Effective sharing of knowledge or knowledge management is done through integrating speedy connectivity, social platforms, community involvement, and the creation of the trust. It might sound close to impossible when someone tells you that a lot of individuals including HR professionals, struggle to share their knowledge while others have difficulty accessing this same knowledge when it comes to performing their jobs to the best of their abilities. Whether your company has a knowledge hoarding problem or is an unorganized heap of learned men and women, this directly affects the company’s ability to carry out its mission. Knowledge hoarding causes distrust among the teams, kills any enthusiasm to contribute and/or collaborate, and costs the company valuable time and money.

One of the direct consequences of the global pandemic was to force employees to work from home extensively. This provided loads of opportunities for global collaborations among employees online. One of the most effective initiatives was Bosch’s “Smart Coffee Break”; which had employees, irrespective of their local times, tuning into a laid-back Zoom meeting where everyone shared software development tools and technologies. During the pandemic, companies with well-oiled knowledge-sharing platforms already existing were able to move into a new model of remote working without fuss.

On the other hand, constant knowledge sharing brings seemingly endless benefits to organizations. Knowledge sharing increases social interaction in the workplace, leads to a rise in creative problem solving, preserves pre-existing knowledge so it is not lost as employees retire or move on, and enables every department to access the information they need, when they need it, therefore speeding up response times.

There is a long way to go for our society but the pandemic has highlighted the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge management regardless of the function an individual or a group carries out. Knowledge-sharing was the front and center of 2020 in every way. Look no further than the most-used applications in the last year and you will find at least one of them to be a collaboration tool. The pandemic has taught us that it is possible to collaborate with teams distributed worldwide and those teams have no other option but to share knowledge via virtual spaces.