Users want to find the closest match of ready to consume content that is trustworthy and most importantly something that fills the wireframe that they have put together through their own research. With the rise of the digital age and advancement in technology, users are made aware of Content Relevancy - a key metric to consume content. Users are therefore expecting High-Value Content to be delivered at their fingertips, and here is where the folly lies as most organizations charter KM teams to meet this expectation.

Take for example an IT company which has many employees, some are new entrants into the workforce, others lateral experienced hires, managers, group managers, vice presidents / business heads and so forth. If you now see clearly you are not talking about creating content for an abstract audience, but a well-defined persona of users who rate the content based on how easy is it to consume to enable them to become successful. 

Hence, it’s important we familiarize ourselves with the process of Content Curation, which is defined as Collecting, Organizing, Selecting, Packaging and Promoting the best content that is tailored for an audience (users).  So what are some of those practices that can help us develop better collections addressed towards these personas of users?

Identify trigger points to deliver content to the group

Once we have zeroed down on a user group we need to ensure we are aware of pushing the content to them and enabling them through this medium to get hooked on to accessing our content and pulling them closer to becoming brand ambassadors of our content. Hence it’s important we focus understanding their unmet needs that should be addressed through our content.

Creating Fresh Content  V/s Curate the Content

As a Knowledge worker you come across leaders, champions and a host of networks. Its important you follow some of their best work whether it a thought paper, research article, knowledge nugget, webinars or other credible content. Take for example a newsletter weekly edition every good curator has a weekly planner of how he wants to schedule this content and while the supporting pieces can be curated from various sources it helps to manage the central piece and create fresh content so the story progresses with each new edition.  I guess we all are familiar with the Pareto Principle where it’s your 20% fresh content that delivers 80% of the hits.

Don’t limit yourself as the only Brand Ambassador of your Content

Content is no good if it cannot be marketed. And many a time as KMers we forget that it’s not just our job to make sure our best content gets delivered out there. So how do we ensure we identify which content can be marketed by our leaders, peers and gets noticed. It’s important to have a watch on the competition yes as many marketers are in need of content and pretty much are the brand ambassadors that Knowledge Managers should credit for ensuring higher touchpoints of the content we curate. Yes, making our knowledge systems accessible through blog posts, webinars and the likes ensures some of our experts get noticed by marketers and their content gets externally published making our work shine.  So don’t limit yourself to only managing your content strategy alone. Like they say don’t lose the trees for the forest always have an eye on the bigger picture and how your content is credit worthy to other communities.

Sharing credit can make you 'content searchable'

There is a plethora of good content out there and many times although we design our content well in advance and define the sources to gather them from we notice that the piece has already got posted most often by the author. So how does this handicap our content delivery process does it make our viewers lose interest even before we want them to find the content? What could be the solution? Well it’s important to ensure we reward our contributors before others do and publish them in our hall of fame ensuring they feel valued with providing us a steady stream of content that is well researched, timely and ensures they reach us as a first choice.

CTRL-R Managing your Content and keeping it up-to-date

The same old problem of governance where Knowledge Managers are chartered with archiving content that is dated a year back. We see less viewership and no this signals lesser number of hits and hence call for action to archive the content by triggering a few reminders. What instead if we take the same piece and work on it adding a few relevant links, headlines re-packaging it and sharing it with the author for the final proof read? There is a high chance it goes to the leaders and they take notice and on publishing the content post it on their private handle or tweet it highlighting their POV for an industry topic that they follow.  This could be the silver bullet and differentiates good curators. Content Curation is as much about the presentation of good content and sometimes enabling our audience with re-packaging their content ensures we develop better collections that are up-t0-date based on our own expertise managing topic based content over time.

Invest time to discover new content and be bold to critique it

CoPs are a great place to notice someone’s point of view and credit them. As a Community Manager we are also chartered with ensuring we respond to every post and at times critics play a big role in leading us to the right content. It’s important to not play silent spectator at all times and sometimes engage in a interaction to challenge a viewpoint as it helps us to learn more about the SME and in-time develop some of their content to build on our existing collection.

In-Summary

In this digital world where content relevance is measured by how practical, credit worthy and ready content is to be consumed it’s important we ensure we understand the importance of curation. While we are designing our content strategy it’s also important we are open to understanding our user persona’s and investing in defining the right trigger points to deliver high-value content to them. As Knowledge Managers it’s also our call to action to hone our content writing skills and contribute to enriching existing content through our deep industry research skills and ensure we expand our network of content creators crediting them. Over time we are all called to play critic and engage and identify SME’s some of whom we can co-partner with to sustain our collections of content and invest our time in becoming experts in our own industry or topics a curators.

Knowledge management is important for any kind of business or company because it helps organizations utilize their collective knowledge more effectively. By managing knowledge correctly, organizations can achieve better results in almost any aspect of their work.

But proper knowledge management is more than just capturing and storing information. To be able to use your organization’s information effectively, you need to use technical writing to manage it in the first place. Hence, here’s the importance of technical writing in knowledge management.

#1 Create High-Quality Documentation

First and foremost, technical writing is necessary for keeping your documentation in check. Technical writing is the type of writing used for all kinds of documents and policies, so you can create high-quality documentation without it.

Knowledge management will require you to create such documentation. These can be documents for internal use (e.g. communication policy) as well as user-oriented documents (e.g. product tutorials). All of them require thorough research and careful organization of information which is only possible with technical writing.

#2 Find Gaps in Internal Data

The goal of knowledge management is to organize a company’s information for further use. However, critical information or data can often be missing – and that’s when you will need to use technical writing to help you fill in the gaps.

Because technical writing generally requires a lot of research, it will be valuable for identifying gaps in your knowledge base and filling them in with relevant data and information. This kind of gap-filling is necessary for maintaining your knowledge base in a good state at all times.

#3 Distribute Knowledge Effectively

Knowledge management is not just about storing information, but also about distributing it to the right audience. Whether you want to distribute it internally among your employees or distribute it to your external audience, you will need to be able to do it effectively.

Technical writing can help you present information in a particular way. You can hire a technical writer who will create the texts for you. Then, you can add infographics and other forms of data visualization to the texts to present the information in a more dynamic way.

#4 Organize Business Processes

The way your company is organized can significantly impact the way it operates. As a result, you could be lagging behind in terms of performance compared to your competitors. But if you organize your company well, it will be easier to achieve the goals you set consistently.

Technical writing and knowledge management are essential for such business process organization. All the documentation you keep will help you ensure consistency across all your activities. And if there are any mistakes or failures, it will be easier to check where things went wrong and how you can improve.

#5 Present Information Dynamically

As mentioned earlier, you could use infographics and other types of data visualization alongside your texts for knowledge management. This way, the information you present can be understood easier by the intended audience.

Dynamic presentation of information is critical for its comprehensiveness. If the reader doesn’t understand what the text is about, they won’t be able to use the knowledge. And because you could have a lot of technical information in your knowledge base, there will be people who will definitely benefit from data visualization.

#6 Train Employees Successfully

Employee training is always difficult for companies to set up and streamline, especially if you just started putting together your team or you have a high turnover rate. Luckily, proper knowledge management will help you with employee training too.

By utilizing technical writing for your knowledge management, you can describe processes in great detail and explain even complex processes in a straightforward way. Hire an experienced writer from the writing agency TopEssayWriting who will help you prepare your employee training program and then create training materials together.

#7 Improve Productivity

This point is directly related to the previous one. Employees who are well-trained are able to perform their responsibilities correctly and even become more productive over time. Moreover, by documenting all these practices, old employees can pass on their knowledge to new employees who join your company.

The more practice your employees get by following the steps of a specific activity closely, the more they will improve their skills. This way, they can eventually perform this activity faster while maintaining high quality.

#8 Reduce Company Expenses

By streamlining your processes through careful documentation, you can also reduce company expenses. Essentially, you will find the most efficient and productive methods and approaches that will help you significantly reduce your costs.

Every organization aims to reduce expenses, and once you are able to do that, you will have a bigger budget for other activities. For instance, by spending less on content creation, you will be able to allocate a bigger budget for customer support.

#9 Become More Efficient

Productivity goes hand in hand with efficiency – and both of them are also connected to cost-efficiency. By streamlining your processes and reducing your expenses, you will already become more efficient.

This can be applied to virtually any aspect of your organization. For instance, you can find a translation service to translate your employee training materials into multiple languages for training your representatives in different countries. You don’t need to create them from scratch.

#10 Upgrade Employee Skills

Lastly, utilizing technical writing for knowledge management will actually facilitate the upgrading of employee skills. This won’t happen directly but will rather be one of the outcomes of using technical writing in knowledge management.

To put it simply, your employees will need to develop their technical writing skills to be able to contribute to your knowledge base. As a result, they will have a bigger and more developed skillset that they will use in their work.

Final Thoughts

All in all, technical writing definitely plays a critical role in the way an organization manages its knowledge. By using technical writing, you can better organize and store all your knowledge as well as use it successfully for achieving a variety of goals.

Companies put new hires through a rigorous training process. However, the time and resource costs are substantial. Companies invest an average of $1,308 annually in the training of one employee. Therefore, it is crucial to concentrate on programmes that ease tension and make the onboarding process economical. 

Onboarding, however, usually takes more time than necessary. According to statistics, 58% of businesses acknowledge that the onboarding process they use is largely paper-based and convoluted. Here, choosing a knowledge management system would enable better distribution, storage, and preservation of all intellectual capital within an organization.

In the end, it ensures improved communication and knowledge transfer within the organization and better training procedures. You can gain access to a knowledge base that is secure and provides self-service with tools like knowledge management system.

Employee Onboarding: Why Should You Pay Attention to It?

It is essential for every business across all industries to hire staff and equip them with an accurate knowledge management system. According to statistics, businesses that concentrate on improving their onboarding procedure observe an increase in employee productivity of 70% and employee retention of 82%.

With the right initiatives, employees are more devoted to their employer in the workplace. When companies make early onboarding process improvements, they see higher employee satisfaction levels and better work quality.

You should realize that proper onboarding calls for more than just hiring new employees and providing them with job-specific training. Instead, brand-new workers need to learn more about the company. They ought to use the information they learn to perform better.

How are knowledge management (KM) and employee onboarding related?

A proper KM system coordinates the onboarding of new employees to offer advantages like:

• Standardized orientation for employees
• Worker role understanding is good
• Higher rates of employee retention
• Increased employee productivity
• Heightened interest from customers

Practices in a KM system make the employee onboarding process more functionally seamless. The impact on employee onboarding is as follows:

• Fast-paced training for new hires using a comprehensive knowledge base
• New hires can meet deadlines on time with the right information at hand.
• Assurance of superior work
• Proper task assignment and collaboration for faster task completion

The main ways that KM would affect employee onboarding are listed below:

1. For new hires, easy access to current company knowledge base 

The sources of information about their companies are unknown to new employees. It makes sense that they are having trouble finding the information quickly. Employees had to search through several sections in traditional onboarding processes to find a single piece of information. That takes a lot of time, though, which leaves new hires with less time to concentrate on other crucial elements.

As a result, it's crucial to introduce new hires to your KM platform at an early stage of the onboarding procedure and to ensure that they are aware of the information that is stored there and how to find it. Implementing a KM system will empower the employees to locate the information they need quickly whenever it is needed (without having to look for a subject matter expert or spend time searching through different files and folders).

Building a knowledge base can serve as a single location for all information so that new hires can quickly conduct data searches as needed. It provides a safe platform for sharing files and documents where you can keep all downloads and files and give your staff easy access to them.

2. Benefits from Self-Service

When brands include a knowledge management system in their onboarding programme, new hires can experience an independent working environment. They can look up information about the business, including tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge, with ease. 

Clean code customization

The information and codes on this platform are all clearly laid out and readable. For better categorization, filters are available. It makes systematic searching simpler for both new and seasoned employees.

Strong search engine 

This platform's centralized knowledge base comes with a top-notch search engine. The fast deep indexed details allow employees to quickly search for any information in the system and obtain it in a matter of seconds. Users can also easily find files without knowing their names thanks to the software.

3. Quick Onboarding

Companies must quickly induct new hires into the duties of the organization. They can begin the actual work more quickly in this way. As a result, in traditional onboarding programmes, existing employees spent a considerable amount of time educating new hires on company policies, customer information, arrangements, employee training tools, and partner names.

It has two negative effects on businesses. Older employees spend a large portion of their workdays training rather than performing their duties, whereas new hires take a long time to learn. Employees can easily access company processes, policies, cycles, and frameworks with the help of a well-structured knowledge base.

As a result, new hires can progress through their training programme more quickly, and senior employees can concentrate on increasing productivity. Implementing a knowledge management platform ensures better time management by lowering the overall stress of existing employees supporting new hires. Find out more about how a central knowledge base reduces the time needed for employee training.

Higher Productivity

Employees who are familiar with their roles are more likely to carry out their tasks successfully, and the onboarding process teaches new hires the best practices for doing so. If they have the necessary knowledge base. 

According to statistics, an effective onboarding procedure increases new hires' chances of staying with a company by 82%.

More effective teamwork

Early on, it's impossible for new hires to seamlessly integrate into teams and existing organizations. They typically have a way to communicate with coworkers and other professionals who are training them thanks to the onboarding programme.

Users can benefit from services like Knowledge Collaborations thanks to knowledge management system programmes. Here, everyone on the team and the creators of the content can communicate, exchange ideas, and pass messages cooperatively for complete social team participation.

Conclusion

If customers receive timely resolutions, the customer experience (CX) can be improved. Customers' questions are likely to be handled more effectively by trained staff. Better and more knowledgeable agents encourage brand loyalty. Additionally, the customer forms an impression of the business in their mind and develops a sense of trust for it. 

Employee onboarding benefits both customers and agents with the help of a knowledge management system.

A comprehensive knowledge management system can unlock new levels in your business. If you’re unfamiliar with knowledge management, it’s a system that helps you collect, store, organize, and share knowledge and information across your company.

That information includes human resources (HR) data. Collecting information about your employees and their lifecycle within your company can do wonders for maximizing productivity and engagement.

The way you create work schedules, in particular, can be much more effective with the help of a knowledge management platform.

Why Knowledge Management Is Critical for Creating Schedules

Flexible work schedules are growing in popularity. In fact, “when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it,” according to Mckinsey & Company.

But it’s much more complex to create flexible schedules than most realize, especially if the information you have about your employees is bare or inaccurate. A knowledge management platform helps you collect and organize the data you need to create flexible schedules more efficiently.

For example, long commutes can be harmful to an employee’s health. The unpredictability of commuting can be incredibly stressful and anxiety-provoking, resulting in unhealthy behaviors like grabbing fast food for breakfast to beat traffic or negative self-talk all the way to work.

You can document how long each employee’s commute is with knowledge management. And then, use this information to determine which employees should work from home or which can come in a little later to avoid long, stressful commutes.

Or, let’s say a few of your employees do their best work in the morning while others do their best work late at night. Making notes about this in your knowledge management system enables you to create schedules accommodating both types of employees.

With access to the most relevant employee information, you can make better-informed decisions about work schedules and inspire optimal productivity.

Data to Collect to Design Work Schedules for Optimal Productivity

To design work schedules for maximum productivity, you must use the information in your knowledge management system properly.

But first, it’s essential to collect accurate data about your employees that will help you understand each of their unique needs, strengths, and preferences. Start with the data below.

When your employees do their best work

Employees love flexible schedules because they can design them to fit according to their preferences and their lifestyle. Instead of forcing your employees to adhere to a schedule that doesn’t inspire their best work, you can design one that does. 

For example, let’s say one of your employees has insomnia and catches up on sleep during the day. Expecting them to come to work at 7 am with their best foot forward isn’t realistic. They’ll likely experience brain fog that disrupts their concentration, focus, and ability to perform.

If you ask them when they do their best work and their preferred hours, you’ll find out that they prefer to work at night and can do their best work then. Armed with that information, you can design a schedule that helps them avoid brain fog and produce high-quality work.

So, ask each employee their preferred work hours and when they think they do their best work and record it in your knowledge management platform.

Family obligations and outside responsibilities

Even though a good work-life balance has been proven to inspire engagement, enthusiasm, and dedication in one’s job, many employers neglect to ensure their employees can take advantage of it.

Optimal productivity is on the other side of ensuring your employees have a full life outside of work. Designing a schedule that accommodates this need is integral. You can do this by collecting information about your employee’s family obligations and outside responsibilities.

Makes notes about the following for each employee and consider them when creating schedules:

●      If an employee is married

●      If they go to school or have a second job

●      If they’re caring for a sick or disabled loved one

●      What are their outside interests and passions are

●      Whether an employee is pregnant or has children

You can collect this information in a variety of ways, but if your main focus is convenience, you can gather this information through knowledge management software.

Work duties

As much as you may want to offer your employees flexible scheduling options, it may not be possible after considering their position, accompanying responsibilities, and company needs.

Collect and continuously update information about each employee’s role and responsibilities in your knowledge management system. Also, make notes about organizational needs and what you need from an employee schedule-wise to accommodate them. The more information you collect, the more comprehensive you can be in your optimal working conditions plan.

How To Bring it All Together

How can you use the data above to design the best work schedules for your employees? Well, first, review everything that you’ve learned about your employees. Lay it out so that you can see how each person’s preferred schedule could potentially work together.

After that, start plugging in hours on your scheduling software. Make sure that all the hours you need to be covered are covered. Account for the tasks and responsibilities that need to be done that week as well.

Get a second pair of eyes on the schedule to ensure everything looks good. You could even run it by your employees to get their feedback. Then, finalize the schedule when you’re comfortable.

It’s also essential to ensure everyone understands the ground rules of their flexible schedules. For example, are they expected to come into the office on specific days? Do they need to be available during specific hours? How are they to record their hours? What’s the plan to ensure they’re getting their tasks done to the highest quality?

Lastly, if you can’t accommodate someone’s preferred schedule, sit down with them, explain why, and work with them to develop a suitable alternative.

Conclusion

Work schedules have an undeniable impact on how well your employees perform. A knowledge management platform can help you design flexible work schedules that fit each employee and capitalize on their strengths. Collect the data above in your knowledge management solution and bring it all together to design work schedules that prompt maximum productivity.

Knowledge management can be a powerful tool in the right hands. It has many purposes, but its main goal is to help organizations utilize their knowledge, information, and expertise in a more meaningful way.

One of the ways you can use knowledge management is to increase your company’s revenue. Without further ado, here’s what knowledge management is and how it can affect your company’s profits.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Before getting into the benefits of knowledge management, it’s worth understanding what it actually is. Essentially, knowledge management is about collecting, defining, structuring, managing, and sharing knowledge and information in an organization. Usually, this is knowledge about the experiences of your employees, but it can also be information about other things.

The main goal of knowledge management is to use the organization’s collective knowledge to improve the different aspects of the said organization. For example, the experiences of the employees from one department could inform the decisions of the employees in other departments. The older your organization is, the more knowledge you will have that can be incredibly useful to your current and future employees.

Successful knowledge management requires a culture of constant development, innovation, and learning. Knowledge management can help in all kinds of processes that range from employee transfer and promotion to staff retirement to recruit training. So how exactly can knowledge management be useful for increasing profits?

#1 Improve Decision-Making

Effective knowledge management can help you improve decision-making by informing different departments, teams, and individual employees. When employees have access to the collective knowledge of your entire organization, they will have the experiences and expertise of their colleagues right in their hands.

Informed employees will be able to speed up the decision-making process and even make better decisions by taking into account a wider variety of factors and details. You can use various collaboration tools to further encourage the sharing of opinions and experiences during the brainstorming process.

#2 Grow, Innovate, and Change Culturally

Another reason why knowledge management is so valuable is that it helps you grow, innovate, and change culturally. You will be encouraging your employees to share their own knowledge while making use of the knowledge of their co-workers. This will help you spread more advanced ideas and perspectives on certain topics.

Moreover, such sharing of knowledge is bound to stimulate the growth of your organization and the innovation that will accompany it. Your industry is ever-changing, so being ahead of your competitors will require you to be constantly improving and finding new things, new methods, etc.

#3 Make Information More Accessible

Besides all the ways information and knowledge can now be shared within your organization, you will also be making information more accessible. There is always an issue with accessibility when it comes to sharing knowledge and information, but effective management can solve this problem.

If you need help structuring and managing your information yourself, you can always hire an experienced writer from the writing service Best Essays Education who will help you. This way, you can ensure that all the knowledge of your organization is stored and shared in an efficient way and that everyone has easy access to it.

#4 Avoid Redundant Effort and Expenses

By managing your company’s knowledge effectively, you can avoid redundant effort and expenses which will increase your overall profits. Rather than avoiding redundant effort and expenses in a straightforward way, it is rather an accumulation of different practices that will give you a good result in the end.

For instance, employees will no longer have to spend time doing something over and over again. They can simply check whether this has been done before by their colleagues and learn from those experiences. Instead of reinventing the wheel, employees can streamline their working process and stay motivated consistently.

#5 Increase Customer Satisfaction

In addition to helping employees, effective knowledge management will also have a positive impact on the experiences of your customers. More specifically, you can increase customer satisfaction by using your company’s collective knowledge smartly. You can share some information with your customers, but there’s more to it than having an open knowledge base.

Essentially, because every employee will have access to your organization’s knowledge, each one of them will be able to do a better job and deliver better quality and value to customers. As a result, the overall experience of your customers will improve making them happier and more satisfied with your business.

#6 Reduce the Time of Staff Training

Knowledge management is valuable to your current employees, but it is also incredibly important for those who are joining your team because it can help you reduce the time of staff training. Onboarding and training new hires always take time (if you want to do it properly), but knowledge management can speed up and streamline the process.

By training them with the help of the accumulated knowledge of your organization, you can ensure that they become competent faster and become accustomed to your company before they start working.

#7 Accelerate Customer Delivery

One of the things that contributes to the experience and satisfaction of your customers is delivery – and knowledge management can help you accelerate it. To put it simply, customer delivery is about providing your audience with products and services faster than your competitors would.

You could have the products and services of the same quality as your competitors, but if you are able to deliver them faster to your audience, you will have an upper hand. This delivery can be the literal delivery (i.e., shipping) and the delivery in the sense of presenting the product (i.e., product launch). Moreover, your services can include customer support, advertising, etc. In other words, everything that makes up your customer’s experience with your brand.

#8 Find Information Faster

Last but not least, effective knowledge management allows your employees to find information faster. It may not seem like something particularly important, but the speed at which your team members can find useful knowledge and information could impact all of their activities.

Decision-making, customer delivery, staff training, etc. – all of these are affected by how quickly any given employee can find relevant information. This is precisely why managing your knowledge and information well is so important for a company of any size.

Conclusion

All in all, effective knowledge management can definitely be quite valuable to your organization as it will help you increase profits. Consider other benefits of knowledge management listed in this article and start managing your knowledge more effectively.