A guide to

knowledge
management
in today’s digital
workplace
Knowledge 23% of employees say it takes 5–10 minutes
to access the latest version of a standard
23%
management is template or document.
– State of the Digital Workplace Survey, 2018, Igloo Software.

mission critical
32% of employees have avoided sharing a
In today’s workplace, there’s more information document with a colleague because it would take
available to employees than ever before. But it’s only too long to find/access. 32%
valuable if everyone knows where to find it and how – State of the Digital Workplace Survey, 2018, Igloo Software.

to use it — and often they don’t.

Knowledge lives everywhere, What is “knowledge management”?

and you can’t afford to lose it Knowledge management is the way
you capture, store, and share knowledge.
At any organization, regardless of size or industry, knowledge is currency. It includes both The knowledge management process
traditional data and documents as well as everything your employees know. We call these handles all types of information by:
two types of knowledge explicit and tacit.
• Finding it wherever it resides
1. Explicit knowledge includes data, information, documents, records, and files stored • Selecting what is worth preserving
across your organization. It’s relatively easy to manage and consolidate.
• Organizing it into meaningful categories
2. Tacit knowledge is people-generated, encompassing employee experience,
• Distilling it down to its most useful,
feedback, dialogue, and ideas. Unlike explicit knowledge, it’s harder to collect
accessible form
and organize. It requires more complex knowledge-transfer tools, such as those
that promote dialogue, ideation, and the recording of best practices. • Presenting it in the context of solutions
to business challenges
This process transforms information
into a vital tool for enhancing employee
productivity and understanding. A proper
knowledge management platform should:
• Allow colleagues from across the
organization to gain insight from each
other’s experiences
• Foster problem-solving, learning,
strategic planning, and decision-making
• Protect intellectual assets from decay
and build organizational intelligence

2
Trends affecting
knowledge management
The nature of work has changed. More and more employees work away from the office using
their preferred apps, creating geographical and technological divisions within organizations.
This lack of cohesion has made knowledge management a significant challenge.

43% of American employees work remotely

at least part of the time. 43% Harness your collective wisdom,
– Gallup

or fall behind
The stakes are high for organizations struggling with knowledge management. If the

30 The average employee uses

wealth of information in your organization is centralized and easily accessible to everyone,
it will drive innovation and productivity. If it remains scattered and hard to access,
DIFFERENT 30 different cloud applications.
APPLICATIONS its potential will be wasted.

When you bring together the knowledge that currently lives in apps, hard drives,
desk drawers, and your employees’ heads, you can put it to work solving your organization’s
most pressing problems.
87% of global employees are not
engaged in their work. 87% The U.S. productivity growth rate has slowed
– Gallup
to just 1.1%, the lowest since the early 1980s.
- US Dept. of Labor

Organizations are also burdened by the increasing onslaught of information.

Employees can become overwhelmed trying to find the right information to do their
jobs efficiently. The result: workers spend a growing number of hours each week By focusing on the following four key domains, you can create
searching apps and inboxes for what they need. optimal conditions for successful knowledge management.

Employees spend an average By 2020, there will be

of 9 hours each week
searching for information.
30x more digital information
and 60x more files. 1 Demonstrate
management buy-in 3 Put the right knowledge
in the right place

– McKinsey – IDC

2 Foster a knowledge-
sharing culture 4 Use technology to optimize
knowledge management

4
 1

Demonstrate 5 ways to demonstrate the ROI of

improved knowledge management
management buy-in If you track changes in the following factors, the value should be clear:
1. Time spent hunting for information and sorting through email.
To be effective, knowledge management cannot be an afterthought or an add-on.
2. Work duplication.
It requires deliberate and systematic effort across an organization – especially from the top.
3. Reading of, and compliance with, policies.
Fostering a knowledge-sharing environment requires consistent, visible management support.
4. User engagement with organizational news and other content.
Some key strategies for leadership include:
5. New idea submissions.
Assigning accountability for Removing workload and technology
knowledge management in specific barriers for employees to share
areas across the organization. knowledge and ideas.

Defining clear policies on Recognizing and celebrating good

information governance. knowledge sharing practices.

Treat knowledge as capital

Lost knowledge is lost capital. Ensure you have formal structures
and policies in place to effectively capture, organize, store, and share
company knowledge.

Measure your success

It’s important to monitor your organization’s progress towards creating an optimal
environment for knowledge management. Use analytics, collect user feedback from
employees on the ease and efficiency of knowledge management systems, and discuss
your strategy with industry peers. Use what you learn to adjust, move forward,
and repeat the process.

6
 2

Put the right knowledge Solutions-driven knowledge

in the right place
While capturing knowledge in all its forms is crucial, the way you organize
and present it to employees is just as important.
Before designing any knowledge management strategy, consider your unique
organizational structure and employees’ workstyles (such as how they search for and
share information). Preserving and sharing knowledge should be an intuitive, efficient,
and enjoyable process that employees will want to incorporate into their workflows.
The key to promoting increased productivity is putting knowledge in the context of
solutions to real organizational challenges.
management
Information only becomes knowledge when it’s made insightful and actionable. In other
words, information needs to formed in a way that helps people solve business problems.
For marketing and all of their stakeholders, this could come in the form of a Brand Portal,
where official assets can be retrieved and new requests submitted. For HR and their
stakeholders, this can take the form of an Employee Handbook, Onboarding Center,
or Policy area, where critical information is made self-service and questions can be
submitted. Whoever the owner and the audience, focusing knowledge in a manner
that addresses their specific business challenges will enable people to be more productive
and engaged.

Make it fun and easy

Knowledge management solutions should be social, engaging,
The pitfalls of weak and simple to use. Whether it’s a company-wide policy discussion or
a party-planning committee, ensure there are intuitive publishing tools
knowledge management as well as mechanisms to capture and share the dialogue.

Information scattered Frequent, repeated

across teams, departments, information requests —
and individual apps. often to the wrong people.

Uncertainty about the Duplicated work.

credibility of content.

8
 3 4

Foster a knowledge- Use technology to

sharing culture
Creating a culture of knowledge sharing in a highly dispersed digital workplace can be hard.
Direct, daily interaction with colleagues is declining. But with tools that support the open
exchange of current, trusted information, organizations can expand the opportunities for
interaction beyond the water cooler and boardroom.
Here are a few effective methods here for building a culture of knowledge sharing
in the digital workplace:
1. Process
Embed process into employees’ daily work lives where they can quickly and easily share
stories, ideas, and lessons learned across the whole organization.
2. Peer and Manager Recognition
Encourage sharing of knowledge through commenting and re-sharing
across channels. Celebrate stories of the organization, its people, and its customers;
publish important decisions to align people to mission and vision, and to keep a history
of decision rationale.
3. Ideation and Feedback
Create a digital workplace environment that has easy mechanisms for submitting ideas
and feedback openly. Allow it to spark dialogue, excitement, and change.
optimize knowledge
management
Remote work and the explosion of apps in the workplace have created a chaotic landscape
for knowledge management.
While best-of-breed enterprise apps can boost individual productivity in the short term,
they’re counterproductive when it comes to the broader dissemination of knowledge.
Multiple apps used in isolation create multiple siloes of hard-to-access content.
But the right technology can cut across these knowledge divides and create a single
source of truth. A central digital destination can surface content from apps and third-party
enterprise systems, and place them in the context of related content and conversation.
The downside of standalone apps in the enterprise
Without a unified destination for sharing information, knowledge can
get trapped in hard drives and file-sharing apps. Only a limited group of
people can access it, and the file hierarchy is often hard to navigate. The
result: stagnant, unused information.

Recognize that knowledge sharing can be social

Forums, polls, microblogs, and other features encourage knowledge
sharing and storytelling in a fun way that people already use in their
personal life. Don’t forget that employees expect consumer-like Powerful search capabilities are key
technology experiences in their work tools.
A unified digital destination with a strong, centralized search function allows employees
to find what they need, fast. Search is critical to the whole digital workplace experience,
with multiple benefits for knowledge management and productivity, including:
Increased visibility Reduced time Decreased volume
of all types of searching across of emails and
knowledge. multiple apps messaging.
or systems.

10
A digital destination Challenge

for knowledge
Low employee uptake
of business-critical
information.

management Solution
The Governance
Center keeps
Every digital workplace can benefit from a central employees informed
destination that enables and encourages knowledge exchange. by centralizing
policies and
It’s the place where data, documents, conversations, insight,
procedures, and
and ideas come together to solve core business problems. mitigates risk through
digital signatures.

The Igloo difference

When you build a digital workplace with Igloo, you can:

Embed knowledge exchange into Preserve dialogue in context

your workflows Incorporate apps and systems that
Structure knowledge to solve employees use every day Challenge
specific challenges Provide advanced, centralized search High employee
Promote meaningful storytelling across apps and systems turnover and intensive
training needs.
Make knowledge sharing social Use analytics to monitor trends
and engaging in knowledge sharing
Solution
The Onboarding
Center accelerates
Igloo is the leading provider of time to productivity

digital workplace solutions and can significantly

increase retention.

Igloo enables organizations to move beyond a traditional intranet to a digital destination

that brings knowledge, people, and resources together to solve critical business challenges.
Based on our experience implementing thousands of workplaces, we’ve combined product
features into an evolving solutions portfolio. Every solution is intuitive, configurable,
and simple to use. These are just a few:

12
Challenge
Weak brand
consistency.

Solution
The Brand Portal
puts all your creative
guidelines and
resources into a
single digital hub,
so everyone can
stay on brand.

Search across all of your file repositories from a single interface

Users can search multiple file repositories (including SharePoint Online,

Get started:
Google Team Drive, Box, and Dropbox) from any location in their digital workplace
with the new, mobile-friendly Igloo search widget. Even better, search results are highly
contextualized to the surrounding content on the page. With this advanced search

Build a roadmap for

capability, employees can dramatically reduce the time spent searching for information.

your digital workplace

At Igloo, we like to say, “Think big. Start small. Scale fast.” You don’t need to solve every
knowledge management challenge you have at once. Identify the most urgent problems,
then choose a few digital workplace solutions that address them. Move on from there to
deploy your solution roadmap.

14
We’re ready when you are
Learn more about how Igloo
digital workplace solutions are
designed for today’s knowledge
management challenges.
Global recognition for Igloo
In the Gartner Magic Quadrant
for 7 years in a row.
Named KM World’s Top 100
companies that matter for
the past 6 years.
Ranked #1 in Enterprise Social
by IDC.
About Igloo
Igloo is a leading provider
of digital workplace
solutions, helping
companies build inspiring
digital destinations for
a more productive and
engaged workforce.
Learn more at:
igloosoftware.com
info@igloosoftware.com
1 877 664 4566
Copyright 2008-2018 Igloo Inc. All rights reserved.
All other company and product names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective holders. 04/18