Memos, meetings, and mantras aplenty, but you’re still not connecting with your employees, and that’s hurting your chances of improvement.
Communication is an obviously important component within any organization, but while sporadic updates about changes to the healthcare policies and holiday times are important, they aren’t the type of conversations eager employees want to have. With modern employees placing a larger emphasis on culture and growth opportunities, they want real knowledge and transparency into their company’s goals and direction, not surveys.
Historically, high-level strategy and information was reserved for management and the executive suite. They were and still are the ones making the decisions and pushing their organizations to innovate, but with an workforce that is increasingly educated, flexible, and open to new opportunities, and the subsequent growth of open innovation practices, knowledge-sharing is becoming a necessity for corporate innovation strategy.
INTERACTIVE – Is your Company actually ready to Innovate?
Knowledge-sharing is all about transparency and forming baselines of information throughout your organization, helping employees to not just understand their responsibilities, but what the company is trying to accomplish too and where they can contribute to that success. Opening up corporate objectives to more than just the executive board helps to build trust among the workforce, leads them to be more engaged with operations around them, and sparks specific thoughts and ideas on how to solve the problems the organization is actually facing.
Without consistent knowledge-sharing practices, management is missing out on a key driver for innovation. Few employees want to feel like just another cog in the machine, and its criminal to prevent them from providing the insights and ideas that they may possess. It’s management’s judgement to determine how “transparent” they should be and with whom, but by sharing even basic context into the challenges the organization is looking to solve, they can help to build morale and push employees to reach their full potential.