Knowledge Sharing
The process of exchanging information, skills, and expertise among individuals or teams within an organization to improve collective understanding and performance.
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What is Knowledge Sharing?
Knowledge sharing is the act of passing information, skills, and expertise between people or teams within an organization. It might look like a veteran employee walking a colleague through a tricky process, someone writing up how they solved a problem, or simply making hard-won expertise available to others. The whole point is to spread useful information so the organization as a whole benefits, rather than just the folks who originally figured things out.
When knowledge sharing works well, it transforms individual expertise into organizational capability. Say one person discovers a more effective way to handle customer complaints. Through information sharing, the entire support team can adopt that approach. This prevents scenarios where only one person knows how to perform critical tasks, something that tends to create bottlenecks and unnecessary risk.
Organizations that make knowledge sharing a priority usually solve problems faster, bring new hires up to speed more efficiently, and maintain continuity when people switch roles or move on. It really comes down to the difference between tribal knowledge trapped in people's heads versus information anyone can tap into when they need it.
Key Characteristics of Knowledge Sharing
- Bidirectional: Effective knowledge sharing flows in multiple directions. It's not just top-down from management or senior staff. Pretty much everyone has something worth contributing.
- Accessible: Shared knowledge has to be easy to locate and understand when people actually need it. A document buried in someone's email inbox doesn't really count as shared knowledge. A well-organized knowledge base makes this possible.
- Practical: The most useful shared knowledge is stuff people can act on. Step-by-step processes, real-world examples, and concrete solutions tend to help more than abstract concepts.
- Continuous: Knowledge sharing isn't something you do once and forget about. As processes change and new people join, organizations need ongoing systems for capturing and spreading expertise.
- Cultural: Genuine knowledge sharing in organizations requires support from leadership. Building a documentation culture means people need time, appropriate tools, and some incentive to document and share what they know.
Knowledge Sharing Examples
Example 1: Manufacturing Floor
A production supervisor figures out a technique that cuts defects in a welding process. Rather than keeping it to themselves, they record a quick video demonstrating the approach and add it to the company's knowledge base. Now welders across all shifts can learn the improved method, and new hires encounter it during training.
Example 2: Customer Service Team
A support rep works out how to resolve a complicated billing issue and updates the internal knowledge base with the solution. The next time any team member hits that same issue, they can find the answer in seconds instead of spending an hour troubleshooting or passing it up the chain.
Example 3: Software Development
During code review, a senior developer catches a common security vulnerability. They document the pattern in the team wiki along with the right way to handle it. Junior developers learn to sidestep that mistake, and the documentation becomes part of onboarding for new hires.
Knowledge Sharing vs Knowledge Transfer
While these terms are related, they point to different things:
| Aspect | Knowledge Sharing | Knowledge Transfer |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Ongoing collaboration and collaborative learning | Specific handoff of expertise from one person to another |
| Timing | Continuous, woven into daily workflows | Usually triggered by events (retirement, role changes, project handoffs) |
| Direction | Multidirectional among teams | Typically one-to-one or one-to-few |
| When to use | Day-to-day operations, building organizational capability | Succession planning, onboarding, project transitions |
How Glitter AI Helps with Knowledge Sharing
Glitter AI tackles the biggest obstacle to knowledge sharing: the time and effort it takes to create documentation. Subject matter experts can just record their screen while performing a task, and Glitter automatically produces clear, visual step-by-step guides. This makes it practical to capture expertise in the moment, not weeks later when the details have gotten fuzzy.
The visual nature of Glitter's documentation makes shared knowledge easier to absorb. Instead of wading through dense text instructions, team members see exactly what each step looks like. This is particularly valuable for software processes, customer service workflows, and any task where seeing actual screens or actions matters more than reading abstract descriptions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does knowledge sharing mean?
Knowledge sharing means exchanging information, skills, and expertise among people in an organization. It's how teams make individual know-how available to everyone who needs it.
What is an example of knowledge sharing?
A typical example is when a seasoned employee writes up a how-to guide for a complex task and adds it to the company knowledge base. New team members can then learn without requiring one-on-one training.
Why is knowledge sharing important?
It keeps critical information from being locked in one person's head, speeds up problem-solving, smooths out onboarding, and helps the organization avoid losing capability when people switch roles or leave.
How do you encourage knowledge sharing?
Give people time and tools to document their work, acknowledge those who contribute to shared resources, make existing knowledge easy to find, and build documentation into regular workflows instead of treating it as extra work.
What are the barriers to knowledge sharing?
Common barriers include time constraints, lack of documentation tools, concerns about becoming replaceable, uncertainty about what's worth sharing, and organizational cultures that don't value or reward sharing knowledge.
Turn any process into a step-by-step guide