Can a business ever have too much knowledge?

For the most part, knowledge in business is always seen as a good thing. We need knowledge to know how to do our jobs, to help customers, and develop innovative new products. 

Having a knowledge base is essential to preserving and curating your knowledge for future versions of your team, rather than having it drain away when individual team members leave. Knowledge is recorded in knowledge base articles that can be accessed by employees with the click of a button and an internet connection. 

But what happens when you have so much knowledge that you begin to drown in it? This can lead to negative consequences for your business and unhappiness from employees. 

Here’s what happens when you have too much knowledge. 

Information overload

Too much knowledge may mean that your employees experience information overload.

If your organization has too much knowledge, it can paralyze action. It can also make your actions unfocused and scattered: 36% of managers say they’re suffering from poor health due to the large amounts of information they have to process at work. 

Too much information affects the health and well-being of your employees, their performance at work, and your ability to retain workers. You need to find a way of deciding what information is important and relevant to your strategy.

However, information overload isn't just about having too much knowledge; it can also just mean that you have a reasonable amount of knowledge without appropriate curation. In this case, the information feels overloading because it's indiscriminate, irrelevant, or poorly organized.

Everyone in your team must play a role in managing the knowledge you have to gain the valuable insights. 

Losing touch with your customers

When you have too much knowledge, you run the risk of thinking your customers know more than they do about your industry. This can lead to products and services that don’t meet your customers’ needs. You and your employees probably spend a great deal of time thinking and researching things in your industry, but if you're not responding to the problems your customers are trying to solve, all that knowledge won't do you any good.

Over time, assumptions you make based on your knowledge can accumulate and cause your business to lose its competitive edge. Your customers start to churn as they’re not getting satisfaction from your products.

How should you combat this sense of knowing a lot? Be humble--or force humility on yourself, your employees, and your business. Create user personas to help channel your target customers and ask customers directly for feedback. Rather than viewing new customers or new hires as needing knowledge, recognize that they can offer you fresh insights you might have missed before. Consider pulling in outside consultants to help further broaden your perspective.

Don’t assume that just because you’re successfully selling lots of products now that you will be in the future. 

Poor curation or search

If you have a lot of collected knowledge, it can also lead to frustration, ironically. Just to do their jobs properly, employees may have to wade through swathes of information, much of it useless. 

A very common problem in complex organizations is having such a quantity of knowledge that an individual employee doesn’t know where to find the information they need. Without centralized knowledge management--or with outdated centralized knowledge management--employees may try to make sense of the chaos by creating their own ways of collecting and organizing knowledge.

This leads to all sorts of wikis and staff pages where people capture what they think is accurate information, or desperately try to find out who is responsible for what. Portals and repositories spring up everywhere, containing duplicated or complicated information.

Consider: 85% of employees said they regularly turn to Google instead of using their employer’s knowledge management system (KMS). 

In contrast, just 30% of employees regularly use their employer’s KMS. 

Why? Because knowledge management isn't Field of Dreams. You can't just store information and expect people to find it and make it useful. All the information in the world won't help your employees if you've failed to manage it properly for your staff. They find it much easier to fire off a quick email to knowledgeable colleagues or search on Google. Knowledge management initiatives fail. 

There’s no easy way to manage knowledge internally but a robust understanding of your processes, and the daily routine for your employees, is essential. 

How information overload affects your business 

Information overload impacts your company on three levels: your employees, your teams, and your organization as a whole. 

• It affects your employees' health and well-being – 25% of workers experience significant stress and poor health due to the amount of information they are required to process. 23% of employees feel burned out at work often or always, and their stress is affecting their quality of life outside of work. 

• It affects your employees’ performance and productivity since they spend, on average, 2.5 hours a day searching for the information they need to do their jobs. They browse the intranet or G-suite, phone colleagues for help, or visit another department to find an answer. On top of that, they are constantly distracted by emails and messages, which take them away from their work. 

• It lowers team performance because teams don’t have the information they need to do their jobs and collaborate effectively. Each team member should know what others are working on and how their work is interconnected. 

• It affects your employer brand and bottom line – the economic losses due to information overload are reported to be $900 billion a year in the US. Employee frustration and confusion impacts the general feeling of your workplace, too, as they start complaining about poor internal communication. Some may even start looking for other jobs. 

How to stop information overload

It’s very difficult to eliminate information overload in the workplace, but with the right internal communication strategy and tools you can significantly reduce it. 

• Assess your internal communications – you’ll need to measure the effectiveness of your strategy and track changes over time. This is the only way you’ll be able to figure out the pain points of your internal communications and how the changes you’re making are impacting information overload in your business. Send employee engagement surveys to ask them what they think of your internal communications and take note of their feedback. 

• Get leadership on board – when you think about changing your internal communications, you need the support of top management and leadership. They should make the employee experience their number one priority and lead the way in your efforts to prevent information overload. 

• Make cultural changes – develop a company culture that puts employees’ well-being first and discourages multitasking. Give your employees the chance to give their feedback on your processes and find out where the problems lie. A strong company culture encourages employees only to share what’s necessary and identifies the best channels for communication. 

• Use the right communication channels – one of the top sources of information overload in a business is the large array of communication channels they tend to use. In most companies, employees are accessing intranets, emails, project management tools, company newsletters, messaging apps, and more. Create a central place where employees can access the most relevant company information in a streamlined manner. 

Conclusion

Information and knowledge are great, but they must be properly handled and managed to be useful for your company. There’s too much knowledge in your company for one person to even begin to manage by themselves. You need specialists in different areas to make up a team that truly fulfils your company’s knowledge potential.

Big data is only getting bigger, with the digital universe predicted to grow from 3.2 zettabytes today to 40 zettabytes in only six years (one zettabyte equalling roughly a billion terabytes). 

Unless organizations wake up to the need to manage their data, useful knowledge will become harder and harder to attain.