Why Knowledge Management Is Important To Creating Vibrant Async-First Cultures
Documenting organizational know-how from day one can make it much easier for teams to collaborate without unnecessary meetings that bog down productivity
Over the years, I’ve become an enormous advocate for asynchronous communications and working cultures that default to async-first.
This trend has been expedited — enormously — by the pandemic. The working world quickly discovered the full potential of Zoom. And almost as quickly Zoom went from a nice novelty to a daily nuisance.
The learning the world woke to was simple: meeting bloat isn’t just a problem when people are working together in the same building. Distributed teams of all variety — both remote and hybrid — can similarly have their productivity stymied by a daily avalanche of unnecessary and dubiously necessary meetings. In the startup world, particularly, digital meeting bloat is endemic. Knowledge management can be an internal practice that can slowly chip away at that problem.
(Note: If you’re also enthusiastic about async, check out WeAreAsync.com which hosts a jobs board and education hub dedicated to advocating for async-first cultures. Organizations listed as async-first include some leading tech players like Buffer, Zapier, doist, and GitLab).
How Knowledge Management Can Support Async First Working Cultures
Another initiative that I’m passionate about is the sometimes tedious, sometimes derided, but often highly important work of cataloging and documenting an organization’s store of institutional knowledge.
And the point of this blog: To make the point that robust knowledge management should be considered a key stepping stone towards achieving a fully async-first culture.
Knowledge management involves cataloging and organizing the knowledge that’s required to make a company effective and profitable.
It involves polling executives about what unspoken rules exist in the company and making sure that the unwritten gets documented somewhere. Then pretending that you’re the company’s internal librarian and organizing the material into some way that makes sense.
What’s the connection to async?
I would surmise that were your average meeting-bloated organization to undertake a process intended to pinpoint the key drivers of excess meetings, many would discover that repetitive information-transmission sessions were a major driver of that wasted time.
Take the following example:
A startup institutes an onboarding process for new hires, who happen to be coming in the door currently at dizzying pace.
HR devises a detailed onboarding plan that involves meetings with no less than 10 internal stakeholders deemed key.
The problem here?
These meetings don’t need to be synchronous become they consist, mostly, of one-way communication from the stakeholder to the new hire.
Furthermore, much of the information being conveyed is repetitive.
That information could much more effectively be captured once, documented, and then amassed into a repository which new hires could be given access to.
That repository could consist of an internal video library, a textual medium, or even an employee-only podcast that new hires could listen to while at the gym.
Documenting internal knowledge is an important value-add that can make even small organizations more impactful.
Repetitive instances of knowledge transmission — like onboarding process — often default to synchronous communication methodologies for no good reason.
This can quickly bog down the calendars of high value contributors by having them repeat the same information to new hires.
Capturing and documenting that knowledge once is more effective.
When coupled with an asynchronous approach to communication, the time savings can compound.
