In order for a business to succeed, every one of its departments must cooperate with each other, and sharing critical business information is one of the most important aspects to achieving that cooperation successfully within an organization. However, that is easier said than done because getting various teams or even members of the same team to work together seamlessly is no easy feat, especially when the company begins to grow and get more complicated with time. In spite of this being a tough task, the big names in the business manage to create that knowledge sharing, friendly culture successfully by eliminating knowledge hoarding altogether within their offices. The good news is, so can you.

Encourage a Conversational Culture with the Help of the Architecture Itself :

If everyone stays cooped up in their own cubicles and offices all the time, there would be little scope or opportunity to converse with one another, so the architecture and furniture of the office do matter when you are trying to create a conversational culture at work. Before you rent out an office space (or have one remodelled), be sure to keep the following points in mind.

How About a Cafeteria? :

Set up a cafeteria with relaxing couches and multiple smaller tables with comfortable chairs around them. You can turn any large room into a small cafeteria if you don’t have the budget to go for a full-blown business cafeteria right now.

Alternately, you can set up coffee stations throughout different sections of the office. Multiple people waiting for their coffee to get brewed is always a scenario that starts conversations. In case you are wondering, you can have both a cafeteria and coffee stations at work if your budget permits it.

Choose Open Tables Over Cubicles :

Cubicles have a bad rep and there’s psychological evidence to justify it too. Working within an enclosed space doesn’t exactly create an open environment that is fit for building the intra-personnel relationships essential to create a knowledge sharing culture. It is more cost-effective and less impersonal to have open tables instead because it encourages employees and team members to share information with each other freely, even during work.

Utilize the Team Building and Knowledge Sharing Principles of Kaizen :

Kaizen management is one of the most popular of the lean management disciplines. The Japanese term is often translated to mean a number of closely related concepts, which include “change for the better,” “continuous improvement”, and the literal Japanese to English translation, which sounds something like “The act of making bad points better.” Kaizen is more than just a lean management process though, as many take it as a philosophy and business culture to be followed in general. One of the core principles of kaizen is based on the practice of active knowledge sharing among team members for mutual improvements, motivation, growth, and joint success. It makes communication easier by putting all team members on the same page.

Kaizen is a complete and proven team building and business improvement principle, designed to simultaneously cut wastage and excess from any process while improving the productivity of the workers and the business in general. To know how you can actually utilize the methods of kaizen in your own business to bring about similar improvements, we recommend you check out the page on kaizen management at Kanbanize, which explains what the term means, its origin, and how to actually utilize kaizen management in a practical business scenario to streamline every process, build strong teams, and achieve more for less.

Utilize Technology :

There is just so much that technology can do to facilitate information sharing and not to take advantage of all that would be a waste in 2019. Most SaaS services are cloud-based nowadays, which means that all information related to business can simultaneously be available and accessible to everyone in the team, irrespective of where they are or whether they are communicating directly with each other or not. A cloud-synced app that is designed to communicate customer information across multiple departments and business apps can make it extremely easy, not just for one team to communicate effectively within itself, but it also automates seamless information sharing between various interdependent departments such as marketing and sales.

It takes time to build a team, and it takes even more time to build a company of teams that actively share knowledge with each other and work collectively towards joint goals, but it can be done, as made evident by big-name companies such as Toyota, Chevron, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so many others. The most important step is to start taking measures with the objective of creating that friendly, open work culture, while growing both collectively and individually with everyone onboard, based on a solid principle like kaizen.

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