Whether you’re a team of 5 people or 500, a knowledge base is an incredible resource to centralize company process and standards. A knowledge base is another word for an internal FAQ, which your team can use to build and refine its institutional knowledge, empowering everyone to access the information they need when they need it.
If you’ve thought about adopting a company knowledge base, but weren’t quite sure how to get started, or have tried to introduce one in the past, and it didn’t stick, follow these simple steps to roll out a knowledge base that everyone loves to use.
Introduction to the framework
The following steps loosely incorporate Kotter’s 8 Step Change Management Model. This framework emphasizes building awareness, participation, and accountability.
Throughout this process, remember that you’re introducing a significant change for everyone in your company – in how they access information, in how they incorporate tools into their workflow, and in how they share information with others. If you are impatient, and just throw a new tool at everyone without much planning, they might resist, ignore, or even reject the change.
1. Pick a Tool
There are some awesome software tools out there that make it easy to build and scale your knowledge base. There are lots of blog posts on the subject, so do your research, weighing the costs and features that make the most sense. Personally, I’ve had good experiences using Confluence, which is part of the Atlassian suite of products.
If you don’t have the resources to purchase a software tool yet, you can get creative with spreadsheets and shared documents in Google Drive or Dropbox. Here is a template you can use for a knowledge base index, with a few links to template process documents.
2. Generate Awareness and Stakeholder Buy-In
In this step, you’re letting everyone in the company know that this change is coming, explaining why it’s exciting, and getting them to participate in building out the tool.
In all communication, express the benefits of centralizing knowledge, such as ensuring consistency, improving new employee onboarding experience, and improved productivity. For more on the benefits, check out Building Clocks: the mindset for operational autonomy.
Here are a few actions you should take to spread the word:
Announce- make this an agenda item at various meetings, such as an All Hands meeting, being sure to answer any questions your team has; send company wide-emails, etc.
Crowdsource – gather content ideas from the company by surveying everyone, asking them to list 10 “how tos” that they think should be included in the knowledge base; meet 1:1 with team members to get their input on what should go into the tool
Teach – hold a workshop on the importance of documentation using this fun 30 minute exercise
Enlist champions – ask department heads or other teammates to champion the change and keep their teams accountable to adopting the tool
3. Build the Skeleton
This is the longest step in the process, because it involves going through all of the input you received from your team so far, and actually adding it to the new tool. The reason for this is to make the knowledge base immediately useful upon its release. If people click on this brand new tool, only to find tons of blank pages, they will continue in their habits and not see the point of the change.
You’ll need to make sure you have the right skeleton in place, which is a bit trickier than it sounds. Be sure to discuss the options among leaders at the company to build a consensus. Here are a few ways you might structure the content:
By department – examples: Customer Success Guide, Business Development Guide, etc.
By phase in the customer journey – examples: Customer Onboarding Guide, Customer Service Troubleshooting Guide
By category of content: examples: Processes, Administrative Documents
Once you have a skeleton, start transferring over any existing documentation that lives outside the new tool. It’s worth taking the extra step to add a link to where the new content lives somewhere on your old document. You don’t have to get to everything, but shoot for at least 50% of existing documents transferred to your knowledge base.
In the last step, you met with and surveyed various teammates to get ideas for content. Those contributions are key, so be sure to add the titles of those content ideas to the knowledge base, even if the body is empty. This is a great way for everyone to see what needs to be documented, and also to truly incorporate your team’s ideas into the tool.
4. Rollout and Incentivize Engagement
As part of the rollout, take the following actions to ensure a smooth adoption:
Communicate – announce the date that the tool will be available at least a week in advance, and add that date to the company calendar; clearly communicate that the tool is not complete, and requires their input to make it as useful as possible
Teach – create a knowledge-base article about how to use the tool itself, host a webinar or in-person walkthrough of the product, including how the content is set up
Clarify responsibilities – every process needs someone to own it. Although you want to encourage people in your company to take the lead in adding new content and keeping it up to date, heads of department should be given ultimate accountability, therefore may need additional instruction on the given expectations.
To help you with that last point above, there are a few things you can do to encourage your team to add articles and content. This is especially important because there is a lot of upfront investment needed to make the tool useful to everyone, so you’ll need to put effort into getting everyone excited. Here are a few ideas:
Spotlight – shoutout individuals who are adding content by praising them in public forums, like All Hands meetings or Slack
Gameify – make it a competition with monetary rewards, giving gift cards to the top 3 employees who add the most to the knowledge base in the first 2 weeks; block off time for an activity in which you ask someone from a different team to follow a random process, and if they can succeed in doing the task, they win
5. Support Ongoing Accountability
Teaching a team about the importance of a knowledge base and rolling one out is not sufficient for the long-term success of the tool. The final step, and perhaps the most important, is creating a mechanism to ensure the tool content is kept up-to-date. I highlighted the best strategies in From Pathfinder to Process: an introduction to startup workshop documentation, but will list them below for convenience:
Documentation freezes – block off a week every quarter to “freeze,” or restrict, any new additions to processes. During this week, have members of each team review existing documentation and add updates where needed
Feedback during training – while spinning up new employees, encourage them to flag anything that seems out-of-date, unclear, or incorrect, so that you are collecting feedback on how useful your documentation is and leveraging a fresh perspective
Regular surveys – check with your teams to see how often they refer to documentation to do their work, how helpful it is to them, and whether there are any large gaps that are missing
Recap
A knowledge base is an investment in the long-term success of your team. Instead of relying on one another to get up to speed on how to complete a task, you are creating a system that takes the burden off of the individuals. But to do this successfully, you make sure everyone has ownership over the tool and understands its benefits.
