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Gather all your information and content in a knowledge base to give your employees access to the documents they need.

According to the Mac Global Institute and EMS observation, an Information Worker spends, on average, 20% of his time searching for information. This research impacts on the organizations in terms of cost. It represents 1990euros/employee!

We are confronted by figures that are alarming and not only have consequences for the companies but also for the employees:

– For the employees, this search for information is a waste of time and causes a loss of productivity.
– For the companies, it has a significant cost

As a result, it is vital to find solutions in order to optimize this research for information. The knowledge base management is an excellent example of one of these solutions.

But what is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is an online base that allows us to organize and store different documents (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, PDF…). The aim of this knowledge base is to empower the employees of a company,eg. when they need any information about procedures, business rules, text definition etc… to help them.

The knowledge base has many benefits:

– It limits the constant search for information by the employees. Thanks to the knowledge base, your collaborators have all the information they need, all in one place. They do not waste time searching for documents.

– It allows us to have a single up-to-date source. When your employees search for information, the risk is that they find a source, a document, that does not contain the latest/newest information. If this is the case, the employee will have accessed the wrong results The goal of the knowledge base is to have access to all the most recent documents right up-to-date..

– It limits clicks and accesses. Thanks to the knowledge base, all the documents are stored in a single place. This meants that, when the employee searches for information, he only uses a few clicks to find the document he needs.

– It is a reference support for new employees. When new employees arrive in a company, they need documentation to appropriate their new business environment and to understand all the different processes to follow. Having a knowledge base is a good way to gather all this documentation together .

A few basic points to remember when creating your knowledge base:

– You can first organize and schematise your ideas: make a map of your knowledge base. This will allow you to identify the key words in your categories and subcategories.

– Remain simple! Just make a few categories to start. If you do too many different categories and subcategories at the beginning, your employees will be completely lost.

– Don’t forget that you create your knowledge base for your employees! As a consequence, you have to use the same language that they use (especially for the key words in the different categories.)

Once your knowledge base is created, your employees will be able to consult it! But do you know that only one in two employees use the knowledge base to search for information?

As a result of this observation, it is interesting to think about the way we can provide relevant content directly to employees.

– The organization can use social networks eg Yammer, Chatter..
– The campany can also diffuse training content directly and contextually to employees when they need it, directly in their business applications.

At Shortways, we help companies to organize and structure their knowledge base! Moreover, we allow organizations to diffuse relevant training content directly in business applications (CRM, ERP, HCM…)!

Do not hesitate to contact us at info@shortways.com for more information.