Employee Information Exchange

Many businesses pay for their staff members to attend seminars and conferences with the understanding that they will learn professional skills they can apply on the job. What most businesses do not do is encourage those staff members to share what they have learned with their co-workers and others.

Websites, shared document portals, social media and other tools allow all of us to easily disseminate information. But many times conference attendees return to work only to be overwhelmed playing catch up. Why not permit that employee to take some time upon his or her return to publish some high level notes that others might find valuable and save them on a shared document portal? Or, better yet, arrange a “lunch and learn” style presentation for the conference-goer to share some of what they learned.

Do you have an internal method or knowledgebase for employees to share information? Or maybe you’ve got a closed employee-only Facebook group or a blog that requires a login? Encourage employees to share what they have learned here, as well. Set some overall structure (for example, all information must be dated and placed into high level categories or have post tags applied to make searching easy) and basic rules (i.e., the information must have value, not a forum for complaints, must be verified when appropriate, etc.). Over time as the information base builds, employees will become used to adding new information and searching the site for answers to their questions.

Even better news with this type of knowledge-sharing: those folks in your company who are responsible for creating content will have a great source of new ideas for their future web content, blog posts, social media updates and more! Encourage sharing…you’ll be glad you did.