It’s hard to keep your company knowledge in sync across all employees when you don’t have a good way of storing and sharing information. This leads to a decline in productivity as employees spend more time searching for answers instead of working.

An internal wiki can help you solve this problem. In this article, we will walk you through the process of setting up your wiki, but first:

What Is an Internal Wiki, and What Are Its Benefits?

An internal wiki is a knowledge repository that empowers employees to create, edit, and share relevant company content and best practices. It is like a centralized database that allows every employee to communicate information to improve your team’s collective knowledge and eliminate redundant questions.

It is a valuable asset that can act like your company’s encyclopedia to preserve institutional knowledge as your team grows.

Although an internal wiki is similar to a knowledge base in that it promotes information-sharing, the main disparity is that it is a more collaborative tool that allows everyone to share their expertise (primarily for internal use). On the other hand, a dedicated team usually manages a knowledge base and includes information for both internal and external use (products and services).

Here are some reasons you should create an internal wiki:

• Providing quick access to information in your organization will improve collaboration across different departments, or within a remote/hybrid workplace.
• Having a place that contains all relevant information will boost employee speed of learning and productivity.
• An internal wiki can improve your onboarding process. It contains all the relevant information new employees need to adapt to their new environment and get the ball rolling.
• Internal wikis also provide an added level of security and reliability. You can set them to be accessible only to members of your organization, and it eliminates the risk of data loss on local hard drives.
• Internal wiki tools are user-friendly and allow anyone to create and edit content clearly and organized using bullets, hyperlinks, different colors, and other valuable features.
• Having an internal wiki can help you build a more inclusive workplace, since it encourages everyone to create the central nervous system of your company.
• An internal wiki allows your teams to communicate asynchronously, reducing the stress of finding overlapping hours and the risks of context switching.
• It allows you to prevent knowledge loss when employees leave.

What Type of Content Can You Store in Your Internal Wiki?

Although an internal wiki can accommodate all the information about your organization, it is best to focus on the most relevant content that your teams need in their daily operations, including:

• Company news and updates
• How-to tutorials for internal software
• Training and onboarding documents
• Technical notes
• Common workflows
• Meeting notes
• Company policies, etc.