All professional service firms—even those as diverse as IT consultancies and auditing, tax, and advising services—have the same challenges, with the two biggest being attrition and knowledge share.
Solving Attrition
Smart services companies are solving the attrition problem by making efforts to understand the needs of employees and taking steps to retain top, IP-generating talent. Talent and knowledge is the business, so many policies that work for other industries don’t work for professional services.
Besides fair compensation and the opportunity for growth, employees want to feel like they are making a difference to the company, their clients, and their own lives. By creating that kind of environment, companies take a giant step in retaining knowledge that is so important to their success and growth.
Sharing Knowledge
But how do companies share and build on the knowledge they have worked so hard to retain? How do they share experience across the business, handle like situations where a solution has already been found, or collaborate to provide better service? If there is no structured way to share knowledge, collaboration can be difficult and most often nonexistent.
An enterprise social network, like tibbr, is one answer. It provides employees with a platform to ask questions and receive answers and updates in real time, follow knowledge threads, and generally collaborate more intelligently with fellow workers. Maximizing the knowledge share via an internal social network is universally acceptable and identifiable to a generation of employees that have grown up on social media, and know how to use it to get what they want and need.
Read Gartner’s latest report on critical capabilities for social software in the workplace.
