New challenges need entirely new ways of thinking: ideas matter. An internal wiki takes into account an employee’s ideas, skills, experience, and opinion. When staff works collaboratively to create content relevant to their work, processes and goals become more aligned.
No successful organization runs successfully by discouraging employees from seeking a helping hand. It encourages staff to work together to solve problems across departments, organizational levels, and functions.
This article will explore what an internal wiki is, why your startup needs it, and tips to improve its effectiveness and foster connections internally.
An Internal Wiki
The secret to phenomenal startup success is creating a forward-looking workplace that fosters inclusivity, flexibility and is deeply rooted in connection. The internal wiki is a knowledge-sharing website that allows employees to do just that.
In fact, a study by McKinsey in 2012 revealed that, on average, 9.3 hours per workweek are spent searching for answers. That means 9.3 of valuable hours are spent contributing zero value to your startup.
What does this mean? Your team finds critical company information by scouring dozens of email threads, slack conversations, and disconnected documents to stay up-to-date. Work gets duplicated, and your team is stuck doing the same repeated, unnecessary work. That’s time-wasting.
That’s what a shared knowledge website – a wiki, attempts to solve. It streamlines the internal knowledge sharing and collaboration pipeline. It helps your team be more productive by allowing them to maintain relevant content for the startup.
Startups need an Internal Wiki
Your startup needs an internal wiki to build teams, reach goals, and keep the work and efficiency flowing. The internal wiki is a proven tactic to boost team productivity and efficiency in any work environment.
Keep content accurate and updated
Accuracy is no joke, for whatever industry. The way teams share information in the workplace has not changed this much or this quickly since ‘emails’ became a thing. The workplace is more plugged in than ever, and there are more people to loop in across multiple geographical locations.
Information sharing is fast turning into a frustrating game of finding the needle in a haystack. This is more than just broadcasting everything to everyone. Keeping your team buzzing with the latest is essential. This is what an Internal Wiki does.
The internal wiki gets the correct information in front of the right people. You provide instant accessibility of the information to the greater team, and the internal wiki organizes everything. So anyone can find what they’re most interested in. A wiki is only as relevant if it is regularly consulted and updated.
Create and share company information on an internal wiki to run down the employee onboarding checklist faster. Integrate the wiki seamlessly with daily workflow and enable your team to collaborate and update real-time information.
Your team can save time by accessing information relevant to the unique problems they are trying to solve. It improves clarity with your startup because everyone sees the whole picture. If your startup is losing a lot of information under email threads, it is time to commit everything under a wiki’s long-term memory.
Faster new employee on-boarding
This is a no-brainer! You have little time and need to get training for new team players done as quickly as possible, efficiently, and cost-effectively. That is why you need an internal wiki for your startup, to help you identify and fill knowledge gaps that can hurt your startup.
An internal wiki allows you to close such gaps in real-time by setting up a tailored onboarding plan for every new hire. After day one, new employees are bound to forget more than 70 percent of everything they learned. Worrying, isn’t it?
Break down the forgetting curve and enhance onboarding to increase performance. The internal wiki enables startup founders to provide information at the right time to each learner. Besides, that means decreased time spent on training, increased knowledge, and employee engagement.
It automates the training and briefing process. The idea is to create a knowledge-sharing platform that translates into faster onboarding and faster performance. Making onboarding new talent anything but boring by allowing the students to rule the curriculum.
How you train the new talents defines everything about your startup. Bring the team together to share information with synergy throughout the organization. It will help eliminate information duplication, unnecessary time-wasting.
Consolidated and retention of company knowledge
You wouldn’t think of using a screwdriver on a nail, would you? It is the same for knowledge sharing. You can’t keep retaining company information under email threads and attachments.
Ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Set up an internal wiki to keep your productivity pipeline moving. Customize the wiki for your team no matter the kind of work they do.
The internal wiki is your company knowledge pipeline on autopilot. You should automate the capture of critical information into the pipeline for team access when it suits them. Your team can access the information they need alongside the email threads for the context they need.
Rebuild the knowledge sharing and retention pipeline from the ground up to make your team brilliant at what they do. Design it for those who want to be the best. Let them get to the information they care about most as quickly as possible.
The knowledge-finding process – startup, search, mining – will be blazing fast and effective. Be effective and, ultimately, brilliant with how you share and retain company knowledge through setting up a wiki.
Get everything done faster, manage information more effectively, get responses with brilliant timing, and improve job satisfaction and employee well-being. That’s why your startup needs an internal wiki.
Final words
Bring more inclusivity and flexibility to your team –no matter the profession. The internal wiki is an opportunity to reinvent the way you work. That means a genuine shot at changing working norms – for better performance and employee productivity. Join the knowledge revolution by commenting below!
Sources
https://www.getguru.com/reference/what-is-an-internal-wiki
https://www.nuclino.com/solutions/internal-wiki
https://slab.com/blog/internal-wiki/
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