Sometimes the most difficult step when building out a knowledge base is convincing your team of the need. But don’t worry, if you’re having a difficult time with that, we’ve got you covered!
To help you, below we built a calculator showing just how much money our team stands to save by setting up an internal knowledge base. We also put together a quick presentation you’re free to use and included a few stats below you can use to make your case for investing in a knowledge base software.
How to calculate the ROI of an internal knowledge base
Setting up an internal knowledge base can provide a serious return on investment (ROI) for any growing team. According to research conducted by McKinsey:
- The average knowledge worker spends 20% of their time searching for internal information or tracking down colleagues to help with specific tasks.
- A searchable record of knowledge can reduce the time by up to 35% people spend looking for company information.
Assuming our team works 8 hours per day, then each person spends 1.6 hours looking for information each day. That’s an entire day lost per person each week. Extrapolated out over the course of a year, that’s 400 hours of lost time annually.
Now, that’s just one person. Multiple 400 hours by the number of people on your team, and you’re likely talking thousands, if not tens of thousands of lost hours of productivity. To figure out sunk cost, we just multiply by the average hourly rate of each team member.
Let’s say you have 25 teammates, then using the formula:
Setting up an internal knowledge base can reclaim up to 35% of that time. Even taking a conservative 10% savings is still a massive per year:
Go ahead and try it using your own team size and salary below:
Calculate your ROIPresentation: The Case for Investing in an Internal Knowledge Base
Below is a presentation you can use to make the case for setting up an internal knowledge on your team. Please feel free to copy, edit, and share this presentation however you’d like.
- View on Google Slides: The Case for Investing in an Internal Knowledge Base (To edit this presentation, click click File -> Make a Copy)
- Download a Powerpoint presentation
- Download PDF (uneditable)
For more resources: checkout out Content Library
Other stats and takeaways to make your case
“Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. Companies with weak onboarding programs lose the confidence of their new teammates, making them more likely to quit in the first year.“
Source: Glassdoor The True Cost of a Bad Hire
Takeaway: Creating a repository of knowledge that new teammates can go to ask questions and find answers will help your long term employee retention and productivity. With today’s war for talent, keeping your team around longer will save money and make your team more productive.
“The time for new hires to achieve full productivity ranges from 20 weeks for professionals to more than 26 weeks for executives, but internal transfers get up to speed twice as fast as external hires.“
Source: MITSlaon Review
Takeaway: Getting ramped with an organizations institutional knowledge matters for reaching peak productivity faster. Creating a centralized resource where a new external hire can absorb company knowledge everything they need to know will make your entire team more productive.
Your assignment
- Calculate your teams ROI for setting up an internal knowledge base
- Download the presentation and update the calculations for your own team’s ROI metrics