Why is Knowledge Sharing Important at Workplace?

Andrew Carnegie once observed and gave this statement,

“You take away all my Factories, You take away all my Money, You take away all that I possess, But leave me my Men and in next 5 years they can get me everything I had or even more.”

This was a very strong statement showing the importance of human resource in an organization. Hence it is very necessary to not only preserve your work force but also to keep them updated as well. Imagine, if the brain drains out what consequences could occur? It’s very much important to share required knowledge with your co-workers. Organization should put emphasis on a culture of “Knowledge Sharing rather than Knowledge Hoarding.”

Let us first understand what is knowledge sharing? It’s an activity through which information, skills, expertise is exchanged between people, friends, and organization. Some people object to sharing as they fear that if I share my piece of knowledge with everyone I will lose the X-Factor of mine which actually keeps me always recognized by my management and someone else would ripe the fruits of my ideas. But this is a fallacy, we should not share with anyone anything but if it’s about working in teams one should develop a habit of sharing your knowledge.

Now, let’s look out why this is important and can improve the organization’s working on a whole.

Creates Awareness:

Knowledge sharing plays a very vital role in creating awareness amongst the people in an organization. If things are properly shared, employees become aware about what is expected out of them and they can thus create a road map keeping in mind the availability of resources, its pros and cons and try to achieve better results for the company as well as clients and themselves.

Provides fast solution and improves response time:

Now for e.g., if a team is working on a project and it gets stuck on any complication that arises while working they can have an immediate solution for the same, because of the culture of sharing, from the one who has handled such things. This will thus improve your response time towards your clients making the delivery of the project on time without any delays.

Increases Co-ordination:

While the activity of sharing takes place people tend to get more comfortable while dealing with each other hence increasing the co-ordination and efficiency of work.

Acceptance to new ideas:

No one likes to be outdated and if they are getting a proper source of guidance they would surely be open to new ideas with a faith that proper knowledge of the same would be shared.

Absence of such a sharing culture can result into lack of employees taking interest in management’s objective. Also they feel isolated thinking themselves to be an unimportant part which results into resistance to new ideas and later into employees leaving away.

Organization can adopt a variety of mechanisms like Knowledge Management and preserve the knowledge which can be later used by other employees even when one moves out and this practice would develop a legacy for the company