5 Key Benefits Of A Knowledge Base

With the growth of organization and expansion of spaces, connectivity surfaces as quintessential. If employees get a common platform, their connectivity with each other and excellence in work improves. The ready availability of information has multiple benefits: it helps in making an informed decision, timely resolution of customer’s problem, customer-centered marketing content, and time-efficient closure of sales deals and effective distribution of research by insights teams.

So, how can you ensure the availability of information across the people of your company?

By putting it in a centralized knowledge base.

What exactly is a knowledge base?

It allows employees to share information with a centralized approachable hub. Here they can share a range of files, post content, post queries, and can have them answered by their colleagues.

We could name dozens of benefits of a knowledge base (as the makers of knowledge sharing & management software). The list is long but for now, let us focus on 5 key benefits of a knowledge base platform which are the stepping stones to success.

1. Better productivity

According to Mckinsey, 20 percent of precious time at work remains unproductive, as it is spent in searching for information in unorganized mailboxes, disorderly shelves, and verbal queries from colleagues. With a knowledge base, this unproductivity gets checked, as a single platform provides all. Both Time and energy get efficiently channelized leading to better productivity.

So, there is no more streaming through dated and monotonous messages, furrowing through countless emails for an attachment, or imploring before an expert for the favor of information. Even if it is every employee’s right. A knowledge base can make each minute of all weekdays productive in completing projects undertaken successfully.

2. Encourage Collaborative Effort and Better Employee Involvement

An involved employee remains regular, works efficiently, and stays for a longer time than his counterparts. One of the effective ways to keep employees involved is to give them access to a centralized knowledge base.

Sharing information may seem strange superficially but it establishes the principle of transparency and integrity in the company. It readily wins employees’ trust and they put in the effort to create a niche for themselves. At this collaborative platform, employees can comment on documents or posts, “like” them (similar to social media), ask questions, and more. They can also post their questions, request clarification when needed, and can do a lot more.

This collaboration is possible irrespective of their physical location. It is entirely up to you if you wish to allow employee access to the knowledge base globally or restricted to the company’s network. In short, one can sync with co-workers on content, share perspectives, and live this feeling that one is significant to his organization.

3. Prevents Knowledge Loss

An employee can leave the job for one or the other reasons: retirement, better job avenues, long (paternity/maternity/study) leave. When they depart, the institution remains at risk of losing the knowledge the company equipped them with and they willingly acquired during their stay. And that creates problems for the people who are tasked with picking up the pieces.

Here comes the inevitability of a knowledge management system for effective knowledge storage and transfer.

Knowledgebase endows employees to comprehensively document every project they complete, the content they write, queries they answer, rules they develop so that transferring tasks and information from one employee to another is straightforward. Besides, it lets employees share information in different formats — video, audio, images, etc. This has an additional advantage, it makes experts protect knowledge at their convenience.

4. Outreach Remote Employees

Collaboration today has gone beyond the 9 to 5 schedule. Work from home at least once a week is a new normal. The employees may be on a business trip abroad they need access to information for accomplishing the project undertaken.

A mobile-friendly knowledge base means that remote employees have access to company knowledge from anywhere, at any time. They may be at conferences, on a plane, or attending an event; they can provide the latest updates and accelerate the growth of their company. This sets them free from week-long wait and dipping connections. The limitations one faces while attending virtual conferences for sharing ideas with their team.

Having a web-based and mobile-friendly knowledge base is also very important when employees need access to company information in a time-sensitive context — e.g. when a sales representative is addressing the inquiry of a client/customer. When a company’s image is dependent on punctual service, employees must be empowered to resolves issues instantly.

5. Overcome the Limitations of E-mail

Organizations can boost their employees by using the knowledge base for sharing their input. It would be an aid for the entire group and the employees to be. This habit of sharing knowledge will ensure the all-time availability of information that can be fruitful to multiple people. Generally, such knowledge remained celled in emails. Additionally, subject matter experts won’t have to respond to the same question more than once.

This also resolves a gigantic challenge — document version control. When a recipient gets an email and edits it; he needs to resend an updated version. If multiple people are working on it, multiple versions float across the company. By using a modern knowledge base with document version control, you can ensure that all employees can find the most up-to-date content while also viewing changes made to the document over time. This helps eliminate duplicate efforts and keeps everyone aligned around the same knowledge.

The Long-Term Benefits of a Knowledge Base

The firms which have implemented a knowledge base witness a considerable surge in productivity, interpersonal relationship, and employee engagement. These advantages have futuristic effects. When employees are endowed proficiency increased, projects are timely completed, resulting in benefits for the company as well as the customers.