Organisational Wikis – Build Your Knowledge Base

Okay. So we’ve all grown up watching Dr Phil and Oprah. We all, therefore, are well-versed in the importance of communication; both within a interpersonal relationships and within larger-scale relationships such as that between employers and employees.

Plainly, if we don’t talk to one another, problems don’t get solved, highs and lows aren’t shared and individuals feel isolated. On an interpersonal level, this results in crazy-nuts divorce rates. On an organisational level, it results in wasted resources and high staff turnover.

I promised you a few articles on the outcomes of the HR Futures conference and will dedicate the next few blogs to fulfilling this promise. One of the most fascinating points arising from discussions at the conference concerned organisational Wikis. For example: Bearing Point’s Mike2.0 I’ve worked within big companies. I understand the culture of wanting to guard information from employees. Marketing and HR can be protective about how much information they like to be released. For this reason, the concept of having an internal wiki, where staff can blog and interact on forums, adding information to the knowledge base over time, is terrifying. Companies regard it as a threat to cohesion.

It’s kinda a form of censorship, isn’t it? But we all know, suppression of viewpoints, the gagging of folks with bereavement or complaint about a community – it simply doesn’t work.

The use of the wiki within a company can have benefits. Internal communication is enhanced in a cost-effective and time-effective manner:

• A new employee to a company can post a blog introducing themselves, and current employees can welcome them. This is how community is built.

• General information about company direction can be enhanced. This is an extension of the open-door policy championed by many forward-thinking CEOs. However, it is much more time-effective than having a literal open door.

• Where groups within an organisation are working on projects, all members can be kept abreast of developments, thereby making the need to constantly email and CC everything redundant.

• People external to the oragnisation can make contributions to knowledge and projects, thus enhancing extra-organisational links and relationships.

• A well-used wiki can allow people to work from home. The advantages of this are enormous for work-life balance and for cost-cutting.

As a society, we need to shrug off this constant need to be right, to protect incoming and outgoing information. One of the main problems with how organisations manage staff concerns the way communication takes place. It is often seeped in censorship and riotously funny officespeak. Wikis allow for an open and honest discussion within a society. The discussion may go places that are uncomfortable. Information exchanged may not always be “correct”, but this is most certainly offset by the enhanced relationships between people and the speed and efficiency of relaying messages through this approach.