Overcoming Knowledge Hoarding in the Workplace

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.

Shanghai … wait, what?

Referring again to this article in the New York Times about how a few major U.S. companies are handling the post-Covid work environment. With some employees returning full-time to the office. Others are working exlusively or almost excluisively from home. And many dividing their time between office and home.

“Though most evidence that remote workers are at a disadvantage is anecdotal, at least one study, led by researchers at Stanford University, suggests they are less likely to be promoted than their in-office peers. In the experiment researchers randomly assigned workers at a large travel agency in Shanghai to work remotely or in the office for nine months. Though the remote workers were 13 percent more productive, putting in more hours and making more calls per minute, they were promoted about half as often as their in-office peers.”

“They can get forgotten,” said Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford and one of the study’s authors.

But wait, what, Professor Bloom? That’s Shanghai. Those are Chinese. What does anecdotal evidence from China tell us about how Americans benefit or lose out if and when working remotely?

The Secrets of Great Teamwork

Collaboration has become more complex, but success still depends on the fundamentals.

Today’s teams are different from the teams of the past: They’re far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership). But while teams face new hurdles, their success still hinges on a core set of fundamentals for group collaboration.

The importance of teamwork

Healthy teams enjoy benefits that go far beyond the company’s bottom line.

Anyone who thought the rise of remote and hybrid work would would be the downfall of teamwork has probably changed their tune by now. The truth is, teamwork is more important than ever. 

“The use of teams and collaboration expectations have been consistently rising,” says Dr. Scott Tannenbaum, a researcher and president of the Group for Organizational Effectiveness. “And when I say teams, I’m talking about all types of teams, whether it’s stable work teams [or] whether it’s teams that now, in the current environment, are operating virtually.”

Knowledge Is Power, But Not In The Way You Think

She was that person everyone liked, but no one could work with. Eventually, she was fired. Her biggest issue was that she was a hoarder—of knowledge. Jenny (not her real name) thought knowledge was power and while she was smart about creating it, she never wanted to share it.

Jenny was right. Knowledge is power. But she was wrong about what do to with it. Actually, knowledge can change the world—or the company—but only when it is shared, and shared in the right ways.

Information density describes a situation where many people in a company know many important things. They know them in the moment—in real-time when it counts most to inform their decision making. The information-dense company is one in which people are informed and in which there is a level of radical transparency.

The 12 Habits Of Highly Collaborative Organizations

When it comes to the future of work and collaboration I’ve worked with and researched hundreds of companies. Collaboration is indeed a top priority for many business leaders but knowing what makes organizations successful can be a tricky thing.  

After all no two companies are like and their strategies and technologies can be quite different. In addition collaboration initiatives come from different departments with different budgets, they have different uses cases and corporate cultures, and different approaches, goals, and measures of success.  

So if there is so much variety here then how do we know what makes organizations successful?  The answer lies in chess.

Midwest Niceoff 1

Youtube comments:

“Charlie- ‘Cuts like butter’. Branch gets the sloppiest peel cut I’ve ever seen.”

“Lived in Wisconsin my whole life, can confirm this is a normal interaction. The polite wars that happen in public are just as terrifying. Just wait until you hold the door for someone that also wants to hold the door for you.”

“I feel like I could do this. My neighbor walks down the street and pulls all the garbage cans back to the garages.”

“Our neighbor mows our lawn in the summer, and we shovel her walk in the winter. True midwest neighbor-ness.”

The 28 friendliest neighborhoods in U.S. cities

Travel is rooted in hospitality—in a welcoming gesture, a friendly smile, an accommodating spirit.

In search of these qualities, we’ve developed—with the help of our data-crunching partners at Resonance Consultancy—this unique index of the 28 friendliest city neighborhoods in the United States.

Whether embracing its immigrant roots (San Jose’s Japantown) or celebrating inclusion (Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen), an open-minded, open-hearted neighborhood can make travelers feel at home. This ultimate list offers starting points to explore American cities: enclaves full of places to delve into, people to meet, and enough bonhomie to make you want to return again and again. (See our list of best smaller U.S. cities.)

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