Writing good assessment questions is crucial for being able to manage your organization’s knowledge base. If your questions are poorly written, you won’t be able to collect accurate information. Hence, here’s how to write good assessment questions.

#1 Align the Questions with the Objectives

The first thing you should do is align the questions with the objectives. Think about the aims you are pursuing with the questionnaire. If these assessment questions are part of something much bigger, you need to keep in mind the bigger picture and adjust your questions according to it.

#2 Use the Right Questions Types

The next thing you need to do is use the right question types. Depending on the information you want to get, you will need to be using the right question types to get this information. For example, if you need a longer answer or have too many options to list, make the question open-ended so that the person can reply to it with the right information on their own. At the same time, some questions work better as multiple-choice rather than open-ended.

#3 Keep Answer Options Around the Same Length

Though it’s important to mind your questions, you should also think about the answers you provide, especially in multiple-choice questions. As Elizabeth Jones from the custom writing reviews site Online Writers Rating says, “Make sure that your answers are all around the same length. This will make them equally possible for the respondents and won’t make your respondents lean to longer (or shorter) answers rather than choosing the right ones instead.”

#4 Avoid Using Your Biases When Making Questions

One issue that many knowledge managers encounter when making assessment questions is that they intentionally or unintentionally start using their biases. This leads to the questions being increasingly inaccurate or inherently biased which makes the answers flawed as well. This is why you must avoid using your biases when making questions at all cost. After all, you don’t want to have questions that won’t do you any good during the assessment.

#5 Don’t Ask Unrealistic Questions or Use Unrealistic Situations

Another issue you may encounter when creating the questions is that you will start asking unrealistic questions or using unrealistic situations either consciously or unconsciously. Always ask yourself whether what you are talking about makes sense and is relevant to the assessment and the objectives. If it isn’t, then you probably shouldn’t be asking the question you want to include.

#6 Be as Clear and as Precise as Possible

An obvious thing you should do when creating your assessment questions is be as clear and as precise as possible. As William Atkins from the writing services reviews site Best Writers Online notes, “You should always use terms that won’t confuse your respondents. Don’t use complex or rarely used phrases and tend to stick to words that don’t have multiple meanings. You absolutely need to be clear with what you mean.”

#7 Keep the Tone Consistent Throughout the Questions

To make your entire questionnaire or survey feel uniform, you need to keep the tone consistent throughout the questions. Instead of being friendly and fun in one part and serious and professional in another, stick to a single approach and make sure that your respondents are immersed into the survey with the help of the tone you are using.

#8 Check Spelling and Grammatical Errors

Once all of your assessment questions are complete, the best thing you can do is check their spelling and grammatical errors (if there are any). This will ensure that your questionnaire is fully ready to be presented to the respondents and shouldn’t be reworked, edited, or rewritten again (i.e. you have the final version ready).

#9 Have Someone Else Check the Questions

That being said, before you can consider your assessment questions their final version, you need to have someone else check the questions too and see if they understand everything or notice any errors. This will ensure that you aren’t missing anything important which can happen when you are reading the text over and over again.

Final Thoughts

All in all, writing good assessment questions may take some time, but you will definitely succeed with the task once you practice a little. Use the tips in this article to perfect your writing skills and start creating better assessment questions.

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Initiating effective knowledge management in your organization often seems like a timely and complex procedure, but done right it can lead to powerful efficiency across all departments. However, this process often requires the confrontation of a number of significant challenges and there are common pitfalls that can ensure a project. Here are 5 mistakes that can cost your organization significantly when implementing knowledge management - awareness will enable you to prevent falling into these traps.

1) Doing Too Much At Once

When you’re taking on knowledge management in your organization it’s natural to shoot for the stars. You want to optimize every aspect of knowledge management to achieve the best possible outcomes for your business. However, by taking on too much you’ll often undermine your core goals, leading to worse outcomes overall.

There are a number of risks entailed in taking on too much when you approach knowledge management. A protracted process of knowledge management implementation risks alienating key stakeholders from your aims, and sometimes a quick victory with measurable outcomes builds momentum. When you set off on your knowledge management journey, phase your strategy with short term goals and realistic aims for the beginning period.

2) Failing To Identify Measurable Goals

Knowledge management, when it’s implemented effectively, provides your organization with strategic insights and solutions that are targeted to certain problems. It is not, as some understand it, a productive background operation, but a highly specific process. When you begin to implement knowledge management in your institution, it needs to be accompanied by specific goals to have an impact.

“Choosing the right goals for knowledge management should be the first step, along with identifying the key metrics that will enable you to track these goals,” says Steven Frost, a KM expert at PaperFellows and OXEssays. “Whether you’re trying to decrease the handling time of clients or improve compliance across the board, targeting and tracking goals will lead to better outcomes.”

3) Forgetting About End Users

When it comes to implementing a new technology across the hierarchies of your organization, and especially when that technology is built around the complexities of knowledge management, it’s easy for architects of these systems to get caught up in the details. However, once implemented, your knowledge management system will be living and breathing through the end users, so ensuring that this practice guides your design is key to a successful system.

Throughout the process, pause at regular intervals to identify the pain points of your end users and proactively address these issues. Even small concerns of end users can snowball if they’re left unresolved, leading to significant inefficiencies as an end result.

4) Enforcing A One Size Fits All Approach

Successfully implementing knowledge management across your business requires building a system of access that works for all employees, regardless of their background, skills and styles. Building a functional system that doesn’t assume one was of thinking makes knowledge accessible to your whole organization, democratizing information and optimizing workflow.

To this end, knowledge should be available in a number of ways. Search terms should work both with specialized keywords and natural language and knowledge hierarchies should be built to be multifaceted, allowing access from a variety of directions. Building a range of paths to knowledge allows it to be distributed effectively and doesn’t presume one approach to accessing information.

5) Ignoring Feedback

“Any knowledge management infrastructure needs to find a way of collecting, incorporating and actioning feedback,” says Mona Hodge, a writer at State Of Writing and Essay Writer. “Feedback is itself a form of knowledge and it’s vital that as your organization starts producing knowledge that your users feel heard and recognized.”

Enable qualitative feedback to be issued from end users to article owners within your knowledge management infrastructure as well as identifying space for quantitative surveys of user experience. As these feed into the knowledge management system you’ll ultimately create an effective platform for all the users across your organization.

Signing Off

Knowledge management is a complex problem for organizations and there are a number of pitfalls that can doom a knowledge management project. However, by improving access to knowledge across your organization you can increase performance in every department. By avoiding these costly mistakes you’ll find a new level of efficiency within your business, and strive towards greater profits.
 

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Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to work better leading to a well-informed, efficient, and innovative workforce. Let's see below how it leads to cost savings for any organization.

• Connecting people to people via the medium of Knowledge Management (KM) communities or knowledge-sharing platforms provide them with a streamlined channel to capture, store and share knowledge leading to increased efficiency and decreased response time.
• With a KM framework in places, people are well versed with best practices followed by employees from other teams working on similar projects leading to a decrease in errors and an increase in quality of work output.
• A higher degree of employee accountability is created when knowledge is easily shared and accessed via various KM channels and tools like communities, knowledge repositories and discussion forums.
• With increased focus on KM employees get a chance to connect with global peers to share and learn from each other leading to Innovation and creation of new products and efficient ways to perform services.
• Client satisfaction is a vital component of sales & delivery for any organization. By having easy access to the knowledge sources, you need to perform your job efficiently, you shorten the sales cycle.

Well, these are reasons enough to start putting together a KM framework for your organization if not already in place. And coming up in the next article is how to capture knowledge and make it available for value creation via various KM channels.

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Files, memos, manuals, guidelines, onboarding lists, CRM data...

Businesses operate a vast amount of knowledge to survive and thrive in a competitive environment. If properly harnessed, knowledge can boost the productivity of entire companies.

That’s why companies are investing in knowledge management systems – the tools that make it easier to share, access, and update information and knowledge within an organization.

In this post, we’ll talk about how these five knowledge management examples can boost organizational productivity:

• Document management systems
• Cross-training programs
• Content management systems (CMS)
• Chatbots
• Social networking tools.

Let’s begin.

1. Document Management Systems and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Organize and promote the use of systems like Google Docs and Notion

These days, every company uses document management systems like Google Docs or Notion. People create presentations, spreadsheets, guidelines, and text documents to share information within a company and store valuable knowledge.

Google Docs, in particular, is super popular.

It’s easy, simple, and free - anyone can use the suite to create documents, share them, control access permissions, and download files. With this document management system, a company can store information in one place, safely, and access it at any time.

Another advantage is that Google Docs’s cloud-based system reduces the need for a centralized organizational data repository and allows collaboration. These features help employees to be productive and achieve more, faster.

One more popular option is Notion. Companies use this system as a go-to source for company information like policies, marketing strategies, HR information, employment terms, and many other useful data.

2. Cross-Training Programs and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Improve employee skills by implementing cross-training programs and initiatives

Every company has training and onboarding programs to allow new employees to gain knowledge by working with experienced employees. Cross-training programs, on the other hand, are for employees to expand their skill set.

In the hotel industry, for example, employees learn how to work different jobs in a hotel or restaurant. Someone working at the reception can explore new roles for delivering service to guests, both online and offline.

The positive effect on productivity can be significant. Employees who participate in training expand their skill sets and can serve customers better. That’s why cross-training is an effective knowledge management approach to increase employee productivity.

Executives value the importance of cross-training as a way to improve employee productivity and interconnected operations.

“While it’s natural for all of our team members to have areas of focus....  all of the pieces of an operation are connected—which makes cross-training critical,” Hotel Business magazine quoted Kevin Lillis, the CEO of Hospitality Alliance, as saying.

3. Content Management Systems (CMS) and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Promote and lead the use of CMS/prepare customer knowledge base for sharing

Companies use CMSs like WordPress to manage, store, and monitor content projects from beginning to publication. They make it easier for marketing teams to collaborate on and track the performance of content projects.

Why is that important?

Content marketing is a cost-effective way for online businesses to connect with customers and promote their products and services. More than 91 percent of companies use content to achieve their marketing goals – and they need to track a wide range of KPIs.

That’s where CMS comes in.

This tool helps to:

• Manage website content
• Create, store, and publish blog content
• Manage product pages and landing pages
• Increase a site’s visibility on Google
• Keep websites secure with built-in plugins
• Collaborate on content marketing projects in one place
• Analyze the performance of content.

A CMS is essentially a database of content-related information and knowledge that a business possesses. Thanks to the tool, businesses can organize their content marketing effort, monitor their performance, and be more productive.

4. Chatbots and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Promote conversational knowledge sharing via chatbots with employees and customers

A chatbot is an app that simulates a conversation with a human online. When a user asks a chatbot a question, it uses algorithms or pre-determined answers to provide a reply in seconds.

Knowledge managers recognize that chatbots are an innovative way to collect, store, and share information with both employees and customers. Here’s how they can help.

Businesses create chatbots to automate internal knowledge sharing by:

• Sharing information about the company policies and procedures with employees
• Answering the most common onboarding and questions.

Using chatbots for marketing purposes is also becoming common.

Website chatbots perform customer surveys, share lead magnets, generate information for a marketing research paper or report, answer customer support questions, and connect visitors with service agents.

As with many other innovative knowledge management initiatives, managers need to secure buy-in from company leaders to start developing chatbots. That’s why they need effective communication tools to promote new projects to any stakeholder.

5. Social Networking Tools and Productivity

Knowledge manager role: Facilitate the use of social networking tools and manage shared knowledge bases

Almost every company today uses a private social networking tool like Slack. Certified knowledge managers are among those promoting and managing this innovation.

The most important benefit of networking tools for productivity is the fact that they bring people, technologies, and processes together. An organization becomes an interconnected community where any piece of information or knowledge can be shared in seconds.

The role of communities in knowledge management is profound. Not only collaboration and information sharing become easier, but knowledge storage, too. Since private social networking tools store all historical conversations, anyone in the company can access previously shared files or conversations.

Knowledge Management and Company Productivity: Summary

The role of knowledge managers in promoting and maintaining high performance standards is significant. By using these five approaches, for example, they enable cooperation and increase engagement within an organization – a must for effective knowledge sharing, innovation, and digital transformation.

Throughout the process, the managers also play a deciding role in ensuring that knowledge management is tailored to employees’ needs and challenges. The success of this project means increased collaboration and engagement, which ultimately leads to higher overall productivity.

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