Question

In our parents day, employees worked for a firm for many years. However, in todays environment, employees change jobs much more frequently. Thus, organization must find ways to maintain organizational knowledge. Discuss the strategies organizations are using to capture tacit from employees before they leave the organization.

Answer 1

Answer:

Tacit knowledge is difficult to define with a particular definition. It is gained by experienced day by day. We don’t know what we gained until someone asks about something. It is difficult to share and discuss with everyone. But organizations are using some strategies to capture tacit knowledge from employees and some they should use because it’s beneficial for the organization. Here are some strategies an organization capture tacit knowledge from employees.

1. Create an organizational culture for knowledge sharing:

An organization should establish a culture that they can communicate with each other. Communication is the need for this act. Sometimes they don’t like to share their best ideas with anyone, its good for them. Sometimes they consider themselves an expert. To overcome this situation, you should encourage teamwork. In a team, they will work closely and share their ideas and experience with each other. Help your employees to understand what they are gaining much more than they are giving.

2. Provide incentives:

An organization should create incentives who are participating in knowledge sharing. For valuable knowledge, you should give incentive and if there is no level of knowledge that should not be rewarded. This idea will encourage the employees to participate in a knowledge-sharing contest. You can get many ideas from employees, in other words, tacit knowledge.

3. Meetings:

When a new project comes in an organization, mostly organization called a meeting to discuss the project- work strategies, objectives, sorted team, deliverables. There is a brainstorm session also conduct to share employee's best ideas for that project. Some organizations conduct meetings for analysis before and after completion project, it is very helpful to gather best practices and learn from failures.

4. Workplace Collaboration:

This helps in effective knowledge sharing and management. An organization should use collaborative suites: Basecamp, teamwork.com, etc. to follow the processes. Encourage employees to share their knowledge on public platforms like Tacitkey, Github, Stack Exchange. Social messenger like WhatsApp, Telegram help record informal discussions at the workplace.

5. Professional and Social Networks:

Large scale organization uses professional networks like LinkedIn and premium features like LinkedIn Elevate to have sharing employees knowledge in an unusual tacit knowledge-sharing platform. Every employee of the organization has a profile that explains what he/she does in the organization. Every employee can share her/his experience or knowledge as a status update, articles or share information.

6. Training (Mentorship programs):

An organization should encourage senior employees to train for better performance and share their knowledge, ideas with them. Invite experts to talk about a particular concept and share real-life examples with employees. Assign a mentor for an employee to train new employee, he will tell how he should work in the organization to fulfill organizational goals.