This post was originally published on lessonly.com.
The COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak has pushed companies from around the globe into a sudden and unexpected remote-working experiment in an attempt to contain the spread of the virus.
Remote work requires employees to be armed with a full stack of tools that enable them to meet their daily work goals and remain productive while out of their familiar work environment. All of these tools are addressing the need for simple and effective communication, collaboration, and security.
Ultimately, even with all of the cloud-based tools available to a remote worker, the biggest hurdle is knowledge sharing and access to the company knowledge base.
Ways to access company knowledge remotely
Teleconference, messaging, or email
Using an internal message on a platform like Zoom or Slack is most likely an employee’s first thought when seeking knowledge. But seeking knowledge in this way impedes productivity significantly. Email is arguably even slower in terms of response time, so hopefully, your remote team won’t rely on it when seeking answers. Consider these statistics about interruptions at work (compiled by Atlassian):
- 56 interruptions per employee per day (average)
- 3 minutes spent working before the average employee switches tasks
- 2 hours spent recovering from distractions per day
So based on this data, it’s clear that by blindly connecting your remote workforce to a teleconference or messaging platform, you may encounter reduced productivity as employees seek knowledge directly throughout the organization.
Cloud-based knowledge base software
While employees will continue to “shoulder-tap” their peers in pursuit of knowledge, the strategy that counter-balances these interruptions is to offer a searchable and remote-accessible knowledge base solution. In the remote work scenario, like the one precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, knowledge must be accessible from wherever your employees are in the world. There are a few different software options that integrate nicely within the remote workflow (to name a few):
- Confluence
- Tettra
- Slab
- Slite
The reason we list these knowledge base software solutions is because they integrate well within the confines of the Slack universe. To be successful, knowledge needs to be directly searchable and accessible directly from where remote employees are always going to be connected – Slack.
Self-serve support and knowledge
A robust knowledge base software solution, properly integrated into an organization, achieves many objectives:
- Increases employee productivity by reducing unnecessary interruptions
- Reduces service-ticket backlog by deflecting issues before they happen
- Escalates more deserving ticket issues to human support teams
Within the scope of requirements for a successful remote working arrangement, self-serve support and access to corporate knowledge should be a top priority.
