How To Reduce Or Avoid Knowledge Hoarding Among Employees? | #hrmanagement #hrexecutive

An excess of hoarded knowledge is the death of a business. We can better understand it with a few scenario discussions:-

Experienced employees have strong knowledge as compared to the workers who have not yet joined the company. And as a senior with experience, it should be their duty to share their knowledge with peers, but despite that, they chose to hide it.

An employee joined the call center a few days ago, and during the call, the employee was stuck and not able to handle the customer properly. And one of the experienced employees notice this issue and handle the issue and took the credit.

So, in such cases experienced people will keep the knowledge with themselves so that they will always have the edge in the organization and the organization should value them.

Knowledge hoarding can only stop with the help of a streamlined process and with a positive sharing and caring culture. Implementation of knowledge management system will help organizations to grow and follow this culture automatically. 

Photo by Pixabay

What is Knowledge hoarding?

Knowledge hoarding happens when people keep the Knowledge to themselves and do not share it with their colleagues. A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with more competent people. In Corporate and Big Companies, when people are working in big teams, passing on knowledge plays an important role. 

Knowledge hoarding will lead to blunders and will also lead the team towards slow or no progress. Knowledge sharing helps the employees to grow together and expand their knowledge.

When a person hoards knowledge, it will directly impact the growth of the organization.

For instance, a person working as a salesperson and they have a new joining the team. So it is the responsibility of the team to share all the important information with the new person and not hoard the knowledge themselves. Co-workers should not wait for the person to make a mistake, their duty is to work as a team and avoid the mistakes.

Reasons for Knowledge hoarding

As we have all heard in our life when Knowledge is been shared it will increase and when we keep it to ourselves there will be no change. There are ample reasons for Knowledge hoarding which we are going to discuss below:

Knowledge is a key to success; some people think it is a great advantage to keep it with them. It will give job security to them. They are the only people in the organization who perceive certain knowledge and are the only people who can solve some issues.

As in organizations, people do not trust each other so early and there is always a lack of trust. So due to a lack of communication and trust, indirectly they hoard the knowledge. Trust issues will always affect the team’s performance.

Co-workers working in an organization will like to share information working with another team or person who is lower in position. As it will give security to them that they don’t have fear of job security. For example, a person working as a sales executive will like to share information with other team members instead of their team members.

In a competitive environment, employees are trying to reach higher positions and prove their value. So they avoid sharing the knowledge that they possess with their employees so that no one can do what they can. 

Some employees do not share Knowledge due to fear. They think that if they will share the information in front of higher authority, they will get rectified in front of their team members. Due to this, they kept the knowledge to themselves only.

Importance of Knowledge sharing instead of Hoarding

Organizations should follow the culture and help the employees to adapt to the Sharing Culture.

As we know Sharing is Caring but in the organization, this value is still missing. So to cultivate this organizations should encourage their employees to fearlessly share their knowledge.

• Slow Organizational Growth

As every Company wants to grow in a fast space. But Due to Knowledge Hoarding, they will face a number of challenges like dissatisfaction among employees, a large number of errors, and new workers will grow in the slow environment.

On the other side if Organizations have a Knowledge Driven culture then the process is streamlined and everyone possesses the right information during the training only. In this way, everyone will be part of the success of the organization.

• Engagement and Satisfaction

Employees Engagement is very important for the success of an organization and also to stop Knowledge Hoarding. Employees feel satisfied when they can interact and share their views and thoughts without any fear. People will like to share information when they know that there will be no threat to their job and the Company values them the same way.

How to Overcome Knowledge Hoarding

Knowledge Hoarding should be avoided in an organization at any cost otherwise it will only lead to an organization towards failure instead of success.

Sometimes Knowledge sharing is a boring and time-consuming task. In this case, Experts can share all the common questions and problems in a knowledge-based management platform from which employees can do a self-service and solve their problems independently.

Onboard a knowledge management system where all the employees can share their knowledge. Employees who will share the information on a daily basis will be getting rewarded. 

Peers who lack knowledge will share their thoughts on how the hoarding barrier can be removed and everyone has access to Knowledge in the Organization.