Access to the information employees need to perform their work can greatly enhance or disrupt workflow. When it’s not at hand, teams waste plenty of time searching for it, perform unnecessary or duplicated work, and generally have inconsistent processes. Studies show that 22.34% of employees spend around half of their workday a week on information search. And 10.47% spend one and a half days on it. The significant time waste leads to inefficiency, onboarding delays, and knowledge silos.
A centralized internal knowledge base solves this. It brings your policies, standard operating procedures (SOPs), onboarding materials, and other essential documents to one place. This improves efficiency and consistency across operations. How do you implement it? This guide is meant for team leaders, ops managers, HRs, and growing startup teams. In it, we’ll cover everything you need to know about knowledge bases, from general understanding and benefits to best practices for building your own base.
What is an Internal Knowledge Base?
An internal company knowledge base is a centralized repository for company information. It can include:
- SOPs
- Onboarding materials
- Company policies
- Training docs
- And other documents that are crucial for an efficient workflow.
The goal of this base is to store important information in one place and make it easily accessible to everyone. But don’t mistake it for an external knowledge base. External bases are meant for the general public, such as your customers. They are there to improve client experience and communicate your offering. Internal bases serve employees and internal stakeholders. They are confidential and aim to improve operations.
Key Benefits of Building a Centralized Employee Knowledge Base
Building a knowledge base allows you to keep your company’s information organized. When it’s always centralized and accessible, this can bring a number of benefits:
- Improved productivity. A shared database removes the need for searching for information. It gives employees all the information they need.
- Standardization of processes. A knowledge base can contain policies, SOPs, and other operational documents. These docs communicate your company’s vision and standards. By having them at hand, employees will know how to perform different tasks to the same standard.
- Knowledge retention. When all new documents and information are added to a centralized base, you prevent knowledge loss even when employees leave.
- Easier scaling of teams. Many companies have onboarding materials. This includes guides, FAQs, and training docs that should help new employees get on the same page with everyone. When these materials are easily accessible in your database, this can create a smoother onboarding process, which means greater scalability for your teams.
- Improved decision-making. A shared base reduces knowledge silos. It ensures that everyone has uniform data. This allows faster decision-making.
How to Create an Internal Knowledge Base
The efficiency, consistency, and scalability offered by a centralized base make it beneficial for pretty much every company. That’s clear. But how do you create one?
Let’s break it down into steps:
1. Identify Core Knowledge and Content Types
Audit the knowledge you have at the moment. Revise existing documents to confirm they’re accurate and up-to-date. Then, audit workflows and tools that may not have respective operational documents yet. You might need to create new materials if they will complement your workflow.
But don’t rush into it. Your knowledge base will be improving and expanding over time. When you’re just creating it, focus on top-priority information, such as SOPs, critical FAQs, and training/onboarding materials.
2. Define Structure and Categories
Organize your existing knowledge into categories. You can cluster it by departments, function, or process. This will help create a more structured base with less clutter. Also, add convenient navigation tools, such as descriptive tags, folders, and search features. This will simplify knowledge access for employees. And it will also let you scale your base more easily in the future.
3. Choose the Right Tools
Find tools that will help you create your internal knowledge base. Solutions like Notion, Confluence, Guru, and similar let you upload your materials and organize them in accessible and searchable databases. Some of these tools even let you create AI-powered knowledge agents that will assist your employees in finding the answers and documents they are looking for.
And don’t disregard the importance of document management tools. While the aforementioned solutions help you build your base using the docs you already have, sometimes, you will have to create, review, and edit your docs first.
Not all of your documents have to stay editable. Some essential files, like compliance materials, policies, and final versions of SOPs, will need a fixed format that won’t be changed. Yet, they need to be shared safely and remain consistent when users access them. In these cases, companies often choose PDF as it preserves the original layout and helps avoid unintended edits.
At the same time, teams still need to update, merge, or prepare these documents for distribution. In these cases, teams need to find a way to easily work with their PDF files. That’s where a PDF editor becomes an integral part of the tech stack. It lets you update and manage your documents in a safe and convenient way.
4. Standardize Documentation Formats
Create a uniform formatting standard for all documents. This will help you eliminate visual noise and keep all information readable and easy to understand. Then, build custom document templates to stick to your standards.
Additionally, standardize naming conventions. You need a single naming format, descriptive and clear, that would let employees search for any file they need by name. And establish a clear version control schedule to keep your docs relevant.
5. Assign Ownership and Maintenance Roles
After building your base, you need to assign individual content owners. These people will be responsible for overseeing audits. Assign ownership and maintenance roles in each department to prevent overloading one person with all the work.
6. Launch, Train, and Iterate
Finally, when you have your base ready, launch it and run an onboarding process. Introduce employees to the system and train them how to use it. Communicate ownership roles and the schedule of audits/updates.
Let your employees test-drive the base for some time and gather feedback. Ask users to evaluate the system’s usability and improve as necessary.
Tools and Workflows for Managing Knowledge Base Content
When building a knowledge base (and afterward), you need to pay special attention to managing your materials. The clarity and uniformity of your documents play decisive roles in the database efficiency. Hence, you need well-defined tools and workflows to manage them the right way.
Firstly, create a standardized format as mentioned earlier. This will help reduce the learning curve and make your docs look consistent. Use secure document creation tools like Google Drive, Notion Docs, Confluence, and similar to craft document templates and prepare new content for your knowledge base.
When your content is ready, convert it into a format that preserves the layout and is easily accessible. Typically, PDF works well. To convert and further edit your PDF files, choose a reliable PDF editor like PDF Services or similar. With this tool, you can edit PDF at any time, and however you need:
- Reorganize and delete pages
- Add signatures (after new version approval)
- Crop pages
- Compress images, etc.
Pro tip: To avoid cluttering your base, organize multiple files into one where possible. For example, merge PDF SOPs if they relate to the same department or function. Typically, a multi-purpose editor should let you merge PDF documents in a few clicks, so you won’t need a separate tool for doing this.
Knowledge Base Best Practices for Long-Term Success
So you already know how to create an internal knowledge base step by step. Here are a few additional best practices to help you make it work:
- Stick to uniform formatting in your content templates. Identify your most common document types and the best-working formats for them. Standardize a uniform document layout that will help users know where to look for the information they need. Begin by establishing consistent title formats. Then, create a clear header hierarchy. And create relevant information blocks in your templates for each document type. A sample structure you can follow in your templates is as follows:
- Descriptive title
- Summary (what the document is meant for)
- Target audience (department, team, or positions that should use the document)
- Prerequisites
- Main content/steps
- FAQ
- Links to related documents
- Aim for conciseness and scannability in every document. Shorten your sentences and avoid unnecessary fluff. Also, stick to simple words and avoid complex jargon. Last but not least, add scannable blocks like bullets and lists to your documents. All these tips will help you give your employees the quick solutions they are looking for.
- Add tags and search functionality. Tagging is a convenient tool for grouping similar docs together. Tags can denote specific themes, product names, departments, or user levels. This will let users filter documents and find what they are looking for faster. It also helps to add a search feature where users can type specific keywords and find the necessary knowledge in less time.
- Perform regular content audits and updates. Some of your documents will become outdated after a policy change, software update, or another event. To prevent users from relying on outdated materials, you need to assign ownership and establish a regular version control cycle. After the document update, you need to remove or archive the previous version to keep the base relevant.
- Enable team contributions and encourage employees to update and expand your base. Employees who are actively using your knowledge base can easily spot gaps in materials and areas for improvement. To help your base grow, provide contributor access to team leaders and top-level professionals to let them create new materials. Importantly, create a detailed style guide to ensure that new contributions align with the overall formatting, structure, and tone.
- Regularly collect feedback and track usage to improve the system. Run occasional polls to learn what users think about the convenience, relevancy, and completeness of your knowledge base. Consider adding thumbs-up/down ratings or comment sections for the articles in your base for automatic feedback collection. This will help you stay updated on any errors in your system and rapidly fix them.
Conclusion
A centralized knowledge base saves your employees’ time daily. It eliminates the necessity to spend too much time searching for the necessary information. It also helps avoid knowledge silos. With it, you can have more efficiency, scalability, and clarity in daily operations.
As you now know, building your own database isn’t too hard. Let’s quickly recap the key takeaways from this guide:
- Begin with the most important materials and expand your base gradually.
- Focus on content consistency and readability.
- Assign ownership roles.
- Perform regular updates.
- Pick the right tools to aid you at each stage of the process.
Use these takeaways and the steps provided earlier to start building your knowledge base now.