Knowledge Sharing at Work: How to Make It the Default

Every team has someone who “just knows” how things work. They know which customer needs a special invoice format, why the deploy script has that odd flag, and who to call when the supplier portal goes down. When that person is busy, on leave, or gone, work slows down or stops.

Knowledge sharing fixes this, but not by asking people to “share more.” It works when sharing is safe, expected, and easy, and when there is one clear place for the answers to live. This guide covers why people hold back, seven practices that build a knowledge sharing culture, and how to tell whether it’s working.

What is knowledge sharing?

Knowledge sharing is the everyday exchange of know-how, facts, and experience between people in an organization, so that what one person learns becomes available to everyone who needs it. It includes conversations and mentoring as well as written answers that others can find later.

Two kinds of knowledge are involved:

• Explicit knowledge is easy to write down: a pricing rule, a setup step, a policy.
• Tacit knowledge lives in experience: knowing which warning signs matter, or how to calm an upset customer.

Good knowledge sharing moves both. Conversations and shadowing pass on the tacit part. Documentation captures the explicit part so nobody has to ask the same question twice.

Why knowledge sharing matters in organizations

When knowledge stays in people’s heads, the same costs keep coming back:

• Repeated questions. Experts spend their day answering what they’ve already answered.
• Slow onboarding. New hires learn by interrupting people instead of reading.
• Inconsistent work. Two people solve the same problem two different ways.
• Fragile teams. One resignation can take a whole process with it.

The reverse is also true. Research on knowledge hiding, published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2021, surveyed 446 managers at financial institutions. It found that withholding knowledge was linked to weaker organizational performance. Knowledge sharing isn’t just a nice cultural value. It shows up in results.

Barriers to knowledge sharing: why people hold back

Most knowledge sharing programs assume the problem is tools. Often the real problem is people choosing not to share.

Researchers Catherine Connelly, David Zweig, Jane Webster, and John Trougakos studied this behavior and called it knowledge hiding: deliberately concealing knowledge that someone has asked for. In one of their studies, people logged 113 requests for knowledge, and more than 10% of them involved hiding. They found three common forms:

1. Playing dumb: pretending not to know.
2. Being evasive: giving incomplete or misleading help, or promising to “send it later” and never doing so.
3. Rationalized hiding: giving a reason not to share, such as “that’s confidential.”

What drives it? In Connelly’s research, the clearest trigger was distrust: the less someone trusted the person asking, the more likely they were to hide what they knew. The 2021 Frontiers study pointed to three other causes:

• No reward for sharing. If nobody notices, why bother?
• Internal competition. This had the strongest effect in that study. When colleagues compete with each other, knowledge becomes leverage.
• Psychological entitlement. Some people see their expertise as theirs alone.

There’s also a quieter barrier: friction. Even willing sharers skip it when writing something down takes too long, or when they don’t know where to put it.

How to build a knowledge sharing culture

The practices below tackle those barriers directly. Start with the one that matches your biggest gap.

1. Build trust before you buy tools

Connelly’s team was blunt about this. As one of the researchers put it: “If you don’t work on creating that climate and establishing trust, it doesn’t matter how great the software is, people aren’t going to use it.”

Their advice for managers is practical:

• Emphasize a shared identity: “we’re one team solving one problem.”
• Encourage direct contact between people rather than relying on email.
• Deal with hiding early, before it becomes a habit.

2. Stop rewarding hoarding

Look at what your incentives actually pay for. If performance reviews rank teammates against each other, or the “go-to expert” is the only one who gets promoted, you’re rewarding people for keeping knowledge to themselves.

APQC, a nonprofit benchmarking organization, notes that leading organizations link knowledge management participation to career progression and use it to give subject matter experts visibility. Make “made others better” a real promotion criterion.

3. Have leaders go first

People copy what leaders do, not what they say. APQC recommends designating role models and getting executives visibly involved.

In practice, that means a manager who writes up the decision behind a reorg, documents a lesson from a failed launch, or answers a question with a link instead of a private message. When leaders share their own mistakes, it becomes safe for everyone else to do the same.

4. Make sharing part of the flow of work

Sharing that feels like extra work doesn’t happen. Build it into moments that already exist:

• Onboarding: APQC lists new-hire onboarding as a key way to build engagement. Give new hires a reading path, then ask them to fix one thing that confused them.
• After incidents and projects: end every retro by updating the relevant doc, not just the slide deck.
• In support: when an answer is given twice, it becomes an article.

The less effort it takes to write something down, the more often people will do it. That’s why the authoring tool matters. People share more when they can write in an editor they already know.

5. Tell people where each kind of knowledge lives

A common reason knowledge goes missing is that nobody knows where it belongs. Chat, email, shared drives, and wikis all collect fragments. APQC specifically recommends giving employees clear guidance on which tool to use in which situation.

Write a one-page rule set, for example:

• Chat is for quick questions and coordination. It is not the record.
• The knowledge base is for anything someone will need again: how-tos, policies, decisions, and FAQs.
• Project folders are for drafts and working files.

Then point people to the knowledge base, kindly but consistently, every time an answer gets lost in a chat thread.

6. Run knowledge sharing sessions that leave something behind

A knowledge sharing session is a short, regular meeting where one person teaches others something they know well. These sessions are great for passing on tacit knowledge, because people can ask follow-up questions and watch how an expert thinks.

The weak point is that the knowledge often disappears when the meeting ends. Fix that with a simple format:

1. Pick one narrow topic, such as “how we handle refund exceptions,” not “finance.”
2. Keep it to 20–30 minutes, with time for questions.
3. Assign a note-taker who turns the session into a short article that day.
4. Publish it where the team already looks for answers, and link it in the meeting invite for next time.

7. Recognize contributions out loud

APQC names rewards and recognition as a key driver of participation, and the Frontiers study found that a lack of rewards fuels hiding. Recognition doesn’t need a budget:

• Thank contributors by name in team meetings.
• Share “this article saved us X” stories.
• Count documentation work in reviews the same way you count shipped work.

Knowledge sharing examples you can copy

Here are a few patterns teams use to make knowledge sharing in the workplace concrete:

• Support team: Agents tag repeat questions. Each week, the most-asked one becomes a help article, and agents reply with the link from then on.
• IT team: Every fix that took more than an hour gets a short runbook entry so the next person doesn’t start from scratch.
• Operations: A departing employee spends their notice period recording their recurring tasks as step-by-step procedures, reviewed by the person taking over.
• Product team: Each release ends with a “what we learned” page linked from the release notes.

Each one follows the same loop: notice the knowledge, write it down, put it where people look, and reuse it.

How to tell whether knowledge sharing is working

APQC recommends documenting impact with business outcome stories: concrete examples where shared knowledge saved time, avoided a mistake, or helped close a deal. Pair those stories with a few simple signals:

• Are the same questions still being asked in chat?
• How long does it take a new hire to work independently?
• Which articles get read, and which searches come up empty?
• Do readers flag pages as unhelpful or out of date?

Empty searches and negative feedback aren’t failures. They’re a to-do list showing exactly what to write next.

Make knowledge sharing the easy path

A knowledge sharing culture isn’t built with a slogan. It’s built when sharing is safe (trust), worth it (recognition and fair incentives), expected (leaders go first), and easy (one clear home for answers, part of everyday work).

The “easy” part is where your documentation platform matters. Sonat lets anyone on your team write in Google Docs or a simple editor and publish to a searchable knowledge base, with no technical setup. Version history keeps every change, and reader feedback on each topic shows you what to improve next. Start with one team, one recurring question, and one article. Then do it again next week.