Shawnee Love   •  
June 29, 2010

Aside from keeping your employees, there are other tried and true methods of retaining the invaluable information your employees keep upstairs.

Beyond maintaining good files and notes about your proprietary information and customers (and depending upon how large you are that may mean a good software package), here are more ideas to help you manage and mine the knowledge your employees carry in their heads:

1. Have employees that go to courses or events share what they learned upon return.
2. Keep notes not just on what was decided in meetings but why it was decided.
3. Save notes, reports, white papers, etc. in a searchable centralized (ideally online) database.
4. Cross train.
5. Provide buddies for new hires.
6. Ask your internal subject matter experts to be mentors.
7. Write your policies and procedures so they not only say what to do but also how and why.
8. Hold debriefs after projects to talk about what went well and what didn’t (with no blame assigned).

These activities bridge the entire organization and are the responsibility of everyone, but it is helpful if one department acts as the knowledge management champions. In my experience IT and HR both have strengths (and weaknesses) in carrying out this role and make effective advocates for knowledge management.  For smaller organizations who don’t have an in-house HR or IT person, it is the leader who must act as or select an ambassador of knowledge to ensure that all the valuable business information is kept whole and safe each time an employee gets hit by the proverbial bus.

If you have other suggestions for managing company knowledge, please add your two bits.