Today’s Work from Home (WFH) environment demands that companies keep looking for ways to enhance employee experience. Companies need to enable seamless communication and collaboration to help employees deliver efficiently. Organizations need to enhance employee engagement and help them in their career progression through remote learning and development.
Companies are now leveraging the modern Knowledge Management System (KMS) or Intranet to improve employee experience and workforce productivity. Emerging technologies in communication, collaboration, and analytics are helping companies evolve traditional KMS to meet the needs of today’s employees and customers.
What is a Knowledge Management System (KMS)?
A knowledge management system is an IT system that stores and retrieves knowledge to improve communication and collaboration and enhance employee and customer engagement. Knowledge management systems can be internal and also external.
Internal knowledge management systems refer to the systems within a company to share knowledge among employees. It also helps encourage learning and skills development, support team collaboration, and improve organization efficiency.
External knowledge management systems refer to a system for the dissemination of knowledge to customers about company products and services. It also includes knowledge sharing with prospects and future employees from a learning and branding perspective.
What does KMS include?
There are different types of knowledge management systems, however, they have some common features, which are as follows:
Examples of KMS
Spartan Race is a global leader in obstacle races. Its customer-centric KMS has 40 help centres customized by country and user groups. Artificial Intelligence helps Spartan Race to recommend relevant knowledge to its customers. It analyzed the questions received over chat and integrated a bot to answer FAQs, along with live chat support. Spartan Race leverages data from the bot to improve the content in help centres.
Canva is a graphic design platform whose knowledge management makes it easy to find resources on getting started even for users who are not design-savvy. Canva’s KMS has organized information with simple category titles making it easier for its users to find answers. KMS includes a search bar and simple graphics for commonly asked questions.
Evernote’s KMS has a clear user interface and a simple structure to showcase knowledge. Their main page classifies trending topics and other help topics into two separate sections. The search bar is positioned front and centre to help users find precise help to meet their unique needs.
How to build an effective KMS?
What are the benefits of KMS?
What should your KMS/intranet have?
Defined business objective
The corporate intranet should act as a single source of information for the employees. The key business objectives are as follows:
The foremost objective of KMS is communication. It should allow employees to connect and exchange information easily. The system should help companies to communicate policy updates and important company announcements to all employees.
KMS should be the central repository for storing organisational knowledge that is well categorized. It should also disseminate knowledge to employees based on their access rights.
With WFH, a KMS has become an important means to share information on COVID-19 and health protocols for employees. This is important as companies need to ensure the health of employees and family members to ensure they do not face any resource issues. The KMS should be used to host troubleshooting videos to help employees solve issues that otherwise would have been attended to by the IT department.
The KMS can become an effective employee engagement tool by sharing employee success stories, achievements, and awards. The company can post internal job openings to enhance the engagement level. KMS can be leveraged to stream awareness and fun events to mitigate the negative effects of a lack of in-person meetings.
Key technology specifications
The KMS should be as professional as the company website with an intuitive user interface to promote regular usage by your employees.
Employees may use multiple devices to access the KMS so it should be device agnostic. A cloud-hosted KMS offers fast access, scales quickly, and has a high adoption rate.
Companies host confidential information on the KMS that needs to be protected from hacking, security breaches, and malicious attacks. Companies should use cloud-based KMS for enhanced security.
The KMS creates a unified work environment by integrating with business suites. The company should also plan for third-party integrations such as messaging and survey tools based on their relevance to the business.
The KMS should include tools that enable employees to generate, publish, and share content. This will enhance employee participation and engagement with the system.
Key features
The KMS should create personalized news feeds that correspond to the needs and interests of individual employees.
The KMS should have a smart internal search to enable employees to find information effortlessly. The system should provide relevant categories and tags to enable creators to sort and classify content appropriately. Well-planned metadata will generate relevant search results.
The KMS should include a content recommendation engine to suggest articles or content for further reading by employees. This will help to improve the utility and engagement rate of the system.
Employee directory includes information about employees’ qualifications, work experience, and contact details. The KMS should include functionality to let employees provide additional information such as interest, hobbies, and certifications.
The addition of social features will facilitate the creation of professional and social communities built around common interests.
Conclusion
A Knowledge Management System (KMS) helps companies to improve employee experience and organization effectiveness. It helps to improve employee communication and collaboration leading to greater productivity and efficiency. KMS also helps companies keep employees engaged through online learning and community building. KMS is becoming critical in the company's digital workplace strategy. To learn more about how to create a modern Knowledge Management System or intranet, reach out to us at business@qed42.com.