Knowledge Hoarding proves to be a problem for all companies.
Some employees hoard information because it makes them feel authoritative and safe in the workplace because their coworkers must address them to ask for advice or procedures that need to be done.
However, it could also be that knowledge sharing and collaboration are not fostered enough by corporates themselves.
Whatever the cause may be, the result is always the same: productivity suffering.
One of the more peculiar subreddits (on a site full of them) is r/DataHoarder. The subreddit’s moderators describe the community as a forum for those suffering from the ‘digital disease’ of data hoarding, the practice of retaining, to an extreme degree, all forms of data.
With more than half a million members, the community prides itself on enabling those who suffer from an inclination to hoard data. One of the top posts is from a verified user who claims to have 87 TB of storage, at a cost of approximately 5,000 dollars.
When your star employees begin to realize that the only way to upward mobility is out, this can cause some serious retention issues for your organization. According to a report by Gallup, 51% of employed adults in the United States say they are currently also searching for new jobs or watching for new job opportunities. This means that half of the employees at your organization are at risk of turnover. But what is the cause of employees leaving your company?
One of the top reasons for leaving given by employees is that they are frustrated with their career progress. Above all other considerations, millennials rank opportunities to grow in a job as the most crucial factor. 69% of non-millenials say that this is also important to them when looking for a new job.
This means that employees tend to leave organizations when they are not able to see a developmental path forward, and instead choose companies that do show them a clear path forward. So why can’t your employees see a future with you? The problem might lie with talent hoarding.
Knowledge hoarding — when employees purposely keep critical knowledge to themselves — is a fairly common phenomenon found in companies of all sizes. It’s an uphill battle to create a culture of knowledge sharing if you don’t address knowledge hoarding head-on.
As our team grows from our initial product and engineering teams to content, marketing, customer support, and beyond, we’ve looked for ways to prevent knowledge hoarding from finding its way into our own company culture. To do this, we first had to identify why employees hoard knowledge.
Knowledge hoarding is an indirect business killer, and there are often signs of knowledge hoarding in the workplace if you know what to look for. The good news is that once you recognize the signs, you can start addressing them.
We’re going to take a deeper dive into the definition of knowledge hoarding, why employees may keep knowledge to themselves, and what you can do to promote a culture of knowledge sharing within your organization.
I’ve observed a growing problem in today’s workplace where employees hide, hoard or simply don’t provide information to others in their organization. It’s disruptive and contributes substantially to the lack of productivity. Although employers have tried multiple solutions to the problem — meetings, team building, knowledge management systems — the issue remains largely unresolved.
Human beings are a complicated bunch, and, as it turns out, there are multiple reasons that can cause this breakdown in the flow of information from person to person, level to level or team to team. The fix depends largely on determining which specific issues are driving the behavior in each particular instance.
At the end of your day, do you close out dozens of browser tabs that you intended to look at but never got to?
Do you have piles of downloaded movies, TV shows, and music that you’ve never watched?
Have you ever discovered unread PDFs, e-books, and blog articles collecting virtual dust in secret corners of your computer?
Congratulations, you might be an Information Hoarder!
That means you collect information but don’t use it. Like the cat ladies on an episode of “Hoarders,” Information Hoarders have way more stuff than they know what to do with.
This very modern problem stems from the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, our desire to consume it all, and our inability to do it.
Information hoarding, whether intentional or not, can be a costly problem. In fact, International Data Corp estimates that Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge across teams and individuals. When employees don’t share their knowledge, teams miss opportunities to collaborate, individuals waste time trying to track down information, and organizations fail to preserve expertise and tacit knowledge when people leave the company.
Hoarding has become a pretty popular term lately, and more people are familiar with this psychological syndrome. It’s become popular on lifestyle magazines, self-help psychology websites, a few TV shows (remember the hoarding woman who didn’t even notice the dead body in the chaos of her house on CSI?), and there are even whole reality shows (think Hoarders) following the habits of people with the condition and their struggle with cleaning up that mess their house turned into.
Is it just poor workflow or is it willful information hoarding! A good friend emailed me recently about the concept of information hoarding at work. I write and speak extensively about individuals who sabotage coworker performance and productivity at work.
The act of withholding information is a common tactic used by difficult and uncooperative employees. This article outlines examples of information and power hoarding, both aimed at maintaining the offending employee’s informal power at work.
