How to create a culture of knowledge sharing
Put an end to information hoarding and set the stage for open communication.
Browse topics
Do you work on a truly open team? Or are employees at your company just competing with one another in a gauntlet-style brawl for who can capture and hoard the most information?
Knowledge sharing in the workplace is the process of creating space for open communication about the wins, losses, and lessons that employees are collectively experiencing. Without a comfortable environment in which teammates can share openly, actual output is jeopardized.
Streamline company culture for knowledge sharing
While company culture can take time to change, building the right knowledge sharing practices into the way that teams, leadership, and individual employees work will set you in the right direction.
Designing your company infrastructure for knowledge sharing
Select the right tools
One of the core pillars of a company’s infrastructure is the technical tools they lean on to get the job done. This means finding the right combination of software to point the company towards knowledge sharing. The two tools that we rely on for knowledge sharing are Confluence (surprise!) and Slack.
Confluence
We utilize Confluence for internal blogging; sharing information; cutting down on meetings; creating strategy and planning docs; and updating each other on wins, failures, and learnings across the company. We keep all of our work open by default instead of road-blocking access with automatic permissions, so every employee has access to the company’s collective knowledge.
You can create three different types of spaces to make your marketing knowledge base navigable:
- Team spaces ensure that each team has a space to focus on the work that is most relevant to their specific area. This means that product marketers can keep user research insights and positioning consolidated in their space; while performance marketers can compile campaign strategy, channel plans, and retros.
- Project spaces keep project-related information in one place. Cross-functional project teams can reference pages and work on their initiatives directly in Confluence, not having to email back and forth, where messages can easily get lost or overlooked.
Personal spaces store what individuals are working on. To-do lists and pages can be updated and polished before moving it to a shared space. This will help keep the collaboration documents centralized, rather than hosting every single team member’s individual work.
Slack
By combining Slack with Confluence, we’ve eliminated reliance on email (which often slows or halts open communication processes). Quick back-and-forth discussions can occur in Slack, and then subsequent feedback is contextualized on Confluence for posterity. Utilizing Slack as our primary chat tool allows for immediate knowledge sharing, and synthesizing that information in Confluence ensures it’s never lost.
These are the tools that work effectively at Atlassian. Finding the tools that work best for you is critical to your team’s productivity.
What’s great about labels is their versatility. Add them to Confluence pages, blog posts—or even attachments. You’re free to enter in whatever you want for the labels, categorizing them as you see fit.
For example, say you have documentation related to how email campaigns should be fun. Create a new label “email” in Confluence. Even if “email” doesn’t explicitly show up in specific pages or filenames, the tag will highlight them whenever someone searching for “email” wants to reference your marketing practices.
These labels don’t only apply to pages, either—you can also apply labels to spaces. The more your team grows, the more important it will be to establish space categories that make sense for internal groups—and labels help you manage them with a quick search.
AI-powered search in now also native in Confluence. Find the information you need without the frustrating manual labor of sifting through contextual information. You’re free to focus on work, neither needing to ask or answer questions about your documentation.
Overhaul meetings to elevate human connection
Meetings are a reality of any workplace, but there are a few practical ways to redesign meeting structures to elevate connection, sharing, and openness. We recommend that you always start your meetings with a casual conversation – it’s okay to talk about what people did last weekend or what new restaurant they tried out last night!
Developing practices like this allows team members to acknowledge the human side of working together. Sharing on a personal level will reflect in the group’s working style and comfort level with each other.
Try This: Set aside 10 minutes to implement an icebreaker play at the beginning of your meeting. Allowing the team to have a laugh and learn something about each other helps employees feel more relaxed and comfortable for the ensuing work discussion.
Arrange your office space to encourage sharing
One of the most practical things you can do to support knowledge sharing is consider your physical space. Is it cramped, closed off, or restrictive? This might be impacting people’s ability to meaningfully connect and share.
We recommend rearranging or designing your office space with openness in mind. This allows employees to have quick meetings in common spaces, learn from people that they might not normally be exposed to, and engage in walk-by conversations.
These small but impactful changes are simple ways to elevate your team dynamic and set your employees at ease. Great collaboration starts with a trust in your teammates, and a culture of knowledge sharing ensures that success.
Integrate with project management solutions
If your knowledge base doesn’t connect to other tools, is it centralized or siloed?
By integrating Confluence with the other tools your team uses the most, you keep your knowledge base responsive to your team’s evolving needs. Confluence provides the content and the context so you have everything you need to complete a project on your terms.
Here’s two examples of powerful Confluence integrations.
Using Trello and Confluence together, you can paste Trello links into Confluence with preview/edit features, allowing you to edit Trello tasks directly within Confluence. Or embed fully-interactive Trello boards on the Confluence page, ensuring your team can use the full range of Trello features within a Confluence knowledge base.
Integrating Confluence with Jira, you’ll be able to track Jira issues directly in Confluence. Keep the team aware of potential challenges right from within your knowledge base. Having Jira tasks on a Confluence page can also allow simple setups for future project timelines. Or you can use it to estimate launch dates and keep your team on track.
Create your living, breathing centralized knowledge base
It’s not that you don’t have a strong marketing plan. Sometimes, successful marketing comes down to getting an entire organization on the same page, all speaking with the same voice. You want to be more than a conversation. To set your brand messaging and marketing apart, you should be more like a stadium full of people cheering in unison.
But you can’t achieve that without internal communication. That begins with a centralized knowledge base for all of your brand and marketing insights. What branding messaging is working? What needs to be updated? Create a centralized knowledge base with Confluence and you can keep your team on the same page—and speaking with the same voice.