High turnover, hiring freezes, and even high growth have one thing in common: for large organizations, these things can limit your ability to transfer knowledge across your company. Limited knowledge sharing has a ripple effect of its own, and can impact your team’s ability to translate and articulate crucial internal details, information, and processes.
For large enterprise businesses where growth or team turnover is very high, it’s not uncommon for the vast majority or even the entirety of a team to change within a short period of time. When this happens without proper knowledge transfer protocols, large companies can find themselves with a team where nobody fully understands the project, tools, or critical processes anymore. This is just one example of how knowledge transfers can potentially make or break your team.
If you’re a large enterprise organization looking to incorporate effective knowledge transfers, great internal documentation is key. Documentation will help ensure that your most valuable knowledge is saved and shared internally.
That said, we know tackling your documentation backlog can feel overwhelming, especially for larger organizations. That’s why we put together a simple, actionable checklist with our three favorite tips to help you leverage documentation for effective knowledge transfers:
First, identify the tools and processes your team members use most frequently, and start keeping track of any bottlenecks or sticking points they encounter along the way. Where does your team get lost or stuck? Where do they need to ask for help, and what questions do they usually ask?
Based on the initial audit from the last step, you’ll have an idea of the most important processes to start documenting. Now it’s simply a matter of documenting the solutions to those problems that your internal teams encounter most frequently. Make sure that this documentation lives in a place your whole team can easily access.
Implementing a specific documentation strategy will ensure your documentation is clear, relevant, and well-maintained going forward. It will also help bring out all the subtle yet extremely valuable knowledge in your organization that may otherwise be lost, and help key processes run as smoothly as possible.
If you’re a large organization and need help developing a specific documentation strategy while maintaining valuable bandwidth across your team, we can help. Reach out to us today if you’re seeking a trusted partner who help can you with all stages of developing and implementing a documentation strategy that supports internal knowledge transfers.