What Is A Company Wiki & How to Set One Up

Regardless of the size of your business, there’s so much information required to keep things running. As your organization grows, this information often piles up and gets scattered across departments, offices, or even storage. This makes quick access and interdepartmental sharing difficult, wasting man hours and hindering productivity.

In fact, employees spend an average of 9.3 hours per week searching for information, accounting for 20% of the team member’s total time. Tracked productivity will also show a declining trend as information complexity increases.

What if you had all this information in a centralized place, where every authorized team member could access with just a click of a button on their computer or phone? This is what a company wiki is.

In a nutshell, a company wiki, also known as a business wiki, corporate wiki, or enterprise wiki, is a centralized repository of important company information relevant to team members. It’s a knowledge management tool that provides information on business processes, organizational culture, and other pertinent info for employees, managers, associates, and corporate leaders. A company wiki is a place to capture information, organize, learn, collaborate on, or update as necessary.

Read on to understand in detail why a wiki is important for your business and, most importantly, how to set one up.

 

Why Is a Company Wiki Important?

A company wiki allows employees to access relevant information about the company quickly. It’s a great way to inform new team members about company policies, procedures, and culture. For established employees, its the central repository, FAQ, and even troubleshooting database for anything that contributes to operational success.

A wiki is convenient because you can track changes and updates quickly as you ensure everything is up to date. If you have information relevant to your entire team but not necessarily customers, a wiki is a great place to put it so everyone can access it.

For a sizeable company, chances are, neither team knows how the other works or why they perform certain tasks. A wiki allows all members and departments to explain their roles and processes in their own words, so that everyone in the company can see and understand. Also, when the time comes to collaborate, a corporate wiki makes it easier for teams to work together, increasing member productivity.

When company information is centralized in a corporate wiki and made accessible to relevant groups, it makes work easier for employees, managers, legal teams, and corporate leaders.

 

What to Include in a Corporate Wiki

A company wiki is an internal encyclopedia for the company. This means you can include almost anything you’d find relevant to your teams, especially helpful information that gives them an understanding of the business brand, processes, and culture. You can include the following in a company wiki:

  • Company History
  • Conflicts of interest
  • Contact information
  • Corporate culture
  • Team member handbook/guide
  • Corporate events
  • Financial reports
  • Legal information
  • marketing strategy reports
  • Product development, history, testing, use, design, and features
  • Risk management
  • Standard operating procedures
  • Strategy
  • Mission and vision

Remember that you should only include relevant and helpful information for your team. That’s why it’s essential to involve employees in creating the wiki. You can also include photographs, videos, and hyperlinks from other websites that are relevant to your content.

 

Who Can Create A Company Wiki?

If you decide to build your company wiki, hiring IT professionals from a reputable software development company is the best. IT professionals have the skills to create a system with enough storage, easy access, and navigation.

However, when it comes to content for the wiki, everyone in the company plays an integral role in populating the wiki pages in order for it to be a comprehensive and useful resource.

 

How to Establish A Company Wiki

Creating a company wiki is very easy when you know exactly what you want. Follow the following steps when creating your company wiki.

 

Identify the Wiki’s Goals

A wiki’s central role is to resolve frequent issues within the organizational processes. Team members are able to access information that simplifies their tasks or improves their ability to perform.

For this reason, you must set your goals for creating your company wiki so everyone with access can achieve your intended goals. Your goals may be:

  • Recruiting and onboarding a new team
  • Having a central source of information
  • Preparing clients’ communication, such as videos and audio
  • Keeping a record of completed projects for future reference
  • Communicating process updates with the team

Before deciding on the best software, incorporate any other personal goals you want the wiki to achieve.

 

Choose the Right Software

When selecting ideal software, you must agree with your internal team on the features you will need in the internal wiki. Take the following into consideration:

  • Permission access to decide who can see the content
  • Interlinking the wiki pages based on relevance to improve navigation.
  • Merging with other valuable tools in the company systems
  • Editable even by non-technical users in real time
  • An easy, reliable, and instant search function

 

Use a Wiki Template

Most wiki software come with page templates. However, you can customize your template in line with your company’s brand. Once your wiki is ready for formatting, customize the templates by deleting already filled content to add your custom content. You can change the color, background, and font to fit your specifications and goals.

 

Identify The Main Contributors

Use an online editor to add all required information. You can also import existing data from your internal files. A good internal wiki supports all forms of media, from videos, audio, images, and scripts. You may also hire professional writers and editors to add more information to your wiki. Remember, the format has to adapt to changing business processes, as editing will be required at different stages to capture these changes.

 

Invite Your Team and Configure Access Rights

Collaboration is one of the main merits of a wiki, so do not do everything on your own. Instead, schedule a meeting with your team to contribute and give feedback. There’s always something you can tweak to make it better.

The information must be secure; therefore, setting permission access to some members for specific pages on the wiki is the way to go. Before making your decision on which members to grant access to what pages, consider the following:

  • Who needs to edit content on the wiki?
  • Who does account setting and billing?
  • Do you want the information to be shareable with everyone?

Moreover, meeting with your team is a great way to launch the wiki as new software in the company. The conference is crucial because you can:

  • Explain the structure and logic behind your wiki
  • Show the team members how the wiki works
  • Provide any clarification regarding the wiki’s content
  • Ensure that everyone is psychologically on board with the new software

 

Conclusion

A company wiki is necessary for any company or business. You can simplify the interview and onboarding processes and increase team member productivity, knowledge, and collaboration efforts. All in all, it saves time and resources.

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