How do you share knowledge in the workplace? 1,000+ managers weigh in with their leadership advice

From our online leadership community in Know Your Team, The Watercooler, we gathered the best tips for sharing knowledge effectively across your team.

A few months back, one of our members of The Watercooler in Know Your Team — our online community for more than 1,000 CEOs, executives, and managers— posed a question to the group. He asked:

“How to do you share knowledge across the team?”

As a team or company grows, it becomes harder to share knowledge in the organization so everyone’s in the loop. Something as seemingly simple as sharing “What are people working on?” becomes tough to figure out as more and more people are hired.

For this particular leader, he’d be racking his brain for better ways to share information in the workplace. He’d tried pair programing sessions, weekly planning meetings, workshops, documentation and even an attempt at a show-and-tell of sorts. He was stumped.

The best leaders are self-aware and know when to ask for help — and so he turned to The Watercooler. Here are some responses from other Watercooler members on how they share knowledge at work:

Adopt a formal training process. Sometimes, people don’t ask for training or additional professional development resources until they’re up against something of which they’re unsure. By implementing a formal training process, you allow all employees to grow and learn.
Schedule weekly, 30-minute talks about what the company is working on so that all members of the team feel knowledgeable and invested in what’s been shared and what’s going on with the company as a whole.
Have an agenda that team members can update and add to before meetings. People will feel empowered to ask questions or discuss ideas if they’re encouraged to add those things that they feel are important to the agenda.
Task a different employee with investigating issues raised every week. This exercise allows you to give ownership to multiple people in solving company challenges.
Encourage employees to provide feedback after every meeting or training session. Remember, being specific when giving feedback is key to unlocking all sorts of information about your company, your culture and your employees’ engagement and satisfaction.
And finally, review your processes. What’s working, what’s not? Don’t force something on your team that doesn’t really work for them. Adapt it to fit your culture or try something new.

In the end, this leader who posed the original question implemented several of these recommendations and saw a positive impact from his team. If you’re looking for ways to share knowledge across the team or disseminate company news to all employees, give one (or more) of these tactics a try.