What is Tribal Knowledge: Importance, Benefits, and Example

How to Capture Tribal Knowledge Efficiently

With such amazing benefits, it becomes essential for your company to capture tribal knowledge. Here are a few tips to make it possible efficiently.

1. Define goals and prioritize knowledge to capture

When creating a tribal knowledge base for your company, you must set a few goals to help you define the information you want to capture.

For instance, you aim to capture all the information discussed during the product upgrade meetings. During these meetings, your team discusses:

• The downsides of the upgrade
• How this upgrade aims to help customers
• How to introduce the upgrade to the existing customers
• The training required for sales and marketing teams to bring in new customers
• How to use this upgrade to sell the product in the coming quarters

Let’s not forget the not-so-important suggestions made by each team member during the meeting. These must be added to the tribal knowledge base to capture information efficiently about a specific niche.

2. Identify key personnel holding tribal knowledge

Next, you need to identify the employee who holds the tribal knowledge. This could be the manager or a loyal employee who has been in the company for years. Here’s why we say so:

• Managers: Managers are involved in every brainstorming session and help the team prioritize the ideas. Moreover, employees who dislike sharing their ideas with everyone approach managers after the meeting adjourns. This way managers become one of the key personnel holding tribal knowledge.
  
  
• Employees: Those who have spent years in the organization know the best way to complete the work and ensure every milestone is achieved before the deadline. They may know which ideas the company will be open to accepting during meetings and which will not.

3. Create a knowledge management strategy

You now know the key holders of tribal knowledge and have decided what type of tribal knowledge needs to be documented. With these done, you need to develop your knowledge management strategy.

This strategy will enable you to capture the information faster, ease the documentation process, and make sharing hassle-free.

The idea behind the knowledge management strategy is to ensure that no information is lost even when an employee leaves the organization. Here’s what you need to keep in mind when implementing this strategy:

• Document every conversation through emails so that it is easier to track the tribal knowledge faster
• Be ready with employee replacements before they leave the organization
• Inculcate a practice of noting MOMs during meetings to ensure no ideas are left behind

4. Document tribal knowledge

To convert tribal knowledge into explicit knowledge, you must start documenting it in one place. When you do this, you get to identify the number of information categories you can create in your tribal knowledge base.

Understand that the information in the tribal knowledge base can help you create the following:

• Standard operating procedures document
• How-to-guides
• Training materials for sales or support teams
• Sales playbook
• Manuals
• Wikis
• FAQs

This way, you can help experienced employees share crucial information without asking them to plan and conduct separate training sessions for the entire team.

5. Establish a single source of truth

Since tribal knowledge spreads like myths through word-of-mouth, chances are that they end up creating knowledge silos. That’s because it is not written in one place but spoken and shared by employees during face-to-face chats.

It is better to establish a single source of truth for all to overcome such challenges. You can find cloud-based solutions that allow you to document and share knowledge internally with all employees. What’s more, this knowledge can be accessed and edited if needed.

6. Opt for appropriate knowledge management tools

Look for SaaS tools specializing in knowledge documentation. To narrow your options, search online for the best knowledge base software.

Or you can explore Document360, which can be your organization’s internal and external knowledge base system.

When it comes to being an internal documentation tool, Document360 allows you to:

• Share knowledge internally via secured login. That means only employees with login access can access the tribal knowledge.
  
  
• Collaborate with other employees while the tribal knowledge gets documented in real-time via in-line comments.
  
  
• Create a workflow that enables you to design and manage the entire documentation process from start to finish.
  
  
• Add links to other relevant articles in the same documentation.
  
  
• Add team roles to ensure only selected members can edit and publish articles from the team’s end.
  
  
• Restore deleted articles by creating their backup to ensure no tribal knowledge is lost.
  
  
• Use Enterprise SSO, where you use single sign-on to authenticate every user.

With such features, it will be easier to document and store tribal knowledge and ensure it gets shared internally.

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7. Cultivate an organizational learning culture

Once you document tribal knowledge in a single place, your next step is to prompt its use in the organization.

You can ask managers to share the documentation link with the team members and review it with them once. Let them know that they can access it anytime whenever they have doubts or need a solution to a certain problem at work.