How knowledge sharing enables a more cohesive team at Community Hired

Community Hired, a small team that works remotely, relied on Asana alone until its documentation became disorganized and hard to retrieve. Its fix was a wiki and a habit: regular group time when everyone works on documentation at once. We recommend both halves: use a task tool for work in motion and a wiki for what stays true, and put documentation on the calendar as shared time instead of leaving it as a task each person has to squeeze in.

Community Hired offers full-service solutions to help online communities, covering monetization, community management, migration, design, cost savings, technical support, security protocols and GDPR compliance. Because it supports a wide range of online communities, the team needed to share information about the company and its clients in a way that was accessible and fit its asynchronous workstyle.

A project management tool alone was not enough for a remote team

Before Kipwise, Community Hired relied mainly on Asana, a popular project management tool, to manage its collaboration. That worked reasonably well at first. As the documentation the team needed to share kept growing, information became disorganized and hard to retrieve, and the team knew it needed a better way to organize it.

We recommend splitting the two jobs. A task tool holds work in motion: who is doing what by when. A wiki holds what stays true, such as how a client is set up, who owns what and why a decision was made. When the second kind of information lives in task descriptions and comments, it is filed by project and date, which is not how anyone looks for it later. Move anything people ask about more than once into the wiki, and link to it from the task.

Why Community Hired chose Kipwise

At the time, Elena Fisher managed operations at Community Hired. She researched a number of solutions and chose Kipwise for three reasons, with ease of use as the central theme.

Visually appealing content, easy to read and to edit

The first criterion was that the tool must make it easy to create visually appealing content that is easy to read. Otherwise, teammates would struggle to find specific information quickly.

Kipwise’s web editor supports a wide range of formatting options, so Elena and her team can create content that is easy to scan. Kipwise also works with other tools such as Google Drive and Vimeo, so it is easy to embed content from other platforms. The editor supports real-time collaboration too, so teammates can edit the same document at the same time without worrying that another teammate will override their content.

Navigation is easy and well organized

Community Hired also likes that the interface is straightforward and the knowledge base is easy to navigate. Kipwise’s flexible folder structure makes it easy for Elena’s team to keep content organized.

Content is easy to find

Elena said finding saved content in Kipwise is easy. Because Kipwise is integrated with Slack, teammates can search for content directly in Slack with a slash command. If someone forgets to search before asking a question in Slack, a teammate can answer it with Kipwise content in a few clicks using the Kipwise Slack action. Kipwise also has a Chrome Extension, so teammates can reach saved content from any web app.

How they get teammates to build the knowledge base together

To get everyone contributing, Community Hired sets up regular dedicated group time in which teammates all work on their content at the same time.

Behavior takes time to change, and Elena said teammates still sometimes forget to look things up in the team knowledge base. Even so, the process of documenting content is already making the team more consistent. By making it easy for everyone to share what they know and giving every teammate the same information, Elena built a more cohesive team and gained more confidence that everyone follows a consistent process.

We recommend copying the group time, especially if your team is asynchronous. Documentation loses to client work when it is a task each person has to find time for, so put it on the calendar. Pick one recurring slot and ask everyone to write up what they answered most often since the last one. A real-time editor lets several people work in the same document without overwriting each other.