From Updates to Insights – Enhancing Team Communication and Knowledge Sharing

Team calls are an important part of managing and maintaining any group of employees. However, sometimes it can be hard to find things to discuss. Once the team updates have been gone over, and there’s still more than 20 minutes left in the meeting time, what do you talk about?

Every team is different, but here’s what we figured out for ours: knowledge sharing! Once a week, after team updates have been given, one member of our team presents on a topic that is relevant to our work. We created a list of topics as a team, listing out aspects of our work, our tools, and our products. Each week one of our team members volunteers to present on one of these topics for 15-20 minutes. We often encourage team members to pick a topic that they have little to no previous knowledge on, so that they can benefit from the time to research and learn.

In addition to providing an opportunity to expand the team’s knowledge base, improve our team member’s research and presentation skills – we also record the presentations. Over time, this has created a huge library of topics that we can direct new joiners to when they have questions or request additional training.

By combining our team meetings with these presentations, we have created a solution that addresses two common pain points: team communication and knowledge sharing. We have been running these ‘VAT Basics Presentations’ for almost a year now, and it has proven to be a powerful tool that has made us closer as a team and vastly increased our knowledge base.