More people than ever are working remotely, from small businesses to giant tech corporations. In fact, between 2019 and 2021, then the number of remote workers in the USA tripled. For many organizations, remote work has unlocked amazing opportunities for expanding the talent pool and reaching new audiences. But, remote work also comes with challenges, and empowering employee self-service is essential.
One of the biggest challenges facing remote employees is information silos. When organizational information isn’t well-managed, it can get stuck in different departments and be inaccessible for employees outside of that department. In an in-person office, most information is physically located in the same building, but in a remote office, vital company information could be located on a computer miles away from you.
Clearly, physically storing company knowledge on a computer is a bad idea. But sticking your content into any old cloud-based folder isn’t necessarily a great idea either. Cloud drives can very quickly and very easily become cluttered and overwhelmed with content. If you forget the name of the file, it’s hard to locate it again. And the amount of content large enterprise organizations create makes it impossible to keep up.
Even if a document already exists, if your employees can’t locate it, they’re likely just to write it again. This wastes time and introduces the possibility of error. So what can you do to help remote employees thrive? It all starts with employee self-service Let’s take a look.
Dismantle information silos
Information can live in lots of different places like:
- CRM’s
- Cloud Drives
- Spreadsheets
- Emails
- Hard drives
- Project management software
- Company chats
These systems are helpful for many things, but when we use them to store our information, it can quickly become siloed. One project lives in a spreadsheet while another lives in an email thread. This makes company knowledge incredibly hard to access. And, employees waste time looking for information.
So, the first step is to identify where company knowledge is held and untangle your organization from these different places.
Establish a single source of truth
Once the information silos are gone, it’s time to set up one simple, secure place for all of your company information to live. This is called creating a single source of truth.
To create a single source of truth you need a system that:
- Is component-based (not page, document, or file-based)
- Enables reuse via linking across departments or the entire company
- Manages company knowledge centrally
A knowledge base is a perfect place to establish a single source of truth. Both employees and customers can use a knowledge base for self-service help, making it a useful investment.
Ensure security with secure access
Since remote employees will be accessing all the information online, it’s vital to ensure that company data is secure. One way to do this is by creating authorized user logins on your knowledge base.
This way, potential and current customers can access the content they need, while employees have access to secure internal content. Make sure that your knowledge base has sign-in capabilities so that you can set up secure access.
Empower remote employees self-service
Remote work brings different challenges, but your organization can thrive when you empower employee self-service.
Need a knowledge base that can handle remote work? Heretto makes employee self-service a snap with our proven Component Content Management System, Deploy API, and Portal. Find out more or book a demo here.
