How to use knowledge transfer to manage your business efficiently

Part of a good transition from a do-it-all boss to an efficient manager is knowing how to transfer knowledge to peers and subordinates.

This article aims to provide comprehensive information on using knowledge transfer to manage your business by providing advice on how to best share and decentralize information. Sharing the wealth of information efficiently improves opportunities for group effort and collaboration.

Remember your first time starting a business? When you first open up your business, the excitement of finally fulfilling a dream will power your every waking moment. You happily take on tasks and try to oversee the entire operation. After all, you learn by doing everything yourself.

Fast-forward a couple of months later and you find yourself tired, burned out, and sorely in need of more hours in a day. You never dreamed that managing a business meant doing everything.

You’re more tired than happy, and you feel there’s a lot of things left undone.

At some point, you’ll have to accept that you’re gonna need help. And you’ll have to learn to trust that other people can share your enthusiasm and passion for getting work done.

Table of Contents

1. What is Knowledge Transfer?
2. Why Effective Knowledge Transfer is Critical
3. Leaders in the Knowledge Economy
4. Ignite Team Training with Micro Learning
5. 6 Micro Learning Strategies for Effective Knowledge Transfer
6. 4 Ways to Advance Your Micro Learning Experience
7. Knowledge is the Most Valuable Currency
8. Building a World-class Cloud Crew

What is Knowledge Transfer?

Knowledge Transfer is the practice of uploading and downloading information, skills, and tools from one part of your business or team member to another. It’s a critical component of organisational success.

When done correctly, knowledge transfer can accelerate the productivity and growth of your business.

If you want to attract top talent to help you with the workload, you’ll want to acquire and retain top talent. And in order to keep high-performers engaged, you’ll have to feed their intellectual curiosity and a capacity for rapid learning.

Your team’s current technical knowledge and competencies won’t matter much if they aren’t given opportunities to absorb new information, work fast, and make smart decisions for your business.

Why Effective Knowledge Transfer is Critical

In response to the unprecedented disruption by COVID-19, 54% of US employees are actively disengaged from their jobs.

Low engagement leads to reduced interest and lower effort. In addition, low engagement leads to high employee turnover, which means you’ll have to start over again with a new hire.

With the falling supply of quality talent worldwide, more businesses are in danger of losing the capacity to remain productive and competitive.

Knowledge Transfer plays a critical role in mitigating the cost of employee turnover. Think about who will you hire to replace actively disengaged employees. If you have a working knowledge transfer system in your business, your fresh hire will be able to pick up the essential skills and competencies to hit the ground running.

Leaders in the Knowledge-Economy

Today’s business leaders must also become effective mentors and trainers to be competitive in the knowledge economy. As a leader, you are in charge of people whose job is to think, communicate, design, disseminate, create, innovate, and so on.

Your operation runs on your team’s brainpower and your responsibility as a leader is to keep their minds fully engaged on the job.

If you lead a company culture where everyone learns and shares knowledge proactively, your teams will be more collaborative and attuned to each other.

This free flow of information can help your team solve problems without your intervention.

Essential Skills of a Leader

That said, every leader/trainer must have these essential skills to facilitate effective knowledge transfer to the whole organisation.

Research and Analysis. At the top of the list is advanced research and analysis. Finding the right information and analysing them for accuracy and relevance is one of the most important skills to have as a trainer.

Communication. Successful training is mostly about the ability to communicate information in the most engaging and compelling way. This is why trainers who can organise their ideas and express them powerfully are highly prized skills. Truly, the trainer’s ability to communicate can make or break a learner’s experience.

Organisation. Trainers need to have strong organisational skills to manage the time, activities, and resources to implement a knowledge transfer program effectively. Another important skill to have related to organisation is the ability for mobilising teams to perform problem-solving and innovation.

Adaptability. In any endeavor, delays, problems, crises can happen. When things don’t turn out as expected, an effective trainer can quickly adapt, adjust plans and strategies in order to get things done. Having processes and systems in place for knowledge transfer helps the trainer prepare the team to adapt and make smart decisions when things go wrong.

Curiosity. Trainers can also feel bouts of fear, frustration, and fatigue in the practice of their profession. From time to time, it’s important to see the world from a learner’s perspective. Having an innate curiosity for new and historical knowledge will help trainers create engaging and fascinating learning experiences.

Ignite Team Training with Micro Learning

Sharing knowledge helps teams keep up with the demanding grind? The trick is to identify the easiest and quickest pathway to learning. Also, building your team’s foundational knowledge as they stack up new skills along the way would be a great way to engage them. There is a slight chance to provide too much information that they might not pick up anything.

You can train your team and provide ample knowledge without overloading them via microlearning. In this case, you’ll find that an approach focusing on skill development through learning works well. As such, microlearning takes information and turns it into manageable chunks that the listener can digest easier. It is an effective way of delivering rapid, high-impact learning for your team through short bursts of training.

What Micro-Learning is about

It breaks down training in to smaller bite-sized units. The idea is to communicate simple, short, actionable information

It encourages self-pace and can fit schedules. Team members learn faster if they can manage their own time for training

It allows for customised training goals. Whether digital, print or in-person, microlearning is a flexible format for learning.

It focuses on a single outcome. Microlearning aims to aid learners to perform a specific action.

It is agile and unstructured. There are no hard and fast rules for implementing microlearning except that it must be brief and actionable.

What Micro-Learning is NOT about

It’s not about learning complex concepts. In particular, broad and multi-layered subjects need some breakdowns into simpler parts to be considered microlearning.

It’s not about gaining deep expertise. The goal of microlearning is to impart simple information quickly, and not for in-depth study. That is why you should aim to learn a new skill quickly, not gain a deeper understanding of a concept.

6 Micro-Learning Strategies for Effective Knowledge Transfer

Model high-achievers by showing their work. Have your A-players document their work process and share their ‘success formula’ with the rest of the team. For example, get one of your best salespeople to record their winning conversations with clients to train new sales hires.

Document and organise processes. Once you document your team’s best ideas, workflows, organise them in a knowledge base that new team members can access. Embed this practice in your work culture by modeling and rewarding excellence.

Identify critical skill gaps, then plug in the training content. The onus is upon the leader to help team members stack up on skills and be excellent at their jobs. As such, microlearning allows managers to implement a learning plan with speed and urgency.

Tailor-fit content to specific training needs. Don’t dump a one-size-fits-all approach to training. Instead, let managers quickly put together highly relevant and useful content for their teams’ individual training needs.

Register your team for learning events. Have your team attend a virtual learning event or workshop. Also, most training course facilitators are experts at delivering content in engaging, interactive ways, and large conferences feature experts at the top of their field.

Subscribe to an online learning platform. Sites like Linkedin Learning, Udemy, and Skillshare are some of the more popular online learning platforms for students and professionals alike. Furthermore, the good thing about online learning platforms is that you are getting world-standard course content.

4 Ways to Advance Your Micro-Learning Experience

Engage with multimedia. In this era of short attention spans, the multimedia format – from a 2-minute slideshow to an online live stream, remains the fastest and most engaging way to learn new material.

Gamify the learning experience. Add game elements such as rewards, badges, and scores when things get done. Then, get creative through some analog fun and games, i.e. flashcards, board games, etc., that are guaranteed to make the lessons stick.

Create micro-assessments. Reinforce the lessons of microlearning with micro assessments! Then, give out a pop quiz or share a 1-minute verbal summary. Accordingly, you can assess how your learners are retaining and using all the new information.

Take advantage of social media. Social media is already in your team’s consciousness so you might as well use it to create training content. For example, use bite-sized educational videos, gifs, and slides that can send the message quickly. In addition, content from popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok can help teams absorb the material quickly.

Knowledge is the Most Valuable Currency

The knowledge and skills that your teams acquire as they develop “deep smarts” while working for you, will drive your business’s success and competitive advantage. While it helps you retain the best employees and increase productivity, it will also cultivate a habit of excellence and innovation in your company.

Building a World-class Cloud Crew

In conclusion, once you know how to use knowledge transfer to manage your business, it makes it easier to get help. By equipping them with the information needed for the job, everybody can pitch in towards a common goal and stay on the same page.

Assembling a team to help you manage your daily business shouldn’t also be a problem. MyCloudCrew can help provide you with virtual staffing solutions. In addition, you can acquire experienced and trained professionals for a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time staff. Subscribe to the My Cloud Crew knowledge center for more resources on distributing the workload. Visit mycloudcrew.com for more information.