10 Best Knowledge Management Practices in 2026

Make knowledge sharing a natural habit rather than an extra task for your team. Get started on aligning your organizational culture and KM strategy by executing these practices right off the bat of your KM implementation:

• Create a space that supports knowledge sharing: A physical space for brainstorming and collaboration in an office. They can also be virtual tools that bring people together to share knowledge if you’re working remotely.
• Offer knowledge-sharing incentives: Give shoutouts in company meetings, offer tangible prizes, include performance review incentives, and clearly define professional development opportunities.
• Update your training and onboarding procedure: Bake the use of KM into the transition process of new hires into your company culture. Incorporate knowledge management practices such as mentorship, job shadowing, and input sharing.

Considering these tactics when planning your knowledge management approach ensures that those involved in the implementation understand its value and advantages. Make it a goal to institutionalize knowledge management best practices in the workplace.

To maximize the impact of your knowledge management strategy, your technology must act as a frictionless extension of how your team already works. The right platform isn’t just about storage; it’s about choosing features that actively encourage participation and reduce the effort barrier for your employees.

You can leverage specific Bloomfire capabilities to turn these theoretical practices into daily habits:

• Deep-Index AI Search: Instead of digging through folders, users can instantly locate information buried within various file types—even jumping to the exact timestamp where a keyword is mentioned in a video.
• Crowdsourced Q&A Engine: This transforms the platform into a living community where team members can ask questions and capture expert answers in real time, building a searchable library of collective wisdom.
• No-Code Configurable Homepages: Admins can use drag-and-drop layouts to surface high-priority content instantly, ensuring the user experience stays relevant as your business needs evolve without requiring technical support.

Your software choice serves as the backbone for every other KM best practice. When a tool feels intuitive and helpful, team members are far more likely to contribute, making your knowledge strategy a natural part of the workday rather than a chore.

Establishing a roadmap for your intellectual assets transforms a static repository into a dynamic engine for growth. To set a concise and clear direction for your knowledge management system, do the following:

• Establish your big why: State why a KM strategy is essential for your entire organization to retain collective knowledge and insight within the company. This should tie back to specific business goals.
• Define why KM matters: State what KM offers you and your team. Highlight the benefits of a knowledge base, including improved productivity, reduced training time, increased employee engagement, knowledge preservation, consistent communication, empowered remote work, better collaboration, and more.
• Identify your specific KM goals and objectives: Two of the most significant goals you should aim for with your KM strategy are based on your audience: external (customers) and internal (employees). The objectives can also vary within each major category.
• Sort the necessary changes in KM implementation: If you’re implementing a KM strategy for the first time, identify the shifts in practices and processes your staff will need to integrate your KM strategy into their daily work.

Adding clarity to your KM strategy goals is integral to your knowledge management best practices, as it drives a better understanding of your decision-making process when incorporating a new system. This is particularly true if your organization is undergoing several pivots within a specific period, which may involve introducing new software.

In a practical setting, designating a knowledge management champion translates theoretical strategy into operational success. One example is during a company-wide migration to a centralized digital headquarters. Some of the core responsibilities of a KM champion include:

• Internal advocates: Translate high-level objectives into relatable benefits for every department to ensure the vision is understood.
• Project leads: Orchestrate the technical rollout of new software by coordinating with IT and department heads for a seamless transition.
• Onboarding facilitators: Champions facilitate personalized onboarding sessions that introduce staff to the interface and clarify how specific tools address daily pain points.
• Active power users: Model ideal behavior on the platform by consistently sharing updates, tagging resources, and answering peer questions.

Establishing a dedicated KM leader ensures that your knowledge management strategy moves beyond documentation and into consistent execution. Team members gain a reliable point of contact who resolves technical roadblocks and provides immediate guidance on best practices for information storage.

Implementing a robust framework for information exchange removes the friction that often prevents experts from contributing their insights. Here are some knowledge management tips for making it as easy as possible for employees to document and share their knowledge:

• Focus on experience first: Look for ways to make it easy and efficient for teams to access and share information (e.g., training, readily available resources, open communication, etc.).
• Create a clear guide for everyone: Establish a playbook for content sharing. Leverage the documents the team members already created to save time. This should help you develop answers for frequently asked questions.
• Make templates for different content types: Allow employees to document their knowledge in the format that makes the most sense to them (e.g., recording a screen share video rather than writing a step-by-step text document).

Eliminating complexities and unnecessary steps can promote knowledge-sharing among your teams. Deliberate actions to make the process easy can motivate everyone to adopt a team-player mentality and join the knowledge-sharing culture.

Knowledge audits also assess gaps and optimize knowledge assets to make them as valuable as possible to the organization. Although specific steps can vary from company to company, you’ll want to make sure you’re covering these five areas:

• Build your audit team: Your team may include cross-functional members who will carry out your knowledge audit and any next steps.
• Revisit your goals and objectives: Similar to how you handle your business goals, schedule dedicated time to reassess the goals and objectives outlined in your KM strategic plan. Update and amend as needed, based on your business and management conditions.
• Create an inventory of existing organizational knowledge: Examine all types of existing knowledge (e.g., explicit, tacit, and implicit) from different sources, such as surveys, questionnaires, shared drives, your company’s intranet, and more.
• Review how knowledge is transferred: Determine how your employees access and share information. Also, identify who shares knowledge frequently.
• Identify challenges and knowledge gaps: Beyond the apparent gaps in the implementation, highlight any duplication issues. Scour for similar knowledge assets located in different places and make siloed knowledge more accessible to everyone based on access.

Performing regular knowledge audits ensures essential calibration in the use of KM software and in the execution of your own set of knowledge management best practices. Depending on the maturity of your usage, you can schedule quarterly or yearly audits. Findings from the Salesforce State of Service Report highlight the urgency of this practice, as 62% of service agents report that their internal knowledge materials are outdated or difficult to follow.

Executive leaders who implement these frameworks into knowledge management practices create a resilient workforce capable of maintaining high performance despite shifting personnel. Managers can utilize specific tactics to bridge the gap between departing veterans and incoming talent:

• Exit interviews transition into knowledge transfer sessions: Where departing experts record video walkthroughs of complex software configurations or client histories.
• Phased retirement programs: Pair senior leaders with successors for several months to allow for hands-on shadowing and the gradual transfer of critical relationships.
• Subject matter experts curate internal wikis: Include troubleshooting guides for rare technical failures that occur once or twice a year.
• Peer-to-peer storytelling circles: Document lessons learned from failed projects to prevent the company from making the same strategic errors in future ventures.

Maintaining this flow of information ensures business continuity during periods of rapid growth or organizational restructuring. Companies that treat knowledge as a renewable resource rather than a static one find themselves more agile in competitive markets. Dedicated retention efforts ultimately foster a culture where every team member feels empowered by the collective wisdom of the entire firm.

Establishing a KM practice for incentivizing knowledge sharing provides a clear roadmap for how team members should interact with company information. Various companies have successfully integrated these methods to turn passive observers into active contributors:

• Peer-to-peer recognition programs allow staff to nominate colleagues for monthly awards when they provide invaluable documentation.
• Performance-based bonuses link a percentage of annual reviews to the quality and frequency of contributions made to the internal knowledge base.
• Gamification elements, such as leaderboards and digital badges, highlight top subject-matter experts within the communication platform.

Providing these clear rewards transforms knowledge sharing from a discretionary act into a core component of professional growth. Employees are more likely to invest time in high-quality documentation when they see a direct path to career advancement or public appreciation. This structured approach ultimately builds a more agile and interconnected workforce.

A structured environment for growth requires practical initiatives that integrate education into the daily workflow. These specific actions help bridge the gap between high-level strategy and the workforce’s actual habits:

• Cross-training rotations: Departments implement rotations where employees shadow colleagues in different roles to understand diverse workflows and broaden the internal talent pool.
• Retrospective analysis: Project leads dedicate time during wrap-up meetings for analysis that transforms individual lessons learned into searchable digital assets.
• Mentorship programs: Senior leaders are paired with new hires to facilitate the direct transfer of nuanced legacy knowledge and cultural best practices.
• Professional development hours: Time is granted to individuals who volunteer to lead lunch-and-learn sessions for other departments.

Building a workplace that values the pursuit of new skills creates a sustainable cycle of innovation and internal mobility in your knowledge management practices. Success in this area is often measured by a team’s ability to adapt to market shifts or adopt emerging technologies. A well-trained workforce remains the most effective tool for keeping your knowledge management system a well-oiled machine.

Successful implementation of knowledge management frameworks often involves creating automated triggers that prompt users to document a solution as soon as a task is completed. This practice is observable in several high-performing industries:

• Customer support teams utilize integrated sidebars within their ticketing software to suggest relevant help articles based on the live text of a customer’s query.
• Engineering departments employ automated bots in Slack or Microsoft Teams to archive technical decisions directly from chat threads into a centralized wiki.
• Manufacturing firms use augmented reality overlays to provide technicians with real-time digital assembly instructions and safety protocols directly on the factory floor.
• Sales organizations sync their CRM data with a content library to automatically surface case studies and pitch decks tailored to the prospective lead’s industry.

Integrating these natural touchpoints within the workday transforms knowledge sharing from a burdensome chore into an effortless byproduct of standard operations. The cultural shift encourages team members to contribute to the organization’s Enterprise Intelligence. Continuous refinement of these workflows also ensures the system scales alongside the company’s growth.