Corporate knowledge, enterprise information, organisational memory — whatever you call it, the documented and undocumented information that captures the who, what and how of an organisation is vital to its survival.
Corporate knowledge can be described as a collection of experiences, processes, policies and procedures that employees possess. It includes explicit or tacit information that paints a complete picture of a business across its lifespan and can be critical to maintaining continuity and efficiency.
What makes corporate knowledge both a valuable and often inaccessible asset is that it’s the product of employee experiences — which means it’s often stored in employees’ heads. The longer an employee has been with the organisation, the more corporate knowledge they’re likely to hold.
The problem is, when these employees leave, the vast troves of corporate knowledge they’ve built over time often leave with them.
The value of employee retention
It’s difficult to put a dollar value on the cost of corporate knowledge, although most companies would agree that losing access to vast realms of organisational expertise is cause for concern.
Retaining this knowledge can be as simple as maintaining employees’ roles within the organisation—but what happens if the business needs to evolve and the employee no longer holds the skills required to contribute meaningfully? Or, as Forbes puts it, how can a company ensure that these employees stay with them as they grow but don't hinder the innovation required to be competitive?
As Australia teeters on the brink of a recession and its attendant threats of layoffs and slashed hiring budgets, it’s a question that many organisations are grappling with. The answer is doing more with less — reshaping existing workforces to overcome skills gaps in order to keep pace with change.
Retaining employees through redeployment, upskilling or reskilling, ideally designed to equip them with broad future capabilities rather than narrow skills, can help you keep corporate knowledge where it belongs and future-proof your teams.
Towards a knowledge management strategy
But retention is only the first step to leveraging the value of enterprise information — after all, it’s no good to anyone if it can’t be documented in a meaningful way. Designing processes and systems to capture and categorise that knowledge offers a range of upsides, including productivity growth — a 2023 survey of 4,000 workers found that workers spend up to 3.5 hours a day searching for information, which drastically reduces their productivity.
Capturing corporate knowledge can also provide stunning insights into what your organisation really does versus what it says it does. As the Harvard Business Review describes it, ‘actual work practices are full of tacit improvisations that the employees who carry them out would have trouble articulating.’
Understanding the realities of these practices can improve organisational performance, by making corporate knowledge accessible to the people who need it, whether that’s staff looking for insights into how to work more efficiently or customers seeking to leverage value from their interactions with your business.
Stop the brain drain
Keep your organisation’s corporate knowledge where it belongs with custom training from Plus UTS. Whether you’re seeking to redeploy, upskill or reskill valued employees, our expert team can help you build a training package and knowledge management strategy that will support your business to evolve.
Visit Plus UTS or contact us to find out more.
