Top Tips to Grow and Retain Your Corporate Memory

Human memory is incredibly powerful. It dictates our career, life, relationships, and in fact, all our everyday errands. 

Corporations are no different. Much like its human counterparts, a company’s entire existence depends on its corporate memory collected over the years. 

This memory determines an organization’s culture, productivity, performance, and the money it makes in the long run.

As technology has made in-roads into a company’s work process, managing this memory has got all the more difficult. Every employee creates useful content every single day, and with no way to manage it, it gets lost in emails, intranets, chats, calls, etc. – the list is endless. 

How do you bring all this critical information together so it can be passed down to those who need it?

This is what we are going to discuss in this blog today. 

Dig into this blog to unlock some simple yet powerful tips that can help you grow, manage, as well as retain your corporate memory.

What is Corporate Memory? 

Corporate memory is the body of business information and knowledge base collected during the course of a company’s existence. This information is an asset that forms the basis of all strategies and decisions a company makes in its lifetime. While mismanagement of corporate memory leads to repeated mistakes, proper retention and management of this memory can boost innovation and growth. 

Why is Corporate Memory Vital for Your Business? 

Most businesses still struggle to understand the meaning of corporate memory, and those who do have trouble figuring out its real value in their long-term growth and success. 

If you are sailing in the same boat, we are here to spill all the top benefits that managing and retaining organizational memory can bring to your business. 

1. Helps You Make Better Decisions 

A business is nothing but a matter of the choices and decisions made over a period of time. While good decisions bring success, poor ones teach lessons. Since every decision you make is based on the amount and accuracy of knowledge you have about the subject, a good corporate memory can certainly help here. It empowers you with crucial insights, observations, and knowledge so that you always make the right decisions that drive your business forward.

2. Prevents You From Repeating the Same Mistakes 

A mistake made once can be corrected. But if the same mistake happens multiple times, it turns into a blunder and has the power to hurt your business seriously. That’s what a sharp and well-managed corporate memory saves you from. It guides every action you take so you are always on the right track. A good corporate memory brings your past learnings and experiences right in front of you, so you don’t go on repeating mistakes. 

3. Builds a Knowledge-Centered Culture 

The ideal company culture has no space for assumptions and guesswork. It doesn’t promote low productivity and poor collaboration. Instead, it builds a workforce that is mindful of how they behave, collaborate, and perform at work. You can also create such a culture by managing your organizational memory on a knowledge centered support platform. 

With company information, subject matter expertise, and industry best practices easily accessible, employees will do only what’s right for their team and the business as a whole. 

4. Encourages Change and Innovation 

Good ideas can come from anyone, whether it be from top management or young albeit talented employees. With a knowledge base, you can keep growing your corporate memory by allowing employees and entire teams to come together and share ideas, insights, and strategies in a central place. This free flow of ideas and open dialogue stimulates a culture of change and innovation, which is essential to the success of a business.

That was all about the importance of corporate memory. 

Remember that corporate memory is not something that can be automatically tapped and used. You need to put deliberate efforts into continuously collecting, maintaining, and growing your corporate memory. A good way of doing this is via a knowledge management system, which we will be discussing in the coming sections. 

Components of Corporate Memory 

Corporate memory includes three main components: 

1. Data 

Data is pure facts and statistics. Corporate memory includes data across areas such as sales, marketing, research, and development, accumulated since the time a business starts. This data is important as it gives a sneak peek into how you have progressed and what changes have occurred over the past years. 

2. Information

When data is processed and structured, it turns into information. It presents data in context, so you can grasp it better and put it to practical use. For example, the profit generated in a particular year is data, but when you know which product line clocked the most profit, that’s when you call it useful information. 

3. Knowledge 

Observations, experiences, and insights rolled into one forms knowledge. It involves a deep understanding of a particular subject, which is based on factors such as perception, reason, experience, etc. For example, a marketing person who uses his past experiences to create a new campaign for a product that was going under loss for years. The approach he takes, in this case, is difficult to document as it is based on his individual experiences and observations. 

Tips to Manage and Retain Your Corporate Memory

As a company grows in size and complexity, managing and retaining corporate memory becomes more and more challenging. These actionable tips will help you manage your growing corporate memory like a pro. 

1. Adopt Knowledge Base Software 

Organizational knowledge is mostly scattered. Important information is often lost in email threads or as isolated Word documents and files. knowledge management software helps you keep all files, documents, emails, videos, PDFs, articles, and other content in a central and easily accessible place. You can use it to build a knowledge base that securely stores all important company information and makes it available instantly to anyone who needs it. 

The best part is you can set access controls to allow only authorized individuals to access your company’s memory. While a knowledge base keeps your corporate memory organized and 24×7 accessible, it also safeguards it against any kind of misuse. 

2. Build a Culture of Regular Knowledge Sharing 

Work towards creating a culture where employees are free to share their knowledge, ideas, insights and discuss successes and failures without getting judged. While explicit knowledge can be easily captured, it is tacit knowledge that is difficult to document.

This tacit knowledge can be documented if your employees have a 24×7 functional system like an online knowledge base at their disposal. Such online platforms give employees the flexibility to document and share their ideas and experiences regularly, even after office hours. 

To make knowledge sharing less chaotic and more organized, you can create a different knowledge base for each department.

For example, sales can have its own, and marketing can have a different platform. When all teams have a separate space for documenting department-specific knowledge, managing the corporate memory gets much easier. 

3. Promote Collaboration Among Teams 

Collaboration is key to achieving corporate memory knowledge management. 

A culture where employees work in silos and their focus is limited to their own area of work is bound to stunt the growth of your corporate memory. Providing employees with opportunities to collaborate over ideas and share responsibilities together is therefore crucial. 

Every employee has a defined specialty. While interns have fresh ideas about a subject, executives carry with them a solid experience. You can bring employees working at different levels under a single roof and let them collaborate to build and maintain your organizational memory. 

In a collaborative workspace, employees are more likely to listen to each other, share suggestions on a subject, and work as one united team. 

4. Keep Your Company Memory Fresh and Updated 

You would not want your corporate memory to have all stale and irrelevant information. If that happens, it would negatively impact not just your business processes but employee performance and productivity as well. 

Since corporate memory is at the center of all your decisions and strategies, it’s crucial to keep it fresh and updated at all times. Modern knowledge base software offers intelligent analytics that helps you keep a constant eye on: 

• Outdated content 
• Topics that need new content 
• Irrelevant information that needs to be removed

For example, ProProfs Knowledge Base has a rich reporting system that gives a sneak peek into how relevant your corporate memory is and even provides suggestions to keep it updated. As your company memory is packed in a corporate knowledge base, you can use these insights to make regular alterations to the content. 

This way, your employees will always have the latest and most relevant information at their disposal. 

Put Your Corporate Memory to Maximum Use 

How to preserve corporate memory and maintain it, is a question bothering most growing organizations today. A major reason behind this is that corporate memory loss or mismanagement directly impacts how employees perform and business grows. 

If leveraged in the right way, corporate memory can take you on the path to progress and how. It guides employees at every step, helping them make the right growth-focused decisions in their respective departments. With company information and insights available in a heartbeat, employees get a good ground to be more innovative and creative at work. 

For all this to be a reality, start by managing your corporate memory. Create a collaborative, knowledge-sharing environment and involve all employees in this process. 

You can also adopt a decent knowledge base tool to help you keep your corporate memory secure, accessible, and most importantly, updated.