Knowledge Sharing between Colleagues: Fostering a Learning Culture

Last Updated on

April 7, 2022

Alicja King

Creating a knowledge sharing company culture requires more than an open office space and a communal lunch area, it requires concrete measures to ensure your employees not only want to learn, but want to share what they've learnt. It's breaking down the tendency to build hierarchies and instead facilitate collaboration that includes everyone.

So what's the barrier?

It can be attributed to two main factors; firstly, management not allowing all employees to know the 'goings on' in the business. It won't be on purpose, but it's a common issue. In fact, according to the Journal of Organizational Behavior 75% of employees feel they're missing out on company info.

Secondly, employees knowledge hoarding (keeping what they've learnt to themselves), either to keep them from doing extra work, or to ensure their newly-found ideas don't get 'stolen' by another employee.

Okay, now you're thinking, 'easy! Just allow everyone access to the intranet and set up some informal meetings' - *sips coffee*. And although many blogs do say it's simple, what happens in a month from now when the meetings get postponed due to something 'more important' or the intranet falls behind on the latest news.

Myskillcamp is here to give you actionable steps to create a proactive learning culture that sticks.

Lunch & Learn

...Because everyone likes free food! These are voluntary meetings over lunchtime where everyone (regardless of department) can informally talk, collaborate in the workplace and learn from each other. Lunch is provided by the managers to entice people to join and spend time with each other. This kind of meeting not only builds trust, but drives personal development.

However, given the sharp increase in home-working recently, not only may these informal meetings be off the table, but (as you probably have experienced) virtual meeting fatigue has set in. This has made, 'fun virtual hangouts' feel more like a chore. So how can we still create this company culture without the face to face element?

Mentoring and Coaching

Being a leader and ally can still be achieved even through virtual means. You'll get to know your employees' needs, work motivations, desires and skills, therefore being able to build trust, collaboration, and increase their willingness to learn. Although coaching is short-term and mentoring is long-term, both can be realised by having an active interest in employees. Achieve this with a mixture of catch-ups, asking questions, and trusting them with new tasks that show their hard and soft skills.

Content Curation

Having employees send you a link concerning a new feature or skill is one thing, but what about a knowledge library, where new chapters of learning are being added constantly? This is the beauty of content curation. Not only is this a 'lockdown-friendly' idea, but there are many platforms that facilitate this culture. From messaging platforms like Slack, to creating groups in Facebook, it has never been simpler to cultivate a sharing culture.

However, myskillcamp is here to make it a step leap easier: By joining together the act of learning new skills, and the collaborative, sharing company culture found on messaging platforms. Offering over 300,000 courses in eight languages with the opportunity to share, discuss and annotate; this Learning Experience Platform is not only a place to share thoughts and knowledge, but to discover courses that make each employee more knowledgable.

The result

By building this 'learning organisation' company culture from following the steps we set out, you'll soon find that the archaic practise of HR Departments cobbling together courses and trying to engage learners is a thing of the past. Instead you'll have a company full of eager-to-learn employees that share proactively, unhindered by knowledge hoarding or distrust.

Want to see how myskillcamp can help you join together the passion to learn with the act of sharing knowledge? Why not try a demo and take your company to the next level.

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