Share this article
Changing the way you use insights has impact across your organization
If you want to foster trust and promote a positive knowledge sharing culture in your organization, broadcasting an executive order across the enterprise and hoping people listen is not the way. Alone, this kind of top-down approach rarely leads to any long-term cultural change.
Indeed, the visible support of your leadership is crucial to influencing the knowledge sharing culture in your company. But knowledge sharing culture change actually happens from the bottom-up, starting at the grassroots, operational level, and that’s where insights teams shine.
Why insights teams excel at changing culture
Why do insights teams excel when it comes to culture change? Because insights teams have the power to change employees’ day-to-day knowledge-sharing actions. Insights teams can influence the routine behaviors and practices that embody the company’s shift towards a more collaborative, barrier-free work culture.
So while the direction may be coming from above, insights teams move the needle of culture change on the ground. And when behaviors change at a grassroots level, you’re more likely to see those changes “accepted, embedded, and sustained as a result.”
An insights engagement platform supercharges insights teams’ efforts with repeatable, scalable processes that make influencing knowledge sharing behavior easier and faster.
Why is culture change important?
Culture change is difficult and slow in any organization, but as markets and consumer behaviors evolve, companies have to adapt to best meet their needs. This is why many leaders are making transforming the company’s knowledge sharing culture a top priority. They know a robust knowledge sharing culture is associated with more competitive companies and high productivity savings because business teams have the information they need to work smarter and make better decisions.
3 ways you can change knowledge sharing culture with an insights platform
1. Challenge the status quo by spotlighting subject matter experts.
According to some models of organizational culture change, culture change happens when the usual paradigm is challenged repeatedly. People need to see their assumptions debunked over and over so they can begin to logically change their minds and behaviors.
One of the main barriers to a positive knowledge sharing culture is trust. Employees need to feel confident they’re not jeopardizing their power, jobs, or reputations when they share knowledge.
One way insights teams can challenge employees’ limiting beliefs about knowledge sharing is by spotlighting experts.
Spotlighting experts using an insights platform helps the business challenge the status quo by:
- Reframing individualized attitudes (i.e., “my knowledge is my power”) to a collective narrative “shared knowledge is power.”
- Giving experts the credit and attention they deserve for their hard-won insights while reinforcing individual knowledge-sharing benefits.
- Easing experts’ fears around knowledge misinterpretation by empowering them to lead the interpretation with easy-to-use insights-sharing tools.
- Unifying remote teams with easy access to multi-disciplinary knowledge and experts.
By consistently spotlighting and celebrating subject-matter experts on your insights platform, the business repeatedly sees examples of positive knowledge sharing, which challenges old, unhelpful assumptions.
Pro tip: Experts can use your insights platform’s storytelling tools to share “knowledge stories” from a body of research or highlight competing theories to demonstrate the nuance in market research. This can drum up curiosity, build trust, and inspire people to dig into more insights on your insights platform.
2.Transform daily rituals and routines with easy searching.
Make no mistake. Transforming how people search for knowledge in your organization is one of the biggest, most influential day-to-day behavioral shifts you can make to knowledge sharing culture at your organization. If you optimize day-to-day search routines and make searching fun, you’ll facilitate smarter teams from the bottom-up.
The problem is, many knowledge management platforms aren’t built to engage your businesspeople in a way that’s meaningful and easy to them. Most knowledge management platforms’ search results are difficult to consume—long lists of documents to sort through, no expert spotlights or curated knowledge zones that synthesize answers to your stakeholders’ most burning business questions, and limited AI functionality to connect the dots between your knowledge assets. The result? Your business people bounce, and they don’t come back.
An insights engagement platform helps transform daily search routines from time-consuming goose chases that squander your team’s productivity to easy self-service insights that empower quality decisions across the business.
3.Build a “know what you know” culture by dissolving knowledge silos.
A culture of “knowing what you know” is the opposite of lost knowledge, expensive research duplication, and poor decision making. It’s where your employees easily and quickly find, compile, and understand your organization’s knowledge on a topic and how that knowledge applies to their problem.
It’s a fundamental shift in your company’s knowledge-sharing paradigm. Instead of this familiar story:
❌ “Our only option is to commission new research because it’s impossible to track down prior knowledge across business units in the time we need it.”
Your employees lean into a new belief about themselves and the organization as a whole:
✅ “We easily know what we know, so we’re quicker, more efficient, and more agile in our decision making.”
L’Oréal challenged knowledge silos in their organization by bringing all their knowledge assets into a single, easy-to-use insights platform, which they launched under the theme “if only we knew what we know.” They rolled out their insights platform to over 40,000 employees, half their workforce, and now, instead of a siloed-knowledge culture, the business is building a positive knowledge sharing culture.
Change your company’s knowledge sharing culture with an insights engagement platform
If insights managers want to bust through old assumptions and inhibitive “this-is-the-way-we-do-things” beliefs when it comes to sharing knowledge in your organization, then an insights engagement platform can help scale and streamline culture-changing your ideal knowledge sharing practices.
Insights teams are poised to change knowledge sharing culture in their organizations from the bottom-up by leveraging their insights engagement platform to transform day-to-day practices that build the company knowledge sharing culture you want.
If you’re interested in learning about how an insights engagement platform can help your organization change its knowledge sharing culture, please reach out to our team at Market Logic.
