge transfer. When employees work together across different teams to execute a project, they almost always have to exchange resources. It could occur during routine check-ins, brainstorming sessions, or informal conversations. This is also a major benefit of incorporating a collaborative workplace culture.
This method of knowledge transfer prioritizes learning by experience. It employs a practical approach, making it more appealing to organizations that rely heavily on a skilled workforce. Here, employees gain knowledge and experience via hands-on work under the guidance of skilled superiors.
Additionally, they can apply new skills learned directly to their daily job tasks, helping to reinforce and expedite the knowledge transfer process.
These are software solutions that support electronic learning (e-learning).
Most online learning platforms support self-paced learning and skill acquisition by providing users with informative, up-to-date content in different learning formats.
Examples include written lectures, video tutorials, and quizzes, and they also offer ways for employees to track and monitor their learning progress.
Communities of practice are groups of individuals with similar interests and expertise within an organization. They help facilitate better knowledge exchange in various established fields, including software development, product development, marketing, and cybersecurity.
Members learn from these interactions, which usually occur in an informal setting. For instance, a company's front-end engineers can create a discussion forum to discuss debugging complex syntax errors.
These groups effectively serve as innovation hubs, helping to maintain a constant flow of fresh, creative ideas within a company. They also help to advance the professional development of individual members, serving as the building blocks of cross-functional workplace collaborations.
A knowledge management system significantly enhances knowledge sharing in an organization. It is a dedicated IT infrastructure chiefly responsible for curating, storing, retrieving, and maintaining the organization's intellectual assets.
Additionally, it provides a reliable means for employees to share information with their colleagues, acquaint themselves with current industry standards, receive focused training, track learning milestones, and obtain feedback.
Resources on knowledge management systems include databases, information repositories, best practices, relevant employees’ experiences, and training modules.
Assembly is a KMS structured to restrict accessibility to only authorized users. It also contains collaborative tools and analytics to monitor KMS usage. Try it today.
The outcomes of a knowledge transfer (KT) process depend on several factors. They include:
KT produces positive outcomes when the information is applicable and relevant in addressing the needs of both the recipient and the organization.
Naturally, we only disclose important information to people we trust. Quality knowledge exchange in an organization requires implementing policies that promote positive working relationships among employees.
Senior HR personnel need to ensure that employees see knowledge sharing as a win-win situation. They should also understand that information hoarding negatively impacts their professional growth and the organization's overall productivity.
Building a knowledge-sharing culture within an organization should go beyond just encouraging people to share knowledge. It should reward employees who frequently turn in insightful ideas, complete training modules, and obtain additional professional certifications.
Assembly offers a host of reward options to choose from!
More often than we realize, nothing is more motivating than seeing a superior walking their talk. Employees tend to be encouraged to do more when their superiors are involved.
When top management staff share their wealth of experience and expertise with employees, knowledge transfer within different departments flows faster.
Thankfully, collaboration tools and digital repositories have completely changed the outlook of knowledge transfer within large teams. The type of knowledge-sharing tool an organization uses determines the ease of resource generation, retrieval, storage, and management.
It’s important to note that employees need to know how to use the tool an organization intends to use. The orientation or training could be during onboarding sessions, team check-ins, or product launches.
Technological advancements in communication, connectivity, and security advancements have helped redefine workplace knowledge sharing. One key revolutionary change is the possible speed of information access due to the characteristic high search functionality of these knowledge management tools.
A digitalized knowledge repository offers the benefits of:
Also, virtual collaboration tools, which are an integral component of knowledge-sharing, are beneficial in the following aspects:
The benefits of knowledge transfer in an organization are indispensable. Knowledge sharing is the secret to thriving in business despite intense competition and changing industry trends. It's crucial for avoiding bad workflow decisions and poor business practices.
Leveraging technology for knowledge transfer can help achieve the desired maximum impact. By efficiently channeling the immense possibilities of communication, collaboration, and learning platforms, the sky is the limit. You can:
Assembly is user-friendly knowledge management and transfer software, making it easier for employees to navigate the array of well-indexed knowledge entries, promoting quick retrieval.
Get the foundational knowledge on creating an employee recognition program that boosts employee engagement and helps them feel valued.
Explore GuideYes, at Assembly, security is a top priority. Each quarter, we have ongoing security work that is everyone’s responsibility. While we maintain a strong security posture, it was important for us to prove to our customers that we do everything we claim to do. This led us to pursue a SOC 2 Type II report that would provide evidence of our compliance with industry gold-standard security practice.
There is study after study showing that employee recognition leads to increased engagement. This in return creates an environment where employees are happier and more motivated which increase productivity and reduces voluntary turnover significantly. In order to filled critical roles, companies tend to spend nearly twice the value of an annual salary. Assembly is an investment in your employees that supports your bottom line.
Yes, we will offer contracts for companies with longer-term agreements to help larger customers have more certainty around future costs.
The minimum agreement term is a 12-month subscription.
We do and for FREE! Any new customer needing further support to get started with Assembly to ensure you're set up for success can request custom onboarding support. Improving your employee experience is about much more than just using our amazing software; it’s about transforming your business to create a workplace that people love. That’s much easier to do with the personal support and advice from our passionate people experts.
Yes. We offer a completely free plan for up to 50 team members. This plan is intended for teams or organizations that are looking to get started with an employee engagement tool. Keep in mind, this plan is limited in features.
All customers can open an Assembly account for free and get started without a credit card. Then you can change plans as necessary.
At the time of redemption (when your employees exchange their points for a paid reward) you'll pay face value. If a reward is a $10 Amazon gift card, your cost will be $10. All paid rewards are billed for on a monthly basis.
The good news is that you don't have to pay for rewards upfront because we only charge you when points are redeemed, not when they're earned.
We offer discounts or educational or charitable organizations. In order to secure a discount, you'll first need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
For all other organizations, we are willing to consider longer-term agreements in exchange for discounts. To set up annual plans or longer, you will need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a month to month plan, you can go here and cancel anytime. If you're having concerns or need help setting up your account for success, you can always book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a longer-term custom plan, you'll need to reach out to your customer support specialist to cancel your account or email us at support@joinassembly.com.
Great question! You can customize your core values to match your organization's to boost and track alignment. You can change your currency from the 🏆 emoji (our default) to any emoji of your choice. You can swap our logo for your own. You can also set up company culture rewards such as, "Lunch with the CEO," "Buy a book on us," and so much more!
While we recommend a peer to peer set up where anyone in your organization can give or receive recognition, you can set up Assembly however you want. If you need to limit the people who can give or receive recognition, that's perfectly fine and can be done from your Admin, here.
Assembly connects to the tools your employees use every day to offer an easy, seamless experience with minimal change management.
Assembly has integrations with HCM/HRIS systems like ADP, Google, Office 365, and Slack. We also integrate with communication tools like Slack and Teams so you and your employees can access Assembly wherever they work now.
That depends on the company's permissions set up. That said, over 90% of the employees on Assembly's platform are recognized on a monthly basis. That means nearly every employee across all of our customers are receiving regular recognition from their peers, managers, or leadership. We're extremely proud of this.
They are not required. You can use Assembly without having rewards set up. However, we don't recommend it if you intend to have a high adoption and usage rate. You can always keep the costs down by offering internal culture rewards that are fulfilled by you internally.
No, you can remove allowances from anyone or everyone. It's up to you but we do recommend using points whether they're worth a real dollar value or not. Companies that use points have a much higher engagement rate even if those points don't exchange for real dollars.
Please schedule time with an expert and we will help you to get all your questions answered