The loss of institutional knowledge due to employee turnover is a valid and pressing concern for organizations. High turnover rates, retirements, and the potential departure of top talent can keep leaders up at night. When employees leave, they take a wealth of experience and insights that directly impact innovation, productivity, and the bottom line.

However, the challenge extends beyond just turnover. Even stable organizations are missing out on significant growth opportunities by not strategically sharing institutional knowledge. Valuable knowledge often remains siloed within individuals or teams, impeding performance and leaving potential untapped. 

It's time to shift the focus from simply preserving knowledge to actively sharing and collaborating. By fostering a culture where knowledge flows freely across the organization, companies can unlock hidden potential, drive performance, and build a more agile and adaptable workforce.

This article will explore why knowledge sharing is essential in today's workplace, how to build a culture that supports it, and practical ways to facilitate the transfer of critical information so you can make the most of your organization’s collective intelligence. 

Institutional knowledge: definition

Institutional knowledge is the shared expertise and experience of all the employees within your organization. It’s the collective insights that employees have accumulated during their tenure about their role and your organization that allow them to effectively contribute to business objectives.

While institutional knowledge can be technical or documented, it often refers to more intangible insights, like cultural best practices, tips and tricks, or even intuition that lives in an employee’s head. 

Think of a seasoned sales representative who possesses intricate knowledge about a key client's preferences, past purchases, and pain points. This information, built over years of interaction, allows them to tailor proposals and anticipate needs, leading to increased sales and stronger client relationships.

While institutional knowledge can present itself differently from organization to organization, it always has a significant impact on business performance. 

The critical role of organizational knowledge

They say people are a company’s biggest asset. But the knowledge that they possess comes a close second. A Deloitte study ranked knowledge management as one of the top three issues impacting a company’s success.

The effective management of organizational knowledge is key to achieving synergy among teams. When you maximize the knowledge that already exists within your organization, you benefit from: 

• Increased innovation: When knowledge sharing is a part of company culture, it fosters an environment of collaboration where employees are more likely to work together to develop innovative solutions. 

• Accelerated problem-solving: By unlocking collective intelligence, employees benefit from valuable historical context that reduces redundancy and elevates decision-making, helping solve problems more efficiently. It allows them to be more agile when it comes to navigating change and unexpected situations.

• Improved knowledge retention: When the right insights are shared with the right people, it sustains your collective organizational memory, and ensures that critical information isn’t lost when employees leave the company.

• Better employee connection: When employees learn from their peers, it helps them build belonging within the organization. It also creates a platform for the transfer of company values and culture, strengthening the connection employees have with the company.

• Increased strategic alignment: When all employees have access to the same information, it helps keep everyone on the same page and working toward the same goals.

What happens if you don’t prioritize knowledge sharing?

Here are some of the ways that poor knowledge sharing can impact your organization.

1. Loss of institutional knowledge due to employee turnover

The biggest challenge organizations face with institutional knowledge is retaining it. But with companies reporting an average turnover rate of 15% or higher, keeping that information within the company can be tricky. 

Even in the best-case scenarios where employees are regularly documenting insights, not all knowledge is explicit and it can be often difficult to articulate at a level where the information isn’t rendered less effective.

When employees retire or resign before they are able to transfer their insights to the right individuals, that information is essentially lost. And, you never know when someone is going to leave suddenly or forget to transfer that information in the offboarding process, taking their institutional knowledge with them.

The nature of institutional expertise and experience means it can take months—if not years—to be redeveloped, leading to prolonged periods of reduced efficiency. When knowledge consistently circulates among the right teams and employees, you’re able to better sustain your collective organizational knowledge, and information is never trapped with just one person at any point in time.

2. Ineffective new hire onboarding

New employees often bring unique and valuable skills to their roles. But what’s often missing—and hinders time-to-performance—is contextual and organizational-specific knowledge. 

While that knowledge might eventually be transferred or gained through experience, it can reduce the effectiveness of that employee at the onset. It increases ramp up time and can cause new hires to feel like they aren’t making enough of an impact fast enough.

For example, recent graduates and early talent at a large professional services firm likely aren’t familiar with all the various interdepartmental projects and client relationships.

If no one shares those insights with them, they won’t be able to contribute productively to client projects and collaborate. 

When knowledge sharing is part of employee onboarding and your company’s day-to-day workflow, it ensures employees are getting the company-specific nuances they need to contribute effectively from day one. 

In fact, with every role requiring access to different internal knowledge, knowledge sharing and social learning actually makes it easier to onboard new employees in a more personalized manner.

3. Failed culture integrations and transitions

Times of transition, such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), can lead to fragmented teams and silos in the best of situations.

So when knowledge sharing isn’t a part of your company culture, critical information can quickly become further isolated. This can translate into diverging goals and workload redundancies, decreasing organizational efficiency and making it difficult to maximize value in the transaction.

Institutional knowledge also isn’t just technical, it can—and should—also be cultural. This means the transfer of knowledge is also key to facilitating seamless culture integration. If employees aren’t sharing their values and cultural norms, it’s impossible to achieve a new path forward for your company culture.

With 65% of acquirers citing cultural issues as a major obstacle to creating deal value, the effectiveness of knowledge sharing within your organization can make or break an integration.

4. Stunted employee growth and development opportunities

We know from the 70/20/10 learning model, that only 10% of learning comes from formal training opportunities. Rather it’s social learning interactions (20%) and on-the-job experiences (70%) that make up the rest of employee growth and development. 

More often than not, the knowledge your employees need to thrive already exists within your organization. It’s simply a matter of unlocking and getting it into the hands of the right individuals.

But when knowledge sharing isn’t made a priority, employees are stuck relying on more traditional learning opportunities, which often lack the organizational nuances and company know-how needed to truly help them excel in their roles. 

Specifically, when it comes to institutional knowledge, there’s no standard path for development. Employees don’t know what they don’t know. So, even if they felt comfortable seeking out information from experienced mentors or peers, they wouldn’t necessarily know what to ask for.

This makes it challenging for high-performing employees to bridge the knowledge gap with more senior and experienced leaders. They might miss out on important context around business objectives or simply lack understanding of the skills they need to progress.

Not only does it make it difficult for them to step into future leadership roles and drain your internal talent pipeline, but it can stifle their growth entirely. With career development continuing to be a top priority for employees, it can cause them to disengage or leave the organization altogether. (And take their hard-earned institutional knowledge with them.)

“You can see how relationships can make an impact on everything from driving revenue growth, helping your client-facing teams collaborate to serve customers better. Or—if you've got transformation initiatives underway—really maximizing the success of those by taking deliberate steps that will help sort of align and integrate your teams, accelerating productivity for new hires or leadership transitions ahead of retirements, and thinking about the knowledge sharing that needs to happen. All of those are to help the business really succeed. So, the key with social learning is connecting the right people at the right time to have the right conversations, and that can make a huge impact on performance.” - Christine Silva, 10KC Adviser & former leader at RBC, Catalyst, & Shopify

5. Missed business and revenue growth opportunities

Shared knowledge also helps employees across the organization collaborate better and reach business objectives. When teams lack visibility into other departments it limits opportunities for collaboration or innovation that can push the company forward.

For example, if a sales team fails to communicate customer insights they’ve garnered through sales calls, the product team is unable to factor that feedback into their road map. This can lead to missed opportunities to build features or products that can generate revenue or cross-selling opportunities.

6. Ineffective management and leadership

The best leaders lean on historical data, organizational information, and their own experience to make informed decisions for the business and their teams. However, when knowledge sharing isn’t common practice, they aren’t always equipped with the perspectives and insights needed to make the best decisions—particularly if they’re newer to their role. 

On the other hand, when employees don’t share knowledge up the chain, leaders often miss critical information that allow them to anticipate challenges and get ahead of them.

“My experience working with senior leaders is quite often we see a pattern where the more senior a leader gets in their career and the more tenured they are in their experience, ironically, the harder it is to find other individuals to connect with. […] It's not as easy to reach out and find other peers and create meaningful connections. And one of the things that I think 10KC programs do really well is they break down that barrier to entry.” - Catherine Brown, Founder, Taybridge Leadership

How siloed workforces stifle institutional knowledge sharing

The sharing of institutional knowledge relies on employees being willing and able to transfer that information to their peers.

With hybrid work environments and globally distributed teams, knowledge sharing is often easier said than done. And once those barriers are in place the silos only tend to get larger, making it challenging to know who has the right organizational knowledge or context to help employees perform in their role 

When business-critical information gets locked up in silos, it all trickles down to your bottom line. 

One solution is to encourage documentation and information capture. However, this often only works with very technical and explicit knowledge. It’s much harder to create a record of more implicit or tacit knowledge. 

So how do you keep the information flowing? By building employee connections. 

Strategies to drive organizational knowledge sharing through employee connections

When employees are connected with one another, it fosters a collaborative work environment where knowledge transfer is part of the company culture and learning ecosystem.

Here are a few ways to elevate employee connections that unlock sustained knowledge sharing across the organization. 

1. Connect the right people at the right times

Organizational knowledge is only as valuable as the person carrying it. Employees need to understand how insights apply to their roles and how to leverage them to achieve business goals. If the information is not being used in their day to day, that information is inevitably wasted and lost over time. 

This highlights the importance of not just facilitating knowledge transfer, but making sure it flows between the right individuals. When you strategically match employees with peers, leaders, and subject matter experts, it allows them to develop specific skills and exchange institutional knowledge in a way that drives business outcomes.

In smaller teams when starting out, you can try to keep track of who knows what and manually connect people, but that's not scalable. You need to leverage technology and AI smart-match algorithms to automatically connect employees based on skills, goals, and organizational attributes. This alleviates the need for spreadsheets and reduces the manual lift while ensuring you’re connecting the right people at the right time in order to make the most of existing organizational knowledge. 

Some examples of facilitated connections that accelerate knowledge sharing and strategic priorities include: 

• Cross-functional leadership forums: Bring together leaders from different departments to uncover critical insights and identify new opportunities.

• Networking sessions: Break down silos and foster connections across teams and locations to enhance collaboration. 

• Subject matter expert Q&A: Pair employees 1:1 or in groups with subject matter experts for guided discussions and skill development.

• Peer-to-peer learning: Reinforce and embed skills after formal training through guided interactions. 

• Onboarding buddies: Match new hires with experienced team members to speed up their integration, cultural immersion, and productivity.

• Early-talent and high-potential mentoring: Connect early-career talent and high-performers with senior leaders for guidance, skill development, and succession planning.

2. Support knowledge sharing via tailored social learning programs

Social learning leans on relationships to accelerate skill development and foster a culture of continuous learning. It encourages employees to learn the way they learn best—from other people. This can include everything from mentoring and 1:1 networking to small group learning sessions.

While all forms of social learning have a place in the workplace, structured social learning programs actively encourage the sharing of targeted institutional knowledge in a way that drives performance—ensuring the right information is being transferred.

Social learning programs go beyond casual conversations and they provide structured guidance and curriculum that align with your talent development objectives. This ensures that employee connections are focused, intentional, and drive specific outcomes.

Rather than leaving employees to develop their own relationships, tailored paths of development can help employees build skills, share knowledge, and thrive in their roles. These learning pathways ensure individuals have access to purposeful experiences and stay on top of the connections they need to unlock the right critical knowledge, based on their individual career goals and key business outcomes. 

For example, 10KC offers a selection of meticulously crafted social Learning Pathways to provide tailored experiences that scale effortlessly across your organization. These pathways align with various talent groups and business goals, including:

• Leadership Development: Nurture future-ready leaders equipped to navigate change.

• People Manager Effectiveness: Elevate your managers to lead with impact and inspire their teams.

• Onboarding: Accelerate new hires' time to productivity and engagement.

• Culture Integration: Foster alignment and connection among teams after organizational changes, M&A, or restructures. 

• Sponsorship: Empower employees to proactively advance their careers.

• Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion: Cultivate a more inclusive workplace to boost engagement and retention of diverse talent.

• Early Talent: Unlock the full potential of new grads, co-ops, and interns.

• Mentoring: Automate and expand the reach of your mentorship program.

• Networking & Connectivity: Break down silos and foster cross-team collaboration.

Our Pathways combine expert-led discussion guides, carefully curated resources, and a range of social learning formats to engage learners with diverse styles and preferences. 

READ MORE: How 10KC Powers Social Learning at Scale for Increased Innovation, Productivity, and Performance

3. Facilitate intentional conversations and interactions across the organization

Making the initial connection is only the first step to knowledge sharing.

The good news is that when employees are connected with one another, knowledge transfer usually naturally follows—at least in some capacity. However, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the right insights are being uncovered.

Research-backed conversation guides help provide clear goals for every interaction. By encouraging thought-provoking discussion questions, you can keep conversations focused and make the most of every learning opportunity. This allows organic conversations to flow while keeping everyone moving toward goals, together.

4. Turn connections into measurable ROI

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who disagrees that institutional knowledge is valuable. However, can be perceived as a more abstract concept, which means despite the value, it often gets deprioritized in favor of more traditionally measurable KPIs. 

Historically it has been challenging to know if developmental conversations drive your business forward because you have a limited view of what employees are learning from each other, how they’re learning, and who they’ve connected with and are learning from.

However, with the right technology, you can measure how knowledge sharing transforms into measurable outcomes with the same precision as formal learning programs. By keeping a pulse on which employees are connecting and when, you can uncover silos and tie those relationships back to key metrics that move your business forward. 

Power knowledge sharing at scale with 10KC

10KC’s social learning platform helps organizations foster collaboration and critical knowledge sharing in the workforce. Turn connections and conversations into performance with tools to:

• Build personalized learning pathways to transfer knowledge at the right time, between the right people.
• Create social learning experiences—from 1:1 mentoring to small group sessions—that break down silos and create a culture of collaboration.
• Turn employee connections into data-driven insights that drive forward business goals.
• Integrate knowledge sharing and employee connections into your everyday workflow.

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Institutional knowledge FAQs

What does institutional knowledge mean?

Institutional knowledge refers to the collective knowledge and expertise of everyone at your company. This includes all different types of knowledge that can be leveraged in order to reach business goals.

What does loss of institutional knowledge mean?

Loss of institutional knowledge describes any situation where an organization loses valuable information, insights, and expertise that have accumulated over time. When this knowledge is lost —due to factors like high turnover, poor communication, or information hoarding—the impact can be severe. Productivity and innovation suffer, revenue may decline, and the company's sense of identity and expertise can erode.

What are the types of organizational knowledge? 

There are three main types of organizational knowledge: explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge.

Explicit knowledge is the readily available and easily shared information, like company policies, procedures, or training manuals. It's often documented and accessible to everyone.

Implicit knowledge is the practical "know-how" gained by applying explicit knowledge. It's about understanding how things work in practice, which can be harder to articulate but can be shared through mentoring, coaching, or on-the-job training.

Tacit knowledge is the most elusive type. It's deeply rooted in personal experiences, intuition, and individual expertise. Often, people possess tacit knowledge without even realizing it, making it challenging to transfer but invaluable to an organization's success.

This diagram helps illustrate the difference between explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge: 

What is a knowledge-sharing culture?

A knowledge-sharing culture is one where information flows freely throughout the workplace. It allows employees and stakeholders to regularly transfer knowledge between one another in a way that drives business goals. 

When knowledge-sharing is a part of company culture it helps reduce silos, increases collaboration, and minimizes the loss of critical information when employees leave the organization.