Unlock Business Growth with Effective Knowledge Sharing

February 14, 2025

Effective knowledge sharing is a powerful driver of business growth, fostering innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. In this blog, we’ll explore how leveraging a knowledge sharing platform can unlock new opportunities, provide tips for building a culture that encourages knowledge exchange, and highlight why now is the perfect time to seize the knowledge sharing advantage.

Business growth through a knowledge sharing platform

Knowledge is the key asset of any modern organisation. Knowledge about its customers, its processes, its technical capabilities and its commercial acumen. So a knowledge sharing platform, or knowledge sharing software, should be among the key tools for business growth for any modern organisation. Yet often, it is not.

Most organisations do not effectively manage the flow of information among their staff, customers and prospects. They may use a customer relationship tool to manage some customer data, or they may have a passive knowledge management process (like Sharepoint, or some PDFs or slides). Rarely does an organisation have knowledge sharing software to identify, capture and share knowledge in a meaningful way.

This is a shame, as a knowledge sharing platform can take the key asset of knowledge and use it to enable significant business growth. Let’s review all the ways knowledge sharing software can drive business growth.

Better outcomes through better processes

Understanding and managing knowledge sharing within an organisation helps identify links between knowledge and outcomes. An organisation typically tracks outcomes – the ends. However, most organisations do not usually do enough to track how those outcomes are achieved – the means.

Implementing a knowledge sharing platform reveals the trends, inefficiencies, inconsistencies, best practices and disconnections within the organisation. It provides data about HOW outcomes are being achieved within the organisation. To change the ends, we usually need to change the means.

When an organisation implements knowledge sharing software, it also enacts a cultural change towards valuing knowledge – know-how – and not just results. By better understanding how knowledge is used in the organisation, managers can retrain or refocus staff to achieve better outcomes.

Example: Accounting firm write-offs are a huge focus for accounting firms. A knowledge sharing platform can be used to specifically target processes around write-offs. Best practices and advice can be captured from partners and senior accountants, to be shared among the firm. In particular, proven processes which reduce write-offs can be captured and included in induction training to prevent behaviours that lead to write-offs in new accountants.

Long-term improvements in workplace behaviours

Unlike generic training activities provided by external training providers, a knowledge sharing platform can drive fundamental changes in employee behaviour. Externally provided training is designed to appeal to a wide range of companies and industries. Your employees have little or no ownership, and it often feels like an ‘event’ – something happening to them for a short time.

Knowledge sharing software overcomes these issues. Knowledge sharing starts with cultural change. It provides infinite opportunities to improve employee collaboration, interaction, innovation and performance by engaging employees directly in the development and sharing of knowledge.

Employees are now the ones creating, sharing and driving knowledge: they have total ownership in the process. Because the knowledge is from within their organisation, it also has significant contextual relevance. They can use this newly shared knowledge easily, and it often yields immediate results.

Example: Accountants often struggle to implement behavioural change simply because they are so busy. Training events come and go, without any context, ownership, or reinforcement. A knowledge sharing platform can immediately improve the relevance of the content, which in turn engages the accountant – they can gain the benefits of using new knowledge immediately. Knowledge sharing software should also provide automated reinforcement of ideas via notifications, on-the-job activities and accountability with key stakeholders. For example, a knowledge sharing topic on conducting ‘work in progress’ team meetings could include activities which require accounting teams to implement improvements in their WIP meetings. These activities should be automated over a 2–3 month period, with notifications to HR, training or Managing Partners to boost accountability. Knowledge sharing software can also share lessons between peers (social learning) to foster best practices and ‘fear of missing out’.

Accelerating delivery to your clients

If knowledge is the key asset for modern organisations, time is the key expense. However a knowledge sharing platform can specifically target the issue of productivity and efficiency.

First, knowledge sharing software can rapidly capture and share your most efficient processes to reduce the time needed to complete them. All those little tips and tricks used by your star performers can be shared with all staff. Processes can be standardised between teams to drive efficiencies and savings.

Second, a good knowledge sharing platform will enable knowledge sharing with customers. Sharing knowledge with your customers (or stakeholders) can enable a huge range of benefits – cross-sell and upsell opportunities, reduced support costs, better expectation management, efficiency in the delivery of low-value services and more. Knowledge shared by customers with your organisation can improve outcomes or reduce the length of customer meetings or calls. Educated customers are also more self-sufficient and require less support and service resources.

Example: Accountants have many repetitive client meetings – meetings of the same type and structure with many different clients (tax planning, tax returns, annual reviews). Knowledge sharing software can automate those meetings. Client updates and education, on changes in tax legislation or regulations, can be provided by the platform in a far more efficient and consistent manner. Clients can be better prepared for meetings and educated on how to prepare their own financial data for submission to their accountant. All of these actions result in time savings for accountants – better data, data in advance, and less time spent educating clients – resulting in lower delivery costs and higher margins.

Stimulating innovation and collaboration

As mentioned earlier in this article, a knowledge sharing platform often improves the culture in an organisation around issues of collaboration and innovation. Knowledge sharing demonstrates to employees that the sharing, curation and refinement of knowledge is just as important as the knowledge itself.

Knowledge sharing software breaks down the ‘expert culture’ within an organisation. It stops employees from hoarding or withholding knowledge and trying to use that as power. This is often a critical issue for many organisations, where knowledge is used as a means for promotion or relative out-performance against peers.

Instead, knowledge sharing should be the means for promotion. Staff should be rewarded for sharing their great ideas, not just coming up with great ideas and using them exclusively in their team for personal ambitions. Knowledge sharing also breaks down silos and encourages self-reflection by staff and teams. After all, collaboration and sharing go hand-in-hand.

Example: For accounting firms with multiple services – compliance, advisory, audit, coaching, advice – a knowledge sharing platform can often be the driver of cross-referrals or cross-selling. Each service area can produce topics on their services and products, along with tips, case studies and resources for other service areas to acquire. Best practices on cross-referrals or cross-selling can be readily captured and shared. Success sharing from accountants who provide new services to their clients can form the basis of peer-to-peer learning.

Tribal Habits is the knowledge sharing platform for modern organisations

Tribal Habits has been designed exclusively for modern organisations to deliver these exact benefits. It allows your organisation to change its culture around innovation, improvement and collaboration by involving your staff (and customers or stakeholders) directly in the knowledge sharing process.

We have designed a user experience that allows any employee to capture and share their knowledge on ANY topic important to your strategic goals.

Now you can drive revenue, reduce expenses, improve service, boost engagement and provide technical, compliance or educational training – all from the same platform with detailed data tracking and extensive automation. It’s like a training manager, knowledge curator and business coach all in one.

If your organisation values knowledge and recognises its value and strategic advantage, then contact Tribal Habits now to discuss your objectives. Or create a free Tribal Habits portal for your organisation right now to start driving business growth, improving collaboration and using your organisation’s knowledge as a powerful asset.

Building a knowledge sharing environment

Knowledge sharing is far more than just showing your colleague how to use shortcuts in your invoicing software. For a professional services firm, a knowledge sharing environment is the very essence of strategic advantage! If human capital is the main resource for a professional services firm, then knowledge sharing – along with its identification and capture – is the key to leveraging that resource.

The problem is that most professional services firms don’t understand what knowledge is. They confuse knowledge with information. In particular, they focus heavily on technical information, often at the expense of commercial knowledge. They also tend to create an environment that rewards the hoarding of knowledge, not the sharing of knowledge.

What is knowledge? How does knowledge differ from information?

Many professional services firms will attempt to capture knowledge in the form of PDF documents or an internal information repository. In doing so, they will often feel that knowledge is being shared effectively. However, this isn’t knowledge sharing at all.

Let’s consider the definition of knowledge from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

As you can see, information by itself is not knowledge. Information is simply ‘provided facts’. Knowledge is the application of that information. Knowledge is the context, the experience, the know-how. Every professional services firm broadly has access to the same information. What differs is their knowledge – how they use that information.

Knowledge is the skill. Information is merely data

Knowledge sharing must go far beyond listing data and facts. It must capture what to do with that information and how to use it, both efficiently and effectively. This means knowledge sharing cannot occur unless it is tapping into experience and expertise. As such, knowledge sharing must come from within your staff, not just from a spreadsheet.

Many professional services firms struggle with this, as they are driven by technical information. They are used to dealing with facts, statistics, rules and regulations, with a heavy emphasis on compliance and safety. This daily bias towards technical information means that the broader issues of knowledge – including management, commercialisation, business development, personal skills, productivity, administration and leadership – are often overlooked.

So the first step for many professional services firms in knowledge sharing is to recognise that knowledge is far broader than technical information. It must encompass the entire know-how of its staff – that’s where the strategic advantage lies. However, given that this know-how lies within the minds of its staff, we encounter a second problem of actual sharing.

Why don’t professionals just share their knowledge anyway?

Most professional services firms tend to promote and reward staff based on relative outperformance of their peers. Partners who close more deals tend to receive bigger bonuses and move to more senior positions. As a result, professionals who keep knowledge to themselves can have an internal advantage over their peers – an advantage they can use to obtain a bigger slice of a bonus pool or to get ahead in the race for promotions. Many professional services firms end up creating a culture that favours the expert and encourages the hoarding of knowledge.

This is exactly the opposite environment required for knowledge sharing. Not surprisingly, when expert staff are asked to share their knowledge with their colleagues, they are often reluctant to do so. What’s in it for them? It is true their colleagues will benefit, and the business itself will be better off, but the individual experts will be worse off as they lose their relative advantage.

Professional services KPIs often prevent a knowledge sharing environment

If we examine the KPIs in many professional services firms, this issue is exposed. There are usually KPIs for revenue, perhaps KPIs for expense management, and then typically some KPIs around professional development (which is largely focused on learning new technical information).

There will also be a few KPIs around knowledge sharing. A two-hour passive webinar on a new tax rule will help an accountant meet their ‘training’ KPI, but a two-hour highly interactive coaching session on client interviewing techniques may not count towards that KPI.

Worse, KPIs tend to emphasise the consumption of knowledge. Accountants might have to undertake 20 hours of training each year. But where does the training come from? It’s unlikely to be from their colleagues in the form of knowledge sharing, as there is unlikely to be a KPI for the creation of training.

Without any KPI to encourage professionals to capture and share their expertise, firms are often left with no options other than technical information training, or generic external training content. To be clear, external training content is not knowledge sharing. It is knowledge ‘importing’, not knowledge sharing. Any external knowledge needs to be adapted to fit the particular context of your business. External knowledge will never fit as well as the knowledge generated from within your business.

This is completely different to knowledge sharing, which captures existing, proven expertise within your business and focuses on its standardisation throughout the business.

What is a knowledge sharing environment?

Changing the game around knowledge sharing requires professional services firms to rethink the very nature of knowledge:

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is the know-how around that information.
Knowledge sharing requires the direct involvement of those with the know-how.
The creation of knowledge and training must be as important as its consumption.
The recognition for collaboration must be as important as that of individual performance.

Any professional services firm that views its expertise and knowledge as a valuable resource – a resource that could be a strategic advantage – needs an environment that encourages knowledge sharing. It requires a culture of collaboration, not a culture of the ‘cult of the expert’.

Firms are advised to work backwards through the above four points, starting with individual recognition for sharing. People are motivated by ‘what’s in it for me’. If the only benefits for knowledge sharing lie with others, then individual people are unlikely to participate unless they are intrinsically motivated.

Recommendations to create a culture of collaboration can include:

KPIs for the creation of content, knowledge and training.
Promotion hurdles that include a demonstration of knowledge sharing.
Internal value placed on time spent capturing and sharing knowledge (such as an internal ‘knowledge client’ which can be charged at external client rates).
Hiring policies that emphasise collaboration, teamwork and sharing.
Reward and recognition by peers and management of sharing and collaboration.
Investment in a knowledge sharing solution to institutionalise collaboration.
An environment that supports transparent communication and open-door policies.

Unlocking the habits in your tribe

The journey towards collaboration and knowledge sharing requires changes in culture, KPIs and behaviour. It also requires the right tools. Utilising ‘death by PowerPoint’ slides, passive PDFs, or instantly forgotten ‘lunch and learn’ sessions won’t solve the problem.

Knowledge sharing requires a solution that’s reusable by new staff, readily updated as expertise develops, accessible from any location, allows new knowledge to be readily captured from across the firm, and can capture knowledge on a wide range of topics in a consistent way.

That’s where Tribal Habits steps in.

Tribal Habits provides your professional services firm with a branded, secure, cloud platform to drive cultural change and create a knowledge sharing environment. Your internal experts can tap directly into the platform to quickly capture their knowledge – on any topic – in a structured and guided process. Your staff can then acquire this knowledge in an interactive format. Staff can optionally be tasked with on-the-job activities to drive behavioural change, contribute new knowledge to refine the topic over time, demonstrate understanding through assessments and provide a wealth of quantitative and qualitative feedback for the business.

If your firm values knowledge and recognises its value and strategic advantage, then contact Tribal Habits now to discuss your objectives. You can also sign up for a free professional services development topic to immediately experience how knowledge is shared in the Tribal Habits environment.

Just imagine if everyone in your firm knew the best practices, proven processes and dedicated expertise of your top performers. How much of a difference could that make to every aspect of your firm’s performance?

The knowledge sharing opportunity awaits

There’s no doubt about it: the developing knowledge sharing opportunity will be a critical success factor for successful organisations and firms in the future.

No one knows an organisation like the people who work within it. They know all its little secrets. The best methods to do everything. The experience helps avoid mistakes. It’s the same at your organisation.

Your people know the parts of your organisation that work and the parts that don’t. They know the fastest ways to get things done and the pressure points that cut off outcomes. They have determined the parts that are easy to use and those that they dread working with. Your people know all the little short-cuts to bypass inefficiencies. They are refining internal processes to work more effectively, using trial-and-error to uncover the things which work best and have already innovated and adapted existing materials.

This isn’t a new phenomena – it’s been like this forever and it’s happening right now. This inside knowledge will continue to exist inside your organisation whether you do something about it or not!

What is changing, however, is that there are a number of forces combining to make the opportunity to share knowledge the defining issue for success in the future. Forces that suggest that you need to do something about it now.

Unlock Business Growth with Effective Knowledge Sharing

Force One: Your staff are already conditioned to share and acquire knowledge

The internet has begun a fundamental change in our knowledge creation and sharing processes. It has made the transmission of ideas easy, low cost and instantaneous. Suddenly, people who couldn’t previously share their knowledge with others are able to do so.

Indeed, we are conditioning ourselves to share….

Through a Like button on Facebook, sharing a thought on Twitter or sharing a photo on Instagram.
Commenting on an article or contributing to a blog.
By writing new articles, maintaining Wikipedia or uploading a YouTube video we made.

The problem is that sharing is occurring in social environments, not business environments. The knowledge sharing opportunity is flourishing outside of your business, not within it.

Force Two: Staff are changing jobs more often causing knowledge to leave your business faster

The days of 30-40 year careers at a single employer are passing. Because view a career as a series of steps and changes, they change employers more often. New employees are training up and then refining existing knowledge within a business…only to move to a new role and have all their accumulated knowledge go with them. The knowledge sharing opportunity is fleeting for each employee in your business!

In the meantime, significant existing, valuable business knowledge developed by existing employees lies latent and untapped within the business. Even in small teams – let alone large, distributed businesses – knowledge is isolated and exists in silos. Information can even be deliberately withheld because the power gained from retaining knowledge is greater than the reward for sharing knowledge.

Force Three: Success will increasingly lie in the rapid sharing of knowledge to create strategic advantages

Knowledge was once well-contained within an organisation. As a result, an organisation could once have genuine proprietary knowledge. Now the internet and transient staff mean knowledge is being rapidly transferred between organisations. In many ways, organisations will lose many competitive advantages they might have enjoyed 20-30 years ago. So organisations risk becoming more similar, rather than more differentiated. This is already evident across many industries where organisations appear the same to both clients and staff.

The organisations of the future will have to look harder internally for what makes them different and better – those best practices of their top people – and rapidly share that knowledge to create a competitive advantage. Barriers to sharing, learning and contributing will be identified and removed. Great organisations of the future will internally cultivate employee knowledge and reward employees who share expertise. They will be able to act on their inside knowledge faster than competitors and utilize it as a strategic advantage.

Force Four: Knowledge sharing platforms are rapidly displacing the need for importing external knowledge

Historically, many organisations have relied on importing external knowledge – training courses and management consultants – into their organisations. This made sense when external knowledge was proprietary and there were no options to effectively share knowledge within a business. However, the content of many training courses and management consultants is now freely available through blogs, books, videos and webinars. It is no longer secret, or powerful.

External knowledge is also, at best, an approximation of the required solution for each organisation. In fact, external knowledge providers often enter an organisation to teach knowledge that already exists somewhere within the organisation!

Technology has evolved. There are now new knowledge sharing platforms to capture and share knowledge. For example, cloud storage, social media, search capabilities, mobile employees, tablets/apps and more. The Tribal Habits platform is at the very centre of this technology. The role of external knowledge is diminishes now that access to inside knowledge is easier. Why use an approximate solution from outside, when an exact, proven solution lies inside?

A knowledge sharing opportunity is all yours

So your organisation faces…

Staff increasingly used to sharing and acquiring knowledge in social settings
Staff increasingly changing jobs and careers, taking acquired knowledge with them
An environment where businesses are increasingly similar and harder to differentiate
An increasing ability to utilise ‘inside knowledge’ as a strategic advantage

Your staff are increasingly ready to share and capture knowledge from each other if given the opportunity. It’s now up to your organisation to take advantage of these forces with your own knowledge sharing platform. Will you allow these forces to work together for the benefit of your organisation? Or will you resist them to the detriment of your organisation?

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