We often say, "Knowledge is Power!"
But how can knowledge contribute to business innovation?
In the ever-evolving times like this, the only certainty is uncertainty.
Tacit knowledge makes it possible!
A study of employees' tacit knowledge-sharing behaviour reveals that 80% of knowledge in a company is tacit knowledge.
Successful companies distinguish themselves by their ability to create, scale, and disseminate both new and existing knowledge fast. Unfortunately, 80% of the knowledge within a company is tacit knowledge. How many times did an employee from your company leave without sharing any KT to their coworkers, leaving a painful gap in company knowledge? How many people in your company are currently the only ones who know certain tools or systems and if they leave it will be almost impossible to recover the lost knowledge?
What is Tacit Knowledge?
Tacit knowledge, the unspoken expertise held by individuals within an organization, makes up 80% of a company's knowledge base. This article explores:
- What tacit knowledge is and why it's crucial for business innovation
- The challenges of preserving tacit knowledge in the face of employee turnover
- 5 key benefits of harnessing tacit knowledge, including increased productivity and innovation
- Practical strategies for promoting and preserving tacit knowledge in your organization
- How tools like Docsie can help manage and leverage tacit knowledge effectively
Unlock the power of your organization's hidden expertise and gain a competitive edge in today's uncertain business landscape.
Tacit knowledge is all about learning by doing. You can think of it as a knowledge hub containing all the skills, abilities and knowledge you can gather through life experiences. Quite naturally, this knowledge differs from one person to another as it depends on individual subjects and his or her environment.
Tacit knowledge is the undocumented, unspoken knowledge and skills, experiences and insights that are held by individuals within your organization.
Real-life situations often provide us with different examples of tacit knowledge. But what happens in the professional/employment sector?
In the context of an organisation, tacit knowledge is very crucial. Employees gain their abilities, skills and expertise by doing things practically and through onsite training, work placements, internships, etc. If organisations need to reap the benefits of tacit knowledge, the first step is to document the knowledge and ensure proper knowledge management.
Bearers of Tacit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge is an intangible asset. People who hold it are like lore bearers. They know your company lore and pass it down during KT sessions. They have new joiners "shadow" them. It's about power, pride. They learned all of these important company processes, skills and secrets, so why should they share them with other employees? How many times did you join in a new role and found out that people in the company were not willing to share the knowledge of how they do their job? They gave you incomplete KT's, or your manager had to pull people from other teams just to impart parts of that knowledge onto you. Eventually you had to assemble it piece by piece, write your own guides, referencing other peoples guides and KT videos.
Onboarding into a new company, team or project is a painful process. It is made more painful by the Tacit Knowledge holders who refuse to turn it into explicit knowledge. This is by no means a malicious intent. People get busy, they have other responsibilities. Documentation of explicit knowledge is always a secondary task to completion of other "more important" activities.
"Globalization has increased the turnover of skilled employees who resign without transferring their tacit knowledge, which makes up 85% of organizational knowledge." (Walden ScholarWorks).
What is the importance of Tacit Knowledge?
In today's professional world, employers prefer candidates who stand out from the crowd, have a unique perspective and can think out of the box. When your team members develop tacit knowledge, you know they are reliable with important and urgent tasks.
If you are the owner of an organisation, you can also emphasise the importance of tacit knowledge. By giving them appropriate resources and relevant opportunities, you can develop your new hires or existing employees.
As a result of going through examples of tacit knowledge in an organisational setup, professionals can adapt to different professional situations and handle them accordingly. With proper documentation, organisations can promote tacit knowledge thinking company-wide and identify knowledge gaps in its various departments.
Who cares about explicit knowledge?
Explicit knowledge is the backbone of any international organization. It impacts revenue in more than one way.
- It enhances decision-making efficiency
- Improves customer service quality
- Streamlines operational processes
- Facilitates faster training programs
- Supports innovation and development
Finally, it is part of the evidence you need to submit in your compliance audits and reports thus it is essential for compliance documentation.
Having an ability to resolve customer queries quickly, onboard new employees and step by step standard operation procedures for every important process is extremely important for small orgs and huge enterprises alike. It keeps your knowledge assets safe, makes it harder for an employee who leaves to damage your operations and makes it easier for existing employees to learn new job-specific skills. Finally it removes knowledge silos and no one likes knowledge silos except for tacit knowledge bearers who view it as a form of job security.
As per Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends study: "75 per cent of surveyed organisations said that creating and preserving knowledge across evolving workforces is important to their success over the next 12 to 18 months."
Additionally, studies on international joint ventures (IJVs) show that ability to transfer high quality explicit knowledge, can significantly impact the success and performance of your joint ventures. We've seen this first hand with some of our customers being able to open up new assembly lines in Mexico faster. They automated generation of their SOP's (Standard Operating Procedures) by generating them from production site videos, automatically translated them into Spanish and converted them into chatbots. This led to:
- Reduced training time by utilizing chatbots that provide interactive on-demand guidance.
- Increased production speed with clearer and easily accessible SOP's ensuring smoother operation of assembly lines.
- Improved quality control with consistent delivery of operational instructions to reduce human errors and automated policy violation detection using our AI.
- Improved employee satisfaction achieved through simpler learning process that reduced language barriers.
- Achieved greater cost efficiency by reducing time to launch new factories leading to faster time to market.
"Our results show the importance that tie strength, trust, and shared values and systems play in the transfer of tacit knowledge, especially for mature IJVs. Our findings are consistent with Uzzi's tenets: tacit learning is accumulative, assists in explaining explicit knowledge, and is enhanced by social embeddedness." - EconPapers
What are the Benefits of Tacit Knowledge?
There are multiple benefits of tacit knowledge. Let's dive into the top advantages of tacit knowledge:
| Benefits | Importance |
|---|---|
| Experience-based | When your employees learn from each others' experiences, they grow as a team and minimise the existing knowledge gaps. |
| Communicate knowledge | Through proper knowledge management, you can maintain documents and articles and transfer more knowledge among your employees. |
| Beat competitors | Companies can stay ahead of their competitors and utilise the knowledge base to further serve their end users. |
| Increase productivity | As a result of knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer, companies allow employees to gain newer perspectives and promote out-of-the-box thinking. |
| Enhanced organisational innovation | If you practice regular documentation, you open up possibilities for your employees to perform better. |
Examples of Tacit Knowledge
We can understand this form of knowledge by going through the examples of tacit knowledge. Let's dive straight in:
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Leadership: Experienced project leaders use tacit knowledge to handle complex projects. The previous knowledge helps them to understand team dynamics, handle risk reduction strategies, etc.
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Intuition: Intuition, especially for company sales, works as a great boon. From navigating complex customer interactions to handling circumstances logically, people with strong intuition go a long way.
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Hard skills: Whether it is learning a new sport or developing the ability to work with complex software, hard skills help individuals improve their muscle memory and gain hardcore skills.
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Innovation: All excellence begins with innovation. By nurturing innovation and creativity, companies can encourage their employees to use tacit knowledge and learn from practical activities.
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Efficiency: The importance of tacit knowledge lies in the fact that it helps organisations streamline workflows and optimise their processes and systems.
How to Promote Tacit Knowledge in Your Organisation?
It's clear that tacit knowledge is important for an organisation to flourish in terms of increased efficiency and enhanced customer satisfaction.
But how can you encourage documentation and management of knowledge through all your systems and departments? Here are some quick strategies for you to start with:
1. Foster a Learning Environment:
Continuous learning makes a team develop a wide array of strengths and capabilities. Document your current knowledge content and identify the knowledge gaps. Create intentional learning opportunities to close such gaps and guide your team to share information with each other.
2. Provide Mentorships:
Introduce mentorship programmes where juniors can follow their seniors and learn from their working styles, decision-making approaches, etc. New joinees can learn from experienced members and understand how to tackle complex organisational challenges. From performing tasks together to participating in brainstorming sessions - give opportunities for the newcomers to find their way through different projects.
3. Offer Training and Development Opportunities:
One of the greatest benefits of tacit knowledge is that it binds employees as a team and helps the organisation to grow. Prioritise employee training and give them scope to try different projects, difficult assignments, etc. Offer practical exposure in terms of on-the-job training, client handling expertise, etc., so that employees can actually learn while performing tasks and gaining skills.
4. Support healthy discussions:
Disagreements and healthy debates are part of our everyday lives. Encourage collaboration across departments and let teams come together to achieve business goals. Use technology and tools to promote a healthy organisational culture where people can discuss company strategies, policies, etc., and move towards a shared goal. Conduct regular discussion sessions and events where everyone can share their presentations and perspectives on various burning issues within the company.
5. Break Barriers:
While knowledge management is an important aspect of maintaining tacit knowledge, being welcoming to all members, irrespective of their roles and levels, goes a long way in ensuring inclusivity and equality. When it comes to problem-solving, consider suggestions from all departments and make a note of their viewpoints. By having diverse perspectives, you will be able to approach a problem more scientifically. Once you reach a solution, make sure that it is documented and made accessible to all employees.
Preserving Tacit Knowledge
According to recent studies some of the key recommendations for preserving tacit knowledge revolve around:
- Enhancing employee relationships
- Integrating knowledge management systems
- Implementing strategic knowledge retention practices
- Encouraging a knowledge-sharing culture
Employee Relationships
Create organizational culture to help each other in terms of knowledge sharing and then you will be in a position to have good camaraderie. Senior employee fear job security due to which collaboration across teams get hampered.
Knowledge Management Tools
Do you want to ensure proper knowledge management of tacit knowledge? You need to choose the right tools that can help you streamline your thoughts and articulate them in the best possible way.
If you do a quick survey of the market, you will find a wide variety of standardised tools that can help you document your knowledge base. What is important here is to understand the features of the different knowledge management tools and find out the one that can capture tacit knowledge and convey all the relevant information.
Docsie - Features at a glance:
As a documentation tool, Docsie comes with powerful features to help you create, edit, maintain and share your documents. Here are some of the top features of the software:
Enterprise-Grade Documentation
Whether you want to create a document from scratch or wish to export an already existing file, Docsie lets you create documentation, knowledge base, etc.
API Documentation Tool
Helping you to value the importance of tacit knowledge, Docsie lets you automate API docs. From creating to maintaining API documentation, you can help your customers access the required information.
Multiple Versions and Languages
Want to improve your international SEO? Create documents in your language and create multiple versions in the required languages. Deploy seamless updates and have different URLs for documentation updates.
Integration and Embedding
Today, businesses work with a plethora of services and platforms. To ensure proper knowledge transfer, Docsie provides custom and hassle-free integrations with your favourite and most-used tools.
AI language translation
Translate your content with zero effort using the platform's powerful AI capability. Localise your content and gain better visibility of your products and services.
So, if you are struggling with proper documentation and want a reliable platform to unleash the benefits of tacit knowledge, choose Docsie as your software partner and create documents that your customers love!
Final Thoughts
Documenting knowledge plays a significant role in developing and sharing tacit knowledge. When you value the importance of tacit knowledge, you provide insights to individuals to excel in their roles and contributions. Now that you know about the top examples of tacit knowledge, you can share your journey of documenting and sharing this mode of knowledge.
Do you wish to embrace the benefits of tacit knowledge and witness your company reaching greater heights? Use the power of Docsie documentation and write your firm's future using the platform's powerful and exciting features!