To start knowledge sharing in teams, all you need to do is…
A little about CROC
We are a technology partner, we work with large businesses and deal with a wide range of IT tasks: solutions, services, products, services. There are about 3 thousand of us, and we do a large number of projects per year.
We make money solely on the fact that our team has cool, smart people, guys with expertise. We don't make chairs or tables, we don't sell oil, we don't have a product that can simply be distributed. If our employees stop being professionals, we will lose our competitive advantage. Therefore, we invest a lot in the knowledge and skills of the guys.
The second important thing is our hiring model. We are hiring a lot of interns and juniors. This year, a third of the hires are interns, guys aged 19 to 23. Many of them are just studying at university and working at CROC is their first experience. Studying at a university does not always reflect the real challenges of business, so we invest a lot in their growth and development. I myself came to CROC as an intern six years ago and rose to the rank of manager, like approximately 90% of my fellow managers.
All this leads to the fact that we in HR are constantly engaged in development, growth, training, and knowledge exchange.
I'll prove it in numbers:
In 2023, we held 160+ meetings to exchange experiences. These are large-scale meetings or events in more behind-the-scenes teams of 10-12 people. But still they occur almost every second calendar day.
This year, 135 employees acted as speakers.
More than 1.5 thousand employees participated in the meetings, which is more than half of the company.
Why is it necessary to exchange experience?
To answer this question, I've compiled seven challenges in teams that sharing expertise can solve. And naturally, sharing experience is not a magic pill; HR doesn’t have them at all.
What pains can be cured by sharing experiences?
The cool senior quits and takes all his knowledge with him.
This painful situation occurs often. It can be treated if you maintain documentation and knowledge bases, and constantly train people. But not all nuances can be recorded in the knowledge base; much is passed on only by word of mouth. If you don’t motivate a great specialist to constantly share his experience, then when he leaves, the whole team will have to close his tasks.
People grow slowly: they sit on one project and don’t understand what else is happening.
From time to time we encounter a problem when an employee is stuck on a long, monotonous project. He does the same thing every day: he looks at the same system, does similar tasks, communicates with the same client. Time passes, and slight stagnation begins, because the person does not develop. Sharing experiences helps pull guys out of this swamp and show that the world is wider.
We step on the same rake in projects and processes.
It is important to share failures and successes: not to repeat failures, and to scale up successes.
We do not take away the best practices from others.
We are trying to spread great practices throughout the company and get rid of unnecessary rakes.
I'll tell you a personal story from my team. A colleague had a task to make a personal newsletter for the entire company – 2.5 thousand people, and send a personalized letter to everyone. There are services that help you complete the task, but the colleague basically wanted to find a way to do it for free. In Microsoft Office, this function can be implemented using a document in Word – it has become the fish of writing. She also used an Excel document where the name, email and other data were written down. A colleague pressed different buttons five times and 2.5 thousand letters flew away.
We periodically talked about this cool thing, and our employees were interested in it. Even email marketers asked to teach them this. This is how we disseminate best practices throughout the company.
There are no guys who present the company well on external platforms.
A company wants to talk about itself, for example, at TeamLead Conf, and needs a cool speaker. Or we need to teach the guys how to communicate with customers. Companies are looking for people who can speak in public and speak well. But it’s scary for an employee to start right away without practice. The team is also scared to release a newcomer, because he might get confused.
In this case, internal presentation formats and experience exchange practices are a safe platform for developing expert speakers. It worked for us, a small conveyor appeared. We invite an employee to speak inside. If a person likes it and we understand that he speaks well, we decide to send him somewhere else. We begin to work with him more and train him in the process. As a result, a ready-made, pumped-up brand ambassador appears.
Mentoring doesn't work well; we don't know how to teach each other.
Sharing experiences helps a lot when there are problems with mentoring. For example, we are not very good at communicating things or explaining things. There are people who know everything and do it perfectly well, but absolutely do not know how to teach, or the company does not have a culture of sharing information with each other: it is better to keep the information to yourself in order to be indispensable. We at CROC encourage guys to exchange experiences and teach each other so that there are no irreplaceable people.
Lack of openness, honesty, and helping culture in the team.
If there is a lack of openness and honesty in the team, and people do not help each other and a toxic atmosphere arises, we need to work with it. Sharing experiences will help here. We go out, say something, answer questions honestly and become more open to each other.
Frequent objections before implementing experience exchange
This should be done by HR, not by the team leader who is in charge.
There is a simple answer to this – the team leader is responsible for everything that happens in his team. I believe that there is no HR problem that does not affect you. If hiring is bad, you need to decide together with the recruiter what to do, and not scold him. If knowledge is not transferred, an HR partner can do the work, but try too, because you suffer from this. HR has other teams besides yours, but it’s up to you to do the work for your own. If possible, you can ask HR to help, but the area of responsibility remains with the team lead.
Sharing experiences is a waste of time. Rather than sitting in a meeting room for an hour, it’s better to work.
A synchronized team works faster and more efficiently. An unsynchronized person can do the same task together for a week or do the wrong thing at all. An hour of sharing experience is an investment in your team for the future. It's like paying interns a salary. They don’t bring much benefit at the start, but it’s worth paying, because later these trainees will become middles, seniors and will bring you a lot of money and benefits.
Nobody will want to share their experience. Everyone sits in their own hole, afraid to speak – the guys are introverts, it’s difficult to get them to talk.
I haven’t had a crowd of speakers on any project so I could choose. We need to work with speakers, we need to motivate them, and set the right example. Start with yourself, attract experienced older guys to help manage the team. Many speakers like the fact that 100 people are watching them or posting them on a channel, liking them, giving them a gift, or publicly praising them—it motivates. There are also those who simply enjoy teaching. They feel that they are being listened to and questions are asked. Speakers understand that their topic is interesting.
For speakers, like for any person, you need to look for the key. It's not always easy, you have to try.
It’s easier to talk about this at CROC; it has its own corporate university of nine people, everyone is involved in this. This will not work in small startups; you need HR and a corporate uni to launch it. The team lead alone cannot do this.
To launch something not complicated, you don’t need HR and a corporate university. A knowledge sharing meeting in its simplest format is a structured meeting with preparation that can be organized by anyone. HR will help make this more interesting and bring its expertise, but you can do without it.
How to start sharing experiences
I'll tell you what I mean when I talk about sharing experiences. I’ll share meeting formats and give you a step-by-step action plan that you can implement in your team as early as Monday.
How to start sharing experience in a group, even if you don’t have HR
Search for a topic
Find an interesting topic to discuss: technology, soft skills, internal company processes, project/product experience, stages of product development, or something personal, local.
At our first experience exchange, we talked about how to start running correctly. I opened our corporate LMS and copied the last 4 exchanges of experience, the topics turned out to be completely different:
Useful features and capabilities of GitLab in terms of CI/CD;
What's under the hood of our product
; How to keep project boundaries locked;
How I combine work, study and sports: time management life hacks.
Search for a speaker
This point can be performed in parallel with the first. The speaker can be someone who likes to speak – a great expert, senior, mentor. Look for people on the team. Perhaps someone is already speaking or working at a university and has experience as a speaker. If you can’t immediately find anyone on the team, you can become the first speaker yourself.
Speaker preparation
If the speaker is not you, but a person from the team, be sure to talk to him. Explain the value, why do it, what you expect from the speech, how it will help the company, why it is important. Offer your help. Support the speaker morally, encouraging him, or physically: help formulate a topic or write abstracts. You can choose memes for your presentation or give feedback during a pre-run.
When we have a large event of more than 50 people, we always offer a public speaking run-through with a speaker. So we also invest in training the children.
Organization
We determine the time, place, location depending on our preferences. We reserve a slot in calendars. We advertise the event, tell you what the meeting will be about, which expert will speak, and how it will be useful.
The meeting itself
The meeting takes place at the appointed time, the team leader makes the opening speech. The lecture format is not very interesting and understandable, so it is better to prepare questions for the speaker and provoke an interactive dialogue.
Be sure to offer to continue such meetings.
Feedback
Collect feedback from the guys and the speaker. Let him tell you how he felt about the performance. Think about how to improve his experience, help him become better. Be sure to praise and mark the speaker, close this gestalt.
Go to step 1
Continue from step 1 until you feel the effect.
Format ideas
We used different meeting formats; they all have pros and cons.
Meetup
Several speakers and short presentations
Our meetup format included several speakers with fairly short speeches.
Cool:
Several speakers are better able to hold the audience's attention due to the different timbres of their voices. If you have boys and girls performing, it is better to put them in turns. This kind of presentation is better received.
Preparing a report for 5 minutes is 10 times more difficult than preparing a report for 30 minutes. There is a good quote: “There is no time to write short, so I write long.” Learning to speak briefly is a useful but difficult skill.
Difficult:
Find several speakers at once;
May be delayed;
It is necessary to organize the meeting correctly in time so that the participants do not get tired.
Idea: thematic meetups around something.
The first thing that came to my mind was to do a meetup around the topic of artificial intelligence, for example, “AI in the work of an analyst/marketer/developer.” Here you can look for points of intersection and exchange useful information.
FuckUp Nights
We tell you how we stepped on a rake and got out of it
At FuckUp Nights we talk about our mistakes and how we solved them.
Cool:
It's always interesting to hear how your manager or another employee made a mistake;
The level of trust in the team increases.
If this format really works, it greatly increases the level of trust in the team. People understand that they can make mistakes; they don’t call you on the carpet for it. If you have such a team, it is worth a lot. But if initially everything is bad with trust in the team, then either no one will agree to speak, or they will take an uninteresting topic and spend the entire time of the presentation talking about insignificant successes.
Difficult: a high level of self-irony and honesty is required. It's hard to laugh at yourself, but it's healthy.
Idea: We always start with ourselves, set an example that it’s not scary.
We in the company started with our top managers. The FuckUp was that they made few mistakes, they could remember very little. But we are not giving up, we will definitely complete this format.
Debates/battles
Two speakers, two opposing points of view
An interesting and exciting format when we give speakers a topic and two opposing points of view. Everyone defends their own, for example, where to track tasks: in Jira or in Trello?
Cool:
It’s exciting, the participants get involved well. The audience also takes its position;
Speakers improve their argumentation skills, learn to prove their point of view;
A real work problem can be exposed and a solution can be found.
Difficult:
On the one hand, you need a burning and exciting topic to make it interesting to participate in its discussion. But at the same time, the topic should not quarrel everyone; a golden mean is needed.
Idea: let speakers defend opposing points of view.
You can complicate the task: ask speakers to prepare to defend one point of view, and at the meeting inform them that positions are changing and it is necessary to defend another. This is an advanced version, it’s fun to change the minds of the guys in the moment.
Invited guest
Invite a speaker from a “neighboring” team or “go visit” yourself
Cool: exchange of best practices, broadening horizons.
Difficult:
Motivate the speaker to tell someone something, instead of focusing on his team;
It’s scary to perform “not for your own people.”
Idea: interview or Q&A format:
Interview – when the presenter asks prepared and pre-agreed questions;
Q&A – when questions come straight from the audience.
You can do a mix of these formats. In this case, less time is spent on preparation, and the dialogue itself proceeds faster.
PowerPoint Party
We make funny and ugly presentations that are not about work
My favorite format for dessert. Here we make funny and creepy presentations that are not about work.
For example, I made a presentation on the topic: “Why tomatoes are the best vegetables.”
Cool:
Works great for team building to create an informal party atmosphere;
Helps to get to know each other better. This is how we get to know everyone’s hobbies, hobbies and interests;
It’s not scary to perform in this format, because we initially set the framework that it will be funny and strange.
Difficult: We need a certain level of security in the team.
It's hard to discuss your favorite meme or who your crush was as a teenager with strangers. But if this level already exists, then you can raise it much higher. It's almost the same story as with FuckUp Nights.
Idea: combine it with a trip to the bar in honor of the completion of a difficult stage of the project, unwind as much as possible and just hang out together.
Results
I want you to take away the following from my article today.
Organized, formalized exchange of experience is not your goal in itself. You need to create a genuine exchange of experience, expertise and knowledge within your teams. It does not take place in a classroom, on ZOOM, or by recording. The exchange of experience can take place anywhere: in the smoking room, in the kitchen, in chats, in the corridors, in Slack, on the phone. It occurs chaotically and cannot be tracked or measured.
For all this to happen on its own, the company and teams need to improve the culture of transparency, openness, and honesty. This is done in many ways. In addition to launching the exchange of experience, you need:
Openness of top managers;
Honest feedback;
Open data about the company;
1-2-1 communication with employees.
You need your company to be open, top managers to talk to people, and give honest feedback. There are many steps and aspects that need to be infused to create a culture of openness. This is not done quickly, the path is long and thorny, but it is worth it.
Watch Lera Chekanova's speech at Knowledge Conf 2023:
