Knowing how to create a knowledge base for employees is essential in reducing downtime and achieving  higher productivity. With a dynamic knowledge base, employees can have an avenue to connect and with the data that enables them to do their jobs. 

Forbes reports that three-quarters of C-suite executives believe that adopting employee support technologies like a knowledge base will help them become more agile and work faster during the pandemic. 

However, building a comprehensive knowledge base is only half of the battle. Organizations also need to keep their knowledge bases updated to help employees address emerging issues and gain insights into workforce collaboration. This article will provide you with simple yet critical practices in maintaining a knowledge base for your employees to help you become more competitive in a fast-paced remote work industry. 

1. Keep Information Simple

Poor workplace communication is a nagging problem for organizations that exacerbated due to the pandemic. Statistics indicate that 28% of remote employees cite poor information communication as the reason for failing to meet deadlines. 

One way for organizations to resolve this issue is to make their knowledge base content easy to digest. 

Keeping information simple ensures that employees won’t find themselves hung up on a specific issue due to a lack of understanding of technical terms. Start going through all of your content and simplify complex information, or perhaps you can conduct virtual meetings to help users get familiar with technical industry concepts. Either way, organizations must find a way to provide simple information to make their knowledge bases a reliable resource for their employees. 

2. Address Common Questions

Tackling common issues and questions should be the cornerstone of an organization’s knowledge base. Employees from different departments usually encounter similar issues, and addressing them individually can be counterproductive. Addressing common questions helps employees save the trouble of going through a sea of information while simultaneously ensuring faster resolution times.

By empowering employees to deliver support quickly, organizations can differentiate themselves from their competitors, ultimately resulting in improved win rates and satisfied customers. An excellent way of doing this is to create wikis, cases, and frequently asked questions pages on your knowledge base. You can use an internal knowledge base template to develop this content to ensure speed and consistency. 

3. Re-use Knowledge

Every business wants to stimulate growth and innovation, and part of doing that is being able to make faster decisions. An excellent way to speed up the decision-making process is to make effective problem-solving experiences reusable. By reusing knowledge, employees can avoid redundant effort and centralize work processes for increased productivity. 

Reusing business knowledge also prevents information overload and allows employees to deliver better service to customers. A robust knowledge base software solution can help you do all of these things thanks to its ability to collect knowledge-centered approaches in every business aspect and pooling them together for easy access. You can select and compare knowledge management software to find a solution that works well with your employees.

4. Update Knowledge Base with New Content

New issues and problems are inevitable as your organization grows. Therefore, you should ensure that your knowledge base is updated regularly with new content to keep information relevant and help employees do their jobs well. This also prevents employees from delivering incorrect and misleading information that could increase the likelihood of consumers leaving your business because of a sour experience. 

Although there is no one-size-fits-all in updating knowledge bases, it is important that you update and publish articles as soon as there are significant organizational changes. Working closely with your customer support, product marketing, and product management teams is an excellent start in updating your knowledge base since they can document changes easily. You can also check knowledge base examples from your competitors' websites and industry trends to get an idea on the content that needs updating. By updating practice guides and how-to-articles occasionally, you can ensure that your employees have the tools to cater to evolving employee needs at a specific point of their journeys. 

5. Ask Feedback

Asking employee feedback regarding their experience using company knowledge bases is key to unlocking insights into where you need to optimize your documentation. It also eliminates redundant content and ensures that the information can assist employees in their jobs. Often, organizations fill their knowledge bases with several articles without considering whether the content is relevant in the first place. 

While filling your knowledge base with a wealth of content may seem attractive, doing so will likely make it more challenging for employees to find the right information quickly. By collecting employee feedback, you can gain insights on how you can optimize your knowledge base and fix issues before they impact your customers. 

Maintaining a Knowledge Base for Greater Employee Satisfaction

Managing a knowledge base is no easy task and often requires constant collaboration between business executives and employees. One way to ensure effective collaboration in maintaining a comprehensive knowledge base is to take advantage of a policies and procedures management system. One of the leading names in this sphere is Staff.Wiki.

Staff.Wiki is a policies and procedures management system designed to help organizations centralize and control their knowledge. It comes with a customizable user portal wherein you can store all of your policies and procedures to make it easier for your team to view. Staff.Wiki offers a generous 14-day free trial on top of its Cloud, Professional, and Enterprise packages.