All brains on deck: 10 best practices for knowledge-sharing

One person’s knowledge isn’t enough to execute the work that really matters. Even your team can’t go it alone. To make great things happen, your entire organization must pool their cognitive resources. 

Sharing knowledge improves innovation, creativity, and productivity for everyone. Without it, information gets trapped within departments, teams, and individuals’ brains (the dreaded silos). That doesn’t help us tackle the complex problems we’re faced with in our hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world. 

And knowledge sharing doesn’t just boost business metrics – it benefits the humans behind them, too. Sharing knowledge makes people feel valued, because they see that their knowledge matters, and it means they’re better supported in doing their best work. 

Knowledge-sharing = culture + systems 

Knowledge-sharing doesn’t happen by accident, especially at large or distributed organizations. It requires infrastructure that takes time, energy, and intention to build. 

That infrastructure comprises two parts: how people connect, and the systems they use to do so. When you set up those practices and the tools to support them, you’ll build a culture where people feel included, valued, and excited to share their knowledge.

Culture + practices

If you want knowledge to flow freely, you must build a culture of trust, inclusion, and non-hierarchical collaboration. It all comes down to listening to people, no matter their title or seniority. 

Here are a few cultural elements that make people more likely to share knowledge: 

• Autonomy and ownership: People are more likely to share in workplaces that support autonomy, not micromanagement. That means coworkers won’t keep running back to them with extra tasks when they’ve already shared knowledge on how to handle them. 
• Clarity on the why: Tell people why they should share, rather than imposing mandates with no explanation. Explain what you’re trying to achieve, like faster individual decision-making, so people don’t worry about becoming redundant or replaceable. 
• Working style diversity: Knowledge-sharing means valuing everyone’s contributions, including all communication styles, disciplines, and professional (or even personal) experiences. When people feel valued and important, they’ll be more excited to share their wisdom. 

Systems + tools 

If they’re not working optimally, tools hold back collaboration, waste people’s time, and bury important information. For example, 56% of workers say they can often only find crucial knowledge by asking someone or scheduling a meeting. 

The goal isn’t to ban all meetings, or eliminate face-to-face interaction. It’s empowering people to answer their own questions, so face time can be used to actually move work forward.

10 daily practices for a culture of knowledge-sharing 

Here are some best practices to build a workplace where knowledge flows freely – both in virtual spaces and face-to-face interactions.

Ask leadership to model knowledge-sharing 

Research shows knowledge-sharing culture is built from the top. Leaders must embody values like trust, inclusivity, and collaboration, or they can’t expect people to make them a practice. 

In action: When announcing a leadership decision, name employees who helped you arrive at it to illustrate how everyone’s knowledge helps drive the company. Think, “we’ve decided to postpone the France launch after talking through customer behaviour with the regional support team.” 

Let different voices take center stage 

If the same senior voices are always presenting ideas, making decisions, and shaping the narrative, you’re leaving valuable knowledge on the table. Study communication techniques for actively including more perspectives, and build practices around them. 

In action: Take turns leading retrospectives and weekly check-ins. When you’re leading, invite a wider range of voices into the discussion by calling on people who share less frequently.

Create mechanisms to proactively collect feedback 

To make sure you’re inviting feedback from everyone on your team, you’ll need structured practices. Asking “any thoughts?” at the end of each meeting isn’t enough. 

In action: Give people the option to share asynchronously after meetings, rather than speaking up on the spot. If possible, integrate and standardize all work management tools, so it’s easier for teams to see and weigh in on each others’ work.

Bridge silos with an Open by Default model 

Share progress, decisions, and context in shared spaces, not private channels. Make it an ongoing practice to update these knowledge bases, and ensure content is high-quality. 

In action: Use Loom to save meeting audio, automatically generate notes, and upload both to your knowledge space. This turns meetings into searchable text that can be referenced later. 

Make AI your first stop when looking for answers 

The beauty of using systems to store knowledge is that we don’t need to ping colleagues with every question. Coach teams to search existing knowledge bases and documentation first – ideally, using an AI tool like Rovo for faster, better-quality answers. 

In action: Build a Slack automation that offers to search documentation when it detects a simple, likely answerable query. Make sure documentation is formatted in a way that’s easy for AI to parse, such as breaking up walls of text with clear subheadings, so it’s more likely to generate useful answers.

Avoid knowledge chaos with regular upkeep

You’re not helping anyone by dumping everything from technical docs to strategy plans into one workspace. Keep things clear, structured, and organized, so people know how to interpret these shared materials. 

In action: In your knowledge base, label work that’s early-stage, still in progress, or fully approved. Build habits around keeping material up to date and archiving old content, such as adding knowledge base maintenance to every project plan as recurring tasks.

Structure stored knowledge so it’s easy to use 

It’s counterintuitive, but overly detailed documentation can actually be less useful. Long, prescriptive instructions cause information overwhelm, and they’re harder to adapt to unique scenarios. Instead, keep documentation concise, and highlight which steps are most critical. 

In action: Pair detailed docs with accessible recaps, like bulleted lists or Loom videos, so they’re easier to digest and act on. You can nest more detailed information so readers can reveal it as needed – Confluence’s Expand macro is one way to do this.

Be choosy with meeting time 

This isn’t the end of meetings – it’s the end of meetings that could have been emails. Giving people access to each others’ knowledge asynchronously means you can use meetings to get work done, not just talk about it. 

In action: Replace meetings that involve mostly one-way communication, like progress updates, with Loom updates. Before necessary meetings, prep attendees with existing resources to get everyone on the same page. 

Invest in cross-team relationships 

Knowledge-sharing and collaboration doesn’t happen without trust, connection, and psychological safety. Distributed and hybrid organizations need to be even more intentional, because personal connection doesn’t happen naturally like it would in an office. 

In action: Host offsites, team-building days, virtual coffee chats or lunches, and free-chat Slack channels. 

Share outcomes – positive and negative – to promote learning

Part of sharing knowledge is sharing wins, losses, and challenges. This can help people understand how different decisions contributed to achieving business goals; organizational learning includes understanding failures. 

In action: Create a documentation folder for outcomes, and assign someone to gather important wins and losses from all project recaps or retros every quarter. Go over these findings in a cross-team meeting and discuss what they can help you learn.