A situation occurs with any business that requires a process of deliberate attention in relation to a knowledge gap. This knowledge gap can adversely affect the performance of specific employees and possibly hurt your business.
Your established employees have a level of knowledge and information that helps them perform well and benefit your business. However your newer employees may have a lower level of knowledge and information within your business. How do you deal with this to make your employees more effective and close the knowledge gap? How do you help your business in relation to this?
Many times managers and owners have the newer people interact closely with one or more long time employees to help with the process of exposing them to additional knowledge and information within the company. Some of the knowledge and information within the business may not be evaluated on a continuing basis. This can make some of this knowledge and information that is being shared with newer employees not completely what is needed.
There needs to be someone, or a group of people within your business, that is responsible for coordinating the acquisition of knowledge within our company and the distribution of this knowledge and information to employees. Asking questions is important. Some questions to ask are what do we need to know and at what level? Who needs to know it? And when do they need to know it? How are they going to use it?
You need to have reliable sources for obtaining this knowledge and information. There needs to be a process for validating that this knowledge and information is accurate and meaningful. You need to have a process that gives everyone the same information, to bring the knowledge and information gap under control. This may be better than long time employees, being the pathway for providing this to newer employees.
There is knowledge and information that is unique in relation to your business internally. Also there is knowledge and information that involves things that are external to your business. How you implement this process can impact the success of your business.
Garry Haggart, CPC is a management, marketing and performance development consultant, and facilitator. He can be reached at 661-259-2530.