How Technology Closes the Gap With Knowledge Transfer in the Workplace

Time spent training new employees is often a big issue for a lot of corporations. First, you have to assign someone to assume the role of the mentor for the new employees coming in to your organization. Then if you leave it up to the one assigned to train the new employee on their own time, chances are the knowledge will either never make it from the mentor to the new employee, or it will take long periods of time to get the employee trained. Rather than making sure the employee is trained efficiently and in a timely manner, many companies leave the matter up to the person assigned to do the training to be accountable to themselves in the matter. It is not until the new employee, who never got adequately trained mind you, starts making mistakes that the company starts to recognize that they have a problem on their hands. It is a situation that begs the question of how technology can bridge this gap and help to ensure that the knowledge gets from the assigned expert to the new employee in a timely manner.

Using Smart Phone Technology to Distribute Knowledge

Every day, people in key positions of an organization are sitting at their desks pausing to text their friends, colleagues, and other family members. Often this activity takes place many times in a given hour of work. But wait a moment, the new employee also has a smart phone. Since it is relatively easy for most people to text back and forth, a revolutionary way for the assigned expert to distribute critical knowledge to the new employee they are supposed to be responsible for training is to text information back and forth. Sure, this may not be a one on one interaction, but in today”s age, people are not always so needy. People today are used to receiving information and instructions through their smart and mobile devices. This sort of interaction is often preferred over person to person contact, even in the office. The advantage of using smart phones and other mobile devices to transfer knowledge from the assigned mentor to the new employee is that any information texted back and forth is able to be stored for future reference, if the new employee needs to review important instructions while learning how to carry their weight around the office. This is particularly useful in the case of a new employee who receives information through an electronic tablet, because this makes it easy to store elaborate diagrams as well, for further study. In this capacity, the new employee can learn at their own pace, without needing to completely interrupt the mentor”s work schedule.

Face to Face

If it turns out that the new employee needs to meet with their mentor face to face, the fact that they have a record of text instructions and diagrams available to them before hand makes it possible to use this time more efficiently. Instead of wasting the mentor”s time, the new employee should be encouraged to formulate key questions ahead of time and address critical issues that need to be ironed out. This way the mentor may not need to spend more than an hour or two, when absolutely necessary, meeting with the new employee. In turn, the company will not suffer from an uninformed new employee making a mistake on procedures that need to be executed correctly.