WHY CENTRALIZED KNOWLEDGE IS CRUCIAL FOR SMALL BUSINESS SUCCESS
Written by Jessica Murray
Setting the scene
What happens at a small business when a key employee decides to leave?
No sweat.
All of the employee’s processes and ways of working are documented in the centralized knowledge base. This information is easy to digest, accessible to the entire team and regularly reviewed so everything is up-to-date.
Sound like a dream state?
That’s because it likely is. One 2022 report indicated that only 26% of businesses surveyed had a centralized source of truth for information about the business.
The more probable scenario is that you’ve been given two week’s notice and you’ll spend that time scrambling to put together a transition plan, understand how certain things have been running under their oversight and post a job description to rapidly find a replacement. You’re overwhelmed because there was already too much to do and too little time, and now you’re faced with losing a valuable employee and institutional knowledge. Not to mention, this might impact the rest of your team’s morale and customer experience.
This sounds challenging, right? So, why do so many businesses put themselves in this position?
Here are rationalizations I’ve heard when people want to put off centralizing business information:
Time: Centralizing internal knowledge can be time-consuming and is a detail-oriented process. It’s not the “sexy” part of the job, it’s not a revenue-generating activity and it’s not necessarily fun. However, effective business process enablement is essential for long-term success.
Resource-constrained: This ties closely with time. In small teams, resource challenges are common as employees wear multiple hats. This often leads to hesitation in adding more to someone’s to-do list. There might also be a misguided view that no one on the team has the expertise to bring together a knowledge base.
Lacking the tools: Decision paralysis about which knowledge management tools to use, resistance to new technology, or, again, just feeling like you don’t have the expertise to get started causes people to kick the can down the road further.
A belief that no one ever reads a knowledge base: There’s always someone who will turn their nose up and comment that there’s a lot of time spent putting the information together, pages are dense and difficult to follow, it’s hard to search, documents are outdated and no one uses it properly. That then begs the question, will the effort put the business in a better place than before information centralization, or is that just false hope?
While I can appreciate valid objections and have myself seen sub-optimal implementations of a company knowledge base (aka a wiki), I’m also here to tell you that if you approach it differently, the investment will be worthwhile, alleviate a lot of pain down the road and return multiples on the energy put into it.
Ten steps to building an effective knowledge base
What I won’t say is that this is a one-size-fits-all approach. Like most things in business, that’s just not how things work. The implementation of processes and tools needs to be a good match for teams that use them. Every team comprises a distinct group of individuals, so there’s a human element here and solutions must be tailored appropriately. I won’t prescribe a piece of software or the “right” structure or content medium because different tactics can be effective for varying teams and use cases. What I will do here, however, is provide a general framework and key considerations to get started.
[Ideal State] Step 1: START DAY 1. The earlier, the better so you don’t play catch-up later. Even if your team is just you, you can start putting pen to paper on how things are done for your business. Too late for that? Don’t worry! We’ll start at Step 2.
Step 2: Build your narrative. Before you rally the troops, make sure you’ve established a compelling “why.” If you get buy-in upfront, the rest of the process will run more smoothly. Here are important things to consider:
Why a centralized knowledge base and why now?
Who will be involved and what are the expectations?
How will this impact people’s current work and what might be taken off their plate temporarily to support this effort?
Specific objectives, timeline and milestones.
Step 3: Choose your platform. There are many options when it comes to where to house and organize the information. For Empower, I use Notion, but that won’t be the best solution for everyone. I encourage you, or enlist someone on your team, to conduct research on the different options and weigh them against the needs of your business and the capabilities of your employees.
Step 4: Establish your baseline and identify gaps. Before diving in, I suggest doing two things first so you better understand the current state and identify gaps that need to be addressed during this process.
Develop a view of the ideal state: Write down all the information you want stored in the knowledge base. Determine what’s important and maintain perspective on what your team can manage.
Understand your baseline: Write down a list of the documentation that exists, but may be siloed, outdated and/or incomplete. Now you can compare that to your ideal state and start to build your action list.
Step 5: Communicate to the team and identify your champion(s). You’ve built your narrative and selected the tool that’s going to bring this all together. Now it’s time to actually bring in the team, provide context and get buy-in. It will also be important to identify your champions because they will be the ones who help build momentum and support for the change.
Step 6: Establish structure and guidelines. One pitfall is a lack of consistency in how content gets organized and in what medium(s) (e.g., written, images, video, audio, etc.). Another is overcomplicating this step. When this happens, businesses develop an overly complex and difficult to use knowledge base. Simplify. I can’t emphasize that enough. This step also includes outlining guidelines for access controls, who is responsible for owning and editing specific information and how frequently it gets updated. Remember when I mentioned the densely written documentation and poor search capabilities? That happens when this step gets skipped. Since we want to make sure this is useful for your business, it’s important to establish these things early.
Step 7: Assign owners and delegate responsibility. I suggest breaking down ownership in two parts:
Overall owner: There should be a single owner on your team accountable for the knowledge base going forward. This person ensures the integrity of the structure and guidelines and serves as the primary point of contact.
Individual responsibility: There’s also delegated responsibility for specific sections of knowledge, and that responsibility should be held by the people who know the most about a specific part of the business’s operations. For example, if you have a process for how you evaluate vendors, then there should be someone who is highly involved in that process and responsible for putting together and maintaining the documentation. Defining clear responsibilities allows the burden to not just fall on one person’s shoulders and makes the upfront, and ongoing, process more manageable.
Step 8: Review the first version. Your newly anointed knowledge base owner (and maybe that’s even you!) should review the first version of the aggregated knowledge base and check it for structural integrity. Meaning, when your team took their first pass, did they follow the guidelines?
Step 9: Reveal and roll out. Once the first pass of the knowledge base is on solid footing, determine how to celebrate and reveal it to your team. Remember Step 5? You communicated this vision and the “why” at the beginning of the journey. Your staff collectively worked to get it over the finish line. Now, it’s time to show them what they accomplished and remind them why it was, and will continue to be, important. This step should also include any relevant training that might be required to ensure everyone is set up for success going forward.
Step 10: Maintain, audit and iterate. We know things change. When they do, it’s important to make sure the knowledge base gets updated. Your knowledge base owner should also do periodic audits and check in when things look outdated. This is a continuous process so you will learn and iterate as you go.
An important callout to business leaders: Effective knowledge management starts at the top. Don’t relegate the evangelism of a centralized knowledge base to your lower-level employees. Lead by example to underscore the importance of the process. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself back in the situation I presented at the beginning of this post.
If you want to dive deeper into what may be right for your business, contact us to learn how Empower can partner with you.
How you and your business benefit from centralized knowledge
Peace of mind: Knowledge stays within the company and doesn’t magically disappear when a person does. You can rest easier knowing that key processes aren’t only known in someone’s head and that information is effectively distributed when disruptions do arise.
Consistency: Developing a knowledge base that outlines how your business operates, with supporting processes and performance expectations, increases the chances of delivering consistent quality standards.
An empowered and more successful team: Giving your staff the tools to be more successful in their roles will instill more trust and make them more energized to play a role in your business’s success. It also helps drive better accountability and collaboration. Don’t underestimate the power of an organized single source of truth on morale and execution quality.
Time and cost savings: This effort can save a lot of time and expense associated with onboarding, turnover, duplication of efforts, inefficient processes, searching for information and more.
Increased agility and innovation: The ability to examine how things are done today can inspire how to improve tomorrow. This process becomes easier when your business’s information is centralized.
Implementing a centralized knowledge base is not just a safety net for when employees leave; it’s a strategic move for continuity, efficiency and growth. There’s a lot of art and it’s not always an exact science, but it can be a powerful resource that keeps your business running on track and preserves built-up internal expertise.