How to Keep Your Workspace Up to Date

Keeping your knowledge base up to date takes a combination of features, best practices, and strategies.

This article contains some best practices on all levels to help you maintain a crisp knowledge base.


1. Make Slite part of people's workflows

A knowledge base that isn't used by the team becomes outdated very quickly. The first thing you need to do to have a successful knowledge base is to integrate it into people's daily work routines. This will help you in different ways:

  • You'll be able to get feedback about what works and what does not
  • You'll understand what content is valuable and what is missing
  • You'll have multiple people at your disposal to help you maintain the content; either by making updates directly, or by flagging outdated content to SMEs


We've got some quick tips to make sure your team keeps using Slite as their main source for company knowledge as well:

  • Leverage our  ⁠⁠Slack Integration v.2⁠  and/or  🔬⁠⁠Chrome extension⁠ Slack and Chrome are likely two tools that your team naturally uses throughout their day. By integrating Slite into the main tools they use to do their jobs, it gives your team easy access to company knowledge without having to remember to log into Slite.
  • Set up a dedicated feedback channel for your knowledge base We recommend creating a Slack channel or setting up an email address where people can easily submit their feedback or suggestions for the knowledge base.
  • Share links to Slite docs when team members ask questions outside of Slite
We've seen great success when knowledge managers or SMEs respond to questions outside of Slite with a link to the documentation in Slite. It really reinforces the habit of checking Slite first, before reaching out to colleagues, and helps your team to work more autonomously. Even though you might feel like a school teacher at first. Teacher


2. Leverage our analytics

Via "My settings → Workspace Analytics" all users are able to view the activity of their workspace. It shows you the overall adoption of Slite, the consumption of documentation and gives you insights into if your team is able to find the content they are looking for.


To make sure your content is in good shape you can leverage our  Knowledge Management  panel, or have a look at our  Knowledge Maintenance Cheat Sheet . Here we gathered 12 clear actions you can take - from quick wins to high rewards - to stay on top of your teams knowledge.


3. Verify and set expiration reminders for important docs

You can verify and set reminders on important documents that should always be up to date (e.g. Company Handbook, SOPs, How-To's, and Help Articles). By setting a reminder the owner of the doc will receive a notification to check the doc periodically and reset the verification.


4. Clarify ownership

Maintaining a knowledge base is not a solo sport. It's crucial to share the ownership and set incentives for your team to ensure they keep their content up to date. Even if you have a dedicated knowledge manager in your company, this person can never be an expert on all subjects.

Incentives
With this in mind, adding knowledge management as a team or personal goal can make sense. Make it something you include in your OKRs, job descriptions, and performance reviews.

Ownership
As the admin of Slite you can appoint individual contributors as owners of specific processes or documentation. You can look out for someone with a natural drive or previous experience. But the best remains to find our organic champions. You can use the leaderboard in "My settings → Workspace Analytics" for this.


5. Don't be afraid to archive

It's tempting to keep creating new documents, especially when it's so easy to do so with Slite, and never remove anything. But we'd like to encourage you to archive any channels or docs that are not being used by the team anymore. To see what content might not be valuable anymore, you can either use the  ⁠⁠Knowledge Management Panel⁠  panel, or the channel display settings to fade out inactive docs.

Fade out inactive docs



Show archived docs

And as we mentioned, don't be afraid to archive docs. Via the same channel display settings you can pull up archived docs within your doc tree structure again. Also, you can filter Search or Ask to only go through archived docs. So no content will ever be lost! Victory Hand