If there’s one word that sums up the reality of managing today’s workforce, that word is challenging. An early 2025 Gallup report found that 51% of employees are actively looking for new job opportunities. Employees crave stability, balance and opportunities to share, use, and expand their knowledge.
Consequently, workplace culture is the key to transforming jobs into chances for continual growth and learning, and it’s incumbent on institutions to preserve those goals. For companies, much of this wisdom and instruction is found in institutional knowledge.
What does that mean for looking ahead, in a world where work is constantly evolving and more roles go digital? Capturing institutional knowledge is a strategic asset for maintaining organizational continuity and success.
What is institutional knowledge, and why do companies need it?
Much of institutional knowledge is passed on informally, making it difficult to preserve in a procedural or formal way. Even if some of that knowledge is intangible, many of these prized facts or concepts deserve a prominent place at the heart of any enterprise transformation.
To ensure valuable corporate knowledge is not lost, it’s important to document institutional knowledge through structured processes and tools. With more teams going hybrid or remote and employee turnover at record levels, preserving and growing your company’s institutional knowledge is more important than ever.
Definition and types of institutional knowledge
Institutional knowledge refers to the collective understanding, skills, experiences, and insights that are accumulated over time within an organization.
This knowledge includes the unwritten rules, cultural nuances, historical information, best practices, and unique expertise that employees develop through their work. It is the backbone of an organization’s identity and operational efficiency, providing a foundation for decision-making, problem-solving, and innovation.
Explicit knowledge
Explicit institutional knowledge is easily articulated, documented, and shared. It is formal and structured, often found in the form of documents, procedures, databases, and training materials. You’d be able to spot this type of knowledge if you’ve ever browsed a company handbook or taken an onboarding course.
Examples of explicit knowledge include company policies, standard operating procedures, and technical manuals. This type of knowledge is crucial for maintaining consistency and ensuring that all employees have access to the same information.
Implicit knowledge
Implicit knowledge is a type of institutional knowledge that is not formally documented but can be inferred or deduced from explicit knowledge. It involves applying explicit knowledge in specific contexts and is often acquired through experience or observation.
For example, an employee might know the best way to handle a particular client based on past interactions, even if this approach isn’t written down anywhere. Implicit knowledge is essential for making informed decisions and solving complex problems, as it bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application.
Tacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge is a type of institutional knowledge that is deeply rooted in individual experiences, insights, and intuitions. It is often subconscious and difficult to articulate. It's harder to transfer institutional knowledge of this type with standard communication tactics.
This kind of knowledge includes personal skills, expertise, and the “gut feelings” that experienced employees develop over time. Tacit knowledge is essential for innovation, creativity, and problem-solving, as it allows employees to navigate unique challenges and come up with novel solutions.
What are the benefits of maximizing institutional knowledge?
Institutional knowledge is more about wisdom than just information. Innovators in your company bring fresh ideas and look for better ways to do things, which is an invaluable lever on the path to growth. But there’s also immense value in accumulated experience and proven methods. Here’s why preserving organizational knowledge is essential:
- Economic uncertainty remains a constant challenge. As businesses navigate inflation, shifting markets, and ongoing workforce changes in 2025, relying on institutional knowledge—especially lessons learned from recent turbulent years—will be crucial. The experience your company has gained will play a key role in shaping strategies and ensuring long-term resilience.
- There's no innovation without a solid base. We like to say that ideas are groundbreaking, but that means there was some ground already there to be broken. Everything your company has learned, through trial and error or chance, is valuable to progress. Knowing what's a mistake and what has worked in the past saves a lot of resources.
- Institutional knowledge helps bridge the gap between new hires and experienced employees. With many baby boomers retiring, companies are seeing more generational diversity than ever. While this shift may help offset workforce shortages, it also highlights the need for knowledge-sharing to ensure a smooth transition between generations.
- You can avoid single points of failure (SPOFs) if your organization has a healthy learning culture. You shouldn't have irreplaceable employees who leave a major information gap when they quit working for the company. If there isn't a constant knowledge-sharing flow, your organization is susceptible to developing a silo mentality that is terrible for progress and growth.
- Institutional knowledge can significantly enhance customer satisfaction by ensuring that employees understand customer needs and preferences, leading to improved service delivery and heightened loyalty.
Read more: How the no silo rule boosts organizational innovation
How to make sure you preserve your institutional knowledge
Even if much of the institutional knowledge is informal, there are things you can do to store it in a formal, organized way. Furthermore, you can ensure a smoother knowledge transfer process by facilitating communication between employees and setting up coaching and mentorship programs:
1. Center some of your training programs around explicit knowledge
Today, corporate learning is becoming increasingly autonomous. Employees often prefer informal learning, and companies do their best to accommodate them by offering rich libraries of third-party content. This is great as it provides diversity and has the power to drive high learning engagement rates.
However, remember that your company is unique even in the global business world. You need to translate that into customized in-house training programs that reflect the organization's values and mission. They should convey institutional knowledge that is particular or even exclusive to your company.
Everything about branding, customer relations, retention and loyalty programs, and even sales falls into this category. For example, you can have a third-party course on how to address customer complaints in an empathetic and friendly manner, but that will just make your customer support employees sound like everyone else's. Add some branding elements, emphasize organizational values and offer practical examples of what going the extra mile means for your company and you’ll have superior customer support service.
2. Use an online training platform for institutional knowledge
These days you don’t need a paperwork trail for everything. Going digital is great for the environment and much easier to track and use. While having internal wikis for employees to contribute to is an outstanding practice, they can be a little hard to follow, and essential information is easily lost.
Depending on the tool you use for these wikis, they can be stored internally or hosted on a third-party server. Not all of these tools have effective search features, so it can be time-consuming to find something specific. Storing essential organizational knowledge in your learning management system (LMS) or knowledge management system makes it easier to browse and update when necessary.
Furthermore, the LMS also protects your sensitive information, and if you need to migrate the content at one point, you can do so seamlessly. A modern platform also allows you to pack the information in various ways – gamified courses, video tutorials, SME talks, whitepapers, etc.
Read more: 5 Reasons why cross-training employees is beneficial for your company
3. Have strong mentorship and coaching programs
Much of institutional knowledge circulates informally within the organization. You can’t always capture all of it but having good mentorship programs allows new hires or people moving to new roles to benefit from the experience of their more seasoned colleagues. While the structure of these programs makes them somewhat formal, the conversations between people will always touch on matters or points that are not always written on the agenda.
In my experience as a trainer, I’ve seen firsthand that learners tend to remember the stories rather than the theoretical content. The power of stories is even greater when they are personal. Mentorship and coaching allow for a deeper connection and are great mediums for transferring that valuable institutional knowledge.
4. Celebrate success and learn from mistakes
Personal stories are powerful, but a company’s history is even more impactful. Major events—like rebrands, product launches, or mergers—shape your organization’s identity. While these stories often spread by word of mouth, actively preserving them ensures everyone benefits from past experiences.
Celebrate wins openly. Send congratulatory emails, highlight successes in a newsletter, or host recognition events. If you want to repeat a successful strategy, make sure it’s visible.
Failures, on the other hand, tend to spread quickly—and often get exaggerated. Instead of letting misinformation take over, address mistakes honestly and without blame. For example, if a product launch gets leaked and harms the company, acknowledge what happened. Explain the impact, and outline the steps to prevent it in the future. Keeping both wins and losses in the collective memory strengthens your organization.
5. Involve your employees
Even though “institutional knowledge” refers to the organization as an abstract entity, people are the keepers of all that information. Therefore, it's only logical to call on them for help. Seasoned employees have a wealth of experience and can help design curriculums and training programs to preserve and transfer institutional knowledge. You can set up a program where you either pay them extra for doing this or offer other kinds of incentives – such as paid vacations, certifications, or time off.
Don’t forget the people who are leaving the organization either. Offboarding them properly means ensuring that their know-how stays within the company. Ask them to record and organize their standard procedures, best practices, and essential insights for specific clients. If there's the possibility of doing an extended handover to somebody on their team, do that as well. As a rule of thumb, ask all your employees to document their knowledge and experiences, even if they are not close to exiting the company.
What are the challenges of managing institutional knowledge?
Managing institutional knowledge can be challenging due to various factors, including employee turnover, knowledge silos, and the difficulty of capturing tacit knowledge. These challenges can hinder an organization’s ability to preserve and leverage its valuable expertise.
Over-relying on institutional knowledge
Over-relying on institutional knowledge can lead to several hurdles you might not anticipate. These challenges include:
- Knowledge loss: When key employees leave the organization, they take their institutional knowledge with them, which can lead to knowledge loss and disruption of business operations. This is particularly problematic if the knowledge was never documented or shared with others.
- Inefficient knowledge sharing: Institutional knowledge is often shared through informal networks, which can lead to inefficient knowledge sharing and duplication of effort. Without a structured approach to knowledge management, important information can be overlooked or forgotten.
- Lack of innovation: Over-relying on institutional knowledge can stifle innovation and creativity, as employees may be less likely to challenge existing practices and procedures. This can result in a stagnant work environment where new ideas are not encouraged or explored.
- Dependence on key employees: Organizations that rely heavily on institutional knowledge may become too dependent on key employees, which can lead to burnout and turnover. If these employees leave, the organization may struggle to fill the knowledge gap they leave behind.
To overcome these challenges, organizations need to implement effective knowledge management strategies that capture, preserve, and share institutional knowledge. This can include documenting explicit knowledge, creating knowledge-sharing platforms, and providing training and development opportunities to employees. By doing so, organizations can ensure that their valuable insights and expertise are accessible to all employees, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
Hot tip: Preserve institutional knowledge by making it part of everyday operations
Want to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door when employees leave? Build knowledge sharing into your daily operations.
Instead of waiting until someone retires to document their expertise, encourage teams to log processes, insights, and best practices as they go.
For example, set up a shared knowledge hub (like an LMS or internal wiki) where employees can upload quick how-to videos, troubleshooting guides, or even lessons learned from recent projects. A senior engineer explaining a complex workflow today could save a new hire hours of confusion next year.
Make it easy—integrate knowledge capture into regular meetings or performance reviews. The key is consistency. If sharing knowledge becomes a habit, your company won’t just preserve valuable information—it’ll keep evolving and improving with every employee who contributes.
Got knowledge questions? CYPHER can help
CYPHER bridges the gap between your organization’s collective expertise, processes, and best practices and your team.
Our platform helps by providing a centralized, powerful hub where businesses and educators can store, organize, and distribute critical information.
With AI-driven automation, personalized learning paths, and advanced content management, teams can easily access the knowledge they need, when they need it. Whether it’s onboarding new employees, training staff, or preserving industry insights, CYPHER ensures that institutional knowledge remains structured, searchable, and continuously updated—helping organizations retain expertise and improve efficiency over time.
Harnessing the power of institutional knowledge
Institutional knowledge isn’t just a record of your company’s past, but it’s also a solid foundation for the future. If you haven’t already, now is the time to start documenting and preserving it.
Embedding knowledge-sharing into your company culture doesn’t have to be complicated or resource-intensive. But neglecting it can lead to lost expertise, workplace inefficiencies, and negative long-term business impacts.
CYPHER can help you streamline knowledge retention and training with an intuitive, AI-powered learning platform.
Get in touch today to see how we can support your organization’s growth.