Learning to share means empowering employees

Every company knows that the way to maintaining growth is by hiring smart people and trusting them to make decisions that define the business operations. As those people go about their jobs they will begin to create, modify and refine the tasks that fall under their ownership. Many times this process is a good thing as efficiencies are created  in the goal of streamlining.

But where the challenge comes in is uncovering the knowledge capital that is so vital. As is human nature employees at most organizations do not naturally think about documenting the details of their role or sharing what they know. Some see that information as a competitive edge while others will say they simply do not have the time in the day for stopping to write down details.

Despite the reasoning people will use for keeping information to themselves the real issue is organizations lack of empowering their workers to share. Managers need to take it upon themselves to make knowledge share as painless as possible and that is where technology comes in. Group project collaboration tools, company based social networks and corporate intranets that allow for thought sharing are great examples of capturing the collective know how for future data mining. While some of these solutions may be expensive there are others that can be started with small investment and little effort.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Yammer - Private social network
• MicroSoft SharePoint - enterprise web portal software
• Atlassian Confluence -a wiki platform that is part of the larger Atlassian toolkit