How much time do you spend repeating yourself?
In the fast-growing world of SaaS, you’re probably talking to new employees relatively often, and explaining things to them that you’ve already explained to their coworkers before.
It’s not a particularly draining task as you’re probably talking to interesting people and it’s never exactly the same twice, but when you stop and think about all the times it’s happened, and then multiply by all the people in your company that new hires have to look to for support, the hours add up very fast.
That’s why more and more companies these days are turning to internal knowledge bases as key parts of their internal employee support systems.
In today’s article, you’ll learn exactly why that is, as well as how you can set up an internal knowledge base for your own company’s use.
Benefits of an Internal Knowledge Base
As mentioned in the introduction, an internal knowledge base saves your company time, and time is money.
Each time someone is interrupted with a quick question, their work concentration flow is broken and they have to kind of start from scratch again. Time is spent answering the question, then thinking about how to get back on track, then actually getting back on track.
The goal is to set up a single point of reference that everyone in the company can turn to when they need their questions answered.
And the point is self-sufficiency, because this makes it so that nobody is pestering others for easy answers when they can find it themselves.
Plus, everybody makes mistakes. It’s no fault of yours if you say that memos should be forwarded to Bob Johnson when they should actually go to Rob Johnson. But it does cause a holdup and probably some embarrassment when those mistakes happen.
Since nobody’s perfect, even employees that have been with the company for a long time, it just makes sense to have a central reference point of all the company’s policies and procedures.
An internal knowledge base can even act as a shared drive or enhanced wiki in a way. You can attach files, photos and videos so that each article is spiced up with a bit of multimedia. This is achievable with cloud document solutions such as Google Drive, but with that kind of thing you often have to wrestle with uncooperative organization and search features – not the kind of slowdown you need or want.
Finally, an internal knowledge base simply keeps you more organized and keeps everybody more informed as they add to it. Much like how writing a crib sheet before a test makes you retain the material even better than cramming, adding to and consistently revising a knowledge base keeps everyone informed about all of the company procedures involved.
Let’s now take a quick look at how best to organize an internal knowledge base.
Your Internal Knowledge Base Structure
When it comes time to figuratively lay pen to paper, you can choose between any of the common knowledge base software, such as Document360.
First, make an outline of what you want to accomplish with the knowledge base and what you want to use it for. It shouldn’t take the place of a CRM, for instance, and many knowledge bases aren’t HIPAA compliant so you technically shouldn’t be putting sensitive information up on there.
The structure of your knowledge base depends on what you’re going to use it as.
Are you going to use your internal knowledge base as a directory, with pages about the minutiae of dealing with particular clients?
In that case, you’ll want to probably arrange your articles into sections based on the client’s specifications. If you’re an insurance broker, for instance, you might break client companies down into large groups, small groups, and individuals, and then also arrange them into geographical region or industry.
Each client page won’t look like a CRM with lists of current tasks, but it will be a place for context about the company. It might describe the reasons why this client is especially valuable despite all the work it takes to maintain them, for instance, or the history of your company’s relationship with them. This kind of information is excellent for new hires to get a background on exactly what the clients really are, beyond just numbers on a screen.
Or perhaps you’re doing something else entirely, like using your internal knowledge base as a company handbook with information about paid sick leave, days off, performance review schedules and so on.
In that case, you’d put different sections in corresponding to different things your employees will need to know. What are the benefits? How do I get started with my health plan? Who is responsible for taking out the trash in the kitchen?
Experiment with different layouts and organizations. Since the search bar is the way most people are going to access your knowledge base, you can often just rearrange articles according to what you wish without affecting the flow of information to your readers.
This reorganization can even lead to better information management, as in many businesses there are different policies and procedures for different locations or different departments. By segregating your knowledge base articles by tier or location, you can grant or revoke access to different users for different sections and avoid cluttering up the Admin knowledge base with the Intern ones. When some articles overlap, they’ll appear in both because they’re relevant.
Of course, keeping your articles relevant is a trick of its own.
Proper Knowledge Base Writing Style
If you’ve written documentation or done any kind of technical writing before, you might find that writing an internal knowledge base comes quite naturally to you.
There are three things to keep in mind when writing each article: the length, the clarity, and the helpfulness.
First off, each of your articles should be relatively short – in fact, the shorter the better. If you can get the same message across in fewer words, then do so. This is because no matter how fast your employees read, if they have to read more words in order to get to the same conclusion, it’s going to take them longer than if you spent the time originally writing as concisely as you could.
Remember, your goal here is to save employees time. Put the most salient information right at the top, and any other extra details can go underneath or in a separate long-form document if absolutely necessary.
Second, your knowledge base is not the time to show off your writing skills. Your English teacher might have taken points off for repetitive writing, but if you have ten knowledge base articles that all follow the same format, then it just means you’ve found a good format.
Keep your writing to a high school reading level, barring of course any specialized vocabulary for your own business. Try to avoid “business-like” figures of speech such as “circle back” or “on the same page.”
Clear and direct sentences mean that people will be able to follow your instructions to the letter every time without misinterpreting. It’ll also be strongly appreciated by anybody in your company speaking English as a second language.
Finally, make sure that each of your articles actually guides the reader to a clear and actionable conclusion. It’s an easy mistake to make to slip into a roundabout way of explaining things with lots of extra detail and backstory before actually telling the reader what to do.
Remember, they’re reading help docs because they need help, nothing more. As soon as the help docs don’t do the job, they’re back to asking other people for help in the same way that you wanted to avoid before.
If you can, try to come up mentally with a one-sentence summary of each article. If that should prove too difficult, it might be a sign that you need to break one article into multiple in order to cover each point in its own specific section (which of course can be searched for with tags and titles).
Updating and Maintaining Your Knowledge Base
Just as your company is not a static entity, neither should your knowledge base be a one-time creation.
Performing a knowledge base audit is a necessary task that should ideally happen every quarter or so – of course depending on how many changes are actually made.
An external knowledge base should tend to be updated more than an internal one just because your product is likely to change more than your internal company information. And yet, there are always little changes going on, especially with the kind of rapid growth and acquisition that happens a lot in today’s business world.
The normal updates that should happen are fairly obvious – each time something changes, be sure to go to the relevant article and update it with the new information. (If there is no relevant article, it’s a good time to make one.)
However, what happens if you just mentioned something in several articles (such as copying Bob Johnson) and then it changes slightly (to Rob Johnson)? That’s where the tagging and search features, like those found in Document360, come in. Search for all of the words related to the old entity and look at each article for ways to update it to the new entity.
Lastly, figuring out who should have a part in creating and maintaining your knowledge base is an important decision as well. If this duty is assigned to just one person, it’s likely that their writing style will remain consistent throughout all the pages, and there won’t be any confusion due to inconsistent terminology.
However, it also might end up being too much work for one person to take on, and they might not choose topics that have a lot of importance to people playing other roles in the company. When those people search for the information they need, well, you’re back to the old problem of asking others for information.
Try your best to have people from all over the company contribute to either the construction or the maintenance of the knowledge base. As people use it, they can rate articles based on helpfulness and add comments or private suggestions to alter the content of each section. With this kind of collaboration, it’s easy to create a beautiful resource as a team.
Conclusion
What are the next steps you’re going to take to overhaul your company’s knowledge management?
Plenty of knowledge base solutions offer free trials for you to test out the features and the ease of use for a short time before committing to signing up. Check out the training and assistance available to the users of your favorite knowledge base provider, and before long you’ll be up and running with a top-tier internal knowledge base of your own.
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