4 ideas to improve information sharing within your organization
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- Start with an audit: which tools and processes are in place, and where information gets stuck.
- Ask the team, not only management: they share information every day and they see the friction first.
- Build the information sharing strategy from the audit and that feedback, not from a hunch.
- Choose the tools last, against the goals the strategy sets.
- Favour a single space holding conversations, documents and company news over information scattered across inboxes and disconnected apps.
The ability to quickly, easily, and securely share information within your organization is a must if you want your team (and company!) to perform at the highest level.
But even though effective information sharing is important, not every organization has the systems, processes, and procedures in place to enable that information sharing.
So the question is, if your company is one that struggles with effective information sharing, how, exactly, can you take your information sharing to the next level, and improve your overall operations in the process?
Let’s take a look at four ideas you can use to improve information sharing within your organization:
Audit your current information sharing practices
You can’t enhance information sharing within your organization if you don’t have a clear idea of how it is currently managed, and what areas offer opportunities for improvements.
Which is why the first step to improving information sharing within your organization is to audit your current information sharing practices.
Take stock of how information is currently shared within your organization. What systems and processes do you have in place for sharing information? What tools or software are you using? And, most importantly, what gaps or bottlenecks exist with your current practices that prevent information from being shared quickly, securely, and efficiently across your organization?
Also read: How New Ways of Working Are Transforming Knowledge Management and Sharing
When it comes to information sharing, having a clear picture of where you’re starting from can help you determine where you want to go and how to get there. So before you take any steps to improve information sharing at your company, make sure to do a thorough audit of the practices you currently have in place to share information.
Ask your team for feedback
As a leader, you have ideas about how information sharing can be improved within your organization. But while leadership and management’s insights are (of course!) important, there are people with even keener insights for how information can be better shared across your company, and that’s your team.
Because they’re the people that are actually sharing information back and forth every day, your team are the people who are most impacted by your information sharing policies, processes, and procedures, and, as such, they’re the best people to ask for feedback about how those policies, processes, and procedures could be improved.
Send out employee surveys and/or schedule focus groups to gather your employees’ insights on what’s working about your current information sharing processes, what’s not working, and what they’d like to see changed. Then, use those insights to drive your strategy around improving information sharing (more on that in a second).
The point is, your employees are the people sharing information within your company. So, if you want to improve information sharing within your organization, you’re going to want to get their feedback.
Develop an information sharing strategy
As the old saying goes, “failing to plan is planning to fail.” So, if you want to improve information sharing within your organization, a non-negotiable step is developing a strategy around information sharing.
Use the information you gathered during your internal audit and your employee feedback efforts to drive your information sharing strategy. For example, during your audit and feedback efforts, you might conclude that there are no systems in place to share important, relevant information to the entire company, in which case, you’d want to focus your strategy on creating a framework to quickly and efficiently disseminate information across the organization. For example, if your company is still using a mailroom to deliver postal mail, consider implementing a virtual mailroom instead.
Or maybe your employees deliver feedback but they have a hard time finding the information they need, when they need it, which impedes information sharing. In that situation, you would want your strategy to center around improving your organizational systems so that employees can more easily access (and share!) information.
Also read: 5 Ways to Encourage Internal Knowledge Sharing and Why It Matters
Bottom line? You need a plan to better information sharing within your company, so before you make any big moves to overhaul your information sharing processes, make sure to take the time to create that plan.
Invest in the right tools
Your strategy will give you a clear plan for how you want to improve information sharing within your organization, but you’ll need the right tools to put that plan into action.
Look at the goals outlined in your information sharing strategy, and then do your research to find the tools and software that will help you achieve those goals.
For example, let’s say one of your goals is to make it easier for employees to find and share information related to a specific project, without having to search hundreds of emails in their inbox. In that case, you’d want to look for a platform that organizes communication and information sharing by groups, teams, or projects.
Or maybe your goal is to streamline what information different teams and employees have access to at any given time (which can help keep employees from feeling overwhelmed as well as prevent important information getting lost in the shuffle). In that situation, you’d want to look for a software that allows you to customize the way different teams and users view and receive information.
Talkspirit offers many features that can help you achieve all those goals, such as an integrated chat that allows you to create different groups, video conferencing and webinars, a secure drive to store all you data, a newsfeed and a home page to share information with all your employees, and customize the content they have access to.
The point is, the right information sharing platform, like Talkspirit, is the key to improving information sharing within your organization, so make sure to invest in the right tools that will help you hit your information sharing goals.
Also read: Streamlining Information Sharing with Talkspirit: The Story of Gîtes de France
In order for companies to function at maximum efficiency and productivity, effective information sharing is a must. With these tips, you have everything you need to better share information with your employees, and take your company to the next level in the process.
Are you looking for more best practices to improve information sharing within your organization? Contact one of our experts to receive personalized support throughout your project:
FAQ
With an audit. You cannot improve information sharing within your organization without a clear idea of how it is currently managed, and where the opportunities for improvement are. Take stock of the systems, the processes and the tools actually in use.
The team, not only management. They are the people actually sharing information back and forth every day, so they are the ones most affected by the policies, processes and procedures in place, and the ones with the keenest insight into what fails.
Because failing to plan is planning to fail. The strategy is built from the audit and the employee feedback: if neither turned up any system for sharing important information company-wide, that gap becomes a goal.
Last. The strategy gives you a clear plan for what you want to improve; the tools come after, chosen against the goals it sets. Research them from those goals rather than the reverse.
Tools that organise information by group, team or project rather than by inbox: a team chat, a newsfeed for company-wide announcements, a shared document space, and a search that covers all of it. Talkspirit brings those together in a single platform.
Against the audit you started from. Time spent looking for a document, the share of employees who say they receive the information they need, the share of a topic that lives in a shared space rather than in email threads: the same internal survey repeated at intervals gives you the trend.
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