Trying to share technical knowledge within a company
I am an optimistic most of the time, I really believe that people, mostly technical people, always want to evolve, to learn new stuff and to try new ways to do their day by day tasks. Thinking about that I always wanted to start some initiative to share the knowledge in the company and to create an environment of mutual contribution, but to accomplish that first we must satisfy some basic requirements:
- people with knowledge to share
- an environment with freedom to speak about anything
- people who wanna learn and grow
This is very basic, right? You need people, with some knowledge to share in an environment that allows you to speak freely and in the other hand you need people who wants to learn and to discuss.
We are trying to build this kind of initiative at the company, but it can be surprisingly difficult to implement such a obvious thing, something everyone should clearly understand the benefits.
From the beginning, it all started with the international conventions we always sent our technicians, the problem is that we always sent people to international events but when they return, we never took the initiative to share what they saw and experienced. That’s a big issue, we can’t afford to choose one person out of some hundreds of employees and be comfortable with that person keeping everything it learned for himself.
Then we started a weekly technical meeting, open to everyone at the company, but specially driven to developers and technical teams (Sys Admin, Telecom, Support, Developers, etc), the first 2 meetings went relatively well, with reasonable number of attendees. The third only had 1/4 of the previous audiences, then I thought: ” it may be the subject”, was to specific, besides the point that was a very interesting technical presentation. Then the next presentation was worst even with a relevant subject for most of the technical employees. Ok, so “Houston we have a problem”, discussing with the other managers they started to send messages to their employees asking then to attend the event, communicating that the technical presentations (we called it TechTalks, original hum?) was something and to pay attention to it. Boom, the next session was packed, totally full, lesson learned: obviously communication is very important, you need to spread the word throughout the company with e-mails and posters with a clear content programming for the next sessions.
Then after another two sessions we experienced another disaster in number of attendees, the I sad “should be some critical project the developers were working on and didn’t have time to attend”. But we know that there are always lots of projects behind the schedule and lots of priorities on our daily tasks, but we need to plan and to destinate part of our time to learn and talk with other employees, with different skills and points of view, I believe this is strategic for the company.
So after some months doing this I’ve learned another thing, it`s difficult to find people that want learn and share. The target audience matter indeed, they need to understand that this initiative, these sessions, aren’t to satisfy the managers or the directors, it’s for themselves, it’s a time they have to learn and to get better, to grow, and unfortunately there are people who doesn’t really care about it and that’s a problem. In the end it always get us back to the attitude, to the technical profile we have in the company. It’s necessary to change the culture, the attitude and I still believe this knowledge sharing thing is very important and I am going to keep pushing this initiative as far as its necessary so it will walk by itself. But the culture issue…. hummm… that is very, very… very complicated and I going to talk about it in the future posts.
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