Mirriam-Webster defines a best practice as a procedure proven by research and experience to produce optimal results. The practice is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption. Best practices are guidelines, ethics, or ideas that represent the most efficient or beneficial course of action. For organizations, they represent the methods that will result in the highest employee productivity, company profitability, and personnel safety.
Businesses proficient in establishing, sharing, and adopting best practices as a part of their culture are more likely to see success and outperform competitors in their market. Here are some tangible benefits your company can enjoy by sharing best practices across your organization.
1. Sharing Cultivates an Environment of Learning: Savvy businesses that share their best practices through knowledge-sharing tools and platforms can quickly train employees to research the answer they need. When employees understand that the approved course of action is a few clicks away, they are more apt to utilize the available tools to learn and adapt.
2. Sharing Identifies and Solves Knowledge Gaps: Another significant impact of sharing best practices within the company is it allows managers to recognize knowledge gaps easily. Automated tools can identify which content is being accessed most frequently, which indicates where questions exist, and more training is needed.
3. Sharing Enables Better Decisions: When customers have issues, representatives search for the relevant needed information. When employees know the best practices, they can efficiently solve customer problems and achieve customer satisfaction. Knowledge of approved best methods and answers allows faster and more accurate decision-making, improving both performance and productivity.
4. Sharing Increases Efficiency: Best practices minimize the amount of time your employees waste searching for the appropriate search result. Using an intuitive knowledge guide or knowledge-sharing tool ensures that all employees can access the correct information, people, or resources in real time.
5. Sharing Builds a Supportive Community: With a dedicated information-sharing portal, companies can store corporate or tribal knowledge in a secure space. Employees can share, collaborate and provide feedback while administrators monitor the consistency of shared knowledge.
6. Sharing Minimizes the Loss Of Knowledge: “Know-how” is an essential asset for every company and must be appropriately managed. By sharing best practices, an organization can effectively capture the knowledge that resides in someone’s mind and make it available to everyone. This will ultimately benefit productivity as essential knowledge doesn’t “walk out the door” if a key employee leaves.
7. Sharing Best Practices Reduces Costs and Saves Time: Documenting best practices on a knowledge-sharing platform allows employees to share information, experiences, achievements – and even losses. It prevents employees from repeating past mistakes and eliminates trial and error. Best practices enable employees to provide the best and most appropriate answer consistently.
Sharing best practices is instrumental in building a proactive community within the organization -a community that can provide insights into efficiency, save time and money, and elevate transparency and productivity.
Methods for Sharing Best Practices
Most organizations have developed some form of best practices, typically delivered in onboarding presentations and available in department documentation. However, without a cohesive and up-to-date archive of these solutions and methods, employees can waste excessive time searching for the exact answer they need. Similarly, managers may spend countless hours answering repetitive questions from their direct reports.
An interactive knowledge portal allows a corporation to make all best practices, SOPS, and company documentation (such as insurance paperwork, employee contracts, and NDAs) available to their employees whenever needed. For more information about utilizing award-winning technology to streamline the transfer of knowledge between your employees, call the KLONE Group today.