Knowledge Sharing in Onboarding: 8 Proven Methods

Knowledge sharing between employees at different levels is the foundation of how an entire organization runs. But if we had to point to one area where knowledge sharing plays first fiddle, it would be onboarding. In an employee's whole career, there's no other situation where learning is so intense and has such a major impact on the individual's effectiveness. All right - but how do you teach so that people actually learn? How do you properly pass on information about the company, the role, and the responsibilities? Today we're sharing knowledge about sharing knowledge effectively. In onboarding, of course.

Passing on knowledge is still underrated in onboarding

Knowledge that's useful at work is worth its weight in gold. A smooth flow of information inside an organization lets people do their jobs in comfortable conditions. Unfortunately, at many companies, managing information still leaves a lot to be desired, and a shortage of knowledge can be a source of negative emotions - as research makes abundantly clear.

According to the Panopto Report, as many as 81% of surveyed employees feel frustrated when they can't get to the information they need to do their jobs. 

And that's data for regular employees only. Substitute people who are still onboarding, and the percentage probably shoots up. Additional emotions likely appear too - stress, for instance, or doubts about whether they chose the right place to work. From there it's a short road to the first thoughts of abandoning a job they only just landed.

Reliably passing knowledge on to a new hire is therefore the best way to build their loyalty to the organization from their very first days. Of course, it's more complex than that, because the way we present information on a given topic significantly affects how well it's remembered - which we'll get to later in the article.

Why is effective knowledge sharing the foundation of onboarding?

The Panopto report we mentioned says a new hire spends an average of 12.7 hours a week asking others for help and 28 hours a month on ineffective work. Another study shows that as many as 37% of American and British employees, not feeling well prepared to perform their tasks, would rather turn their questions to Uncle Google than to a more senior colleague. Meanwhile, results from a survey by TalentLMS make it clear that learning and getting to the information they need in a new job are among the biggest pain points for new hires themselves.

That's exactly why effective knowledge sharing is a key part of onboarding - both from the new hire's perspective and from the organization's. For the new person, it means greater satisfaction with how onboarding goes, and therefore more motivation to keep working. For the organization, in turn, it brings savings in the time and resources spent on the onboarding process. Onboarding runs more smoothly and with a better outcome, because the employee reaches full independence and effectiveness faster.

Achieving that effect isn't hard - you just need to work out a framework, and today's tools can help you build it. But exchanging information can't be limited to traditional methods, such as handing over documents or lecturing in a way that's better suited to an academic setting. Passing on knowledge is a more complex process.

Knowledge sharing - passing on knowledge the traditional way

Knowledge sharing is a bit like onboarding itself - it exists in some form in every organization, even if there's no trace of it in official systems or procedures. But "some form" is rarely the optimal form. And although some of the popular ways of teaching new hires are quite effective and interesting, they often drown in a flood of less effective solutions whose biggest drawback is low listener engagement and one-way delivery, which translates into no interaction with the audience.

What does sharing knowledge with a new hire usually look like?

• Handing over an employee handbook

That is, the good old (?) method we all know from school. The new person gets a manual (on paper or as a PDF) full of information about the organization's history, structure, values, and culture. Their job is to study it closely. The knowledge is then checked somehow. Or not. If it is, it usually follows the equally familiar formula: "cram, pass, forget." Is the idea of learning from handbooks inherently bad? No! Can it be put into practice more effectively? Absolutely, but more on that in a moment. With training formats like this, it's vital that the materials are broken into smaller, more digestible portions (see: microlearning), which makes the knowledge easier for the audience to remember.

• Training sessions or onboarding meetings

This is another fixture on the onboarding hit list. Onboarding training sessions are a good point of reference for a new hire. They let you pass on knowledge in a structured way.

The downside of classic introductory training, though, is its strongly one-directional delivery and an enormous accumulation of knowledge - so enormous that after one or two days little of it remains in the heads of the people onboarding. This is confirmed by the results of our study "Onboarding in Poland 2025" - 20% of new hires point to the flood of information delivered on day one as the main onboarding problem.

Passing on knowledge this way severely limits the effectiveness of the course. Despite the best intentions, listeners lose focus after a while, which is a natural defense mechanism of the human brain. You don't have to abandon traditional onboarding training entirely. But you do have to do a great deal to tailor it to the needs of the audience and thereby keep their attention sharp. How? You'll find out by reading on. Modern ways of passing on knowledge in an organization are far more effective.

• 1:1 meetings with the manager

Handled well, they can be a springboard to fast, effective onboarding - especially if they end with delegating specific tasks to the employee. Unfortunately, as we all know well, managers generally don't have a surplus of free time, so thoughtful meetings that genuinely deepen an employee's knowledge happen far less often than they should.

On top of that, a fairly common practice at many companies is canceling meetings like these. You've surely run into similar stories many times in your career. It's worth adding that few things curb a new hire's motivation as powerfully as this.

• Informal communication with the team

A few years ago, informal communication with the team happened somewhere between the coffee machine and the desk; today its domain is more like Slack or Teams channels. The essence, though, remains unchanged. It's about informal knowledge sharing among team members. Here I'll ask someone about something, there I'll make sure I'm doing something right, and somewhere else I'll ask for a contact to someone I can team up with on a given project. A format like this obviously won't replace official training or onboarding meetings, but it's a necessary complement to them.

Each of the methods above makes sense, and used properly can also be remarkably effective. Unfortunately, each also suffers from at least one of three sins: accumulation over time, organizational chaos, passive absorption of knowledge. The point isn't to throw all these methods straight in the bin. But you do need to understand their drawbacks well and keep the right proportions.

At more than one organization, a single day - a week at most - is set aside for passing company knowledge on to a new hire. Such a flood of information, often absorbed in a completely passive way, is simply ineffective and overwhelming for the employee. The knowledge evaporates from their head in a flash. It ends with the scenario we already mentioned. A new hire, embarrassed not to know something they should in theory already know, would rather turn their question to Google than to, say, a manager or someone on the team. That deepens their sense of being lost and alone.

How do you effectively pass knowledge on to a new person? 8 ways

Passing knowledge on to employees being onboarded into an organization is riddled with mistakes. Once you know them, you can consciously avoid them. Time to move on to the most valuable tips. What should model knowledge sharing with a new hire during onboarding look like?

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.
_{Benjamin Franklin}

The famous words of one of the founding fathers of the United States are worth treating as a signpost when designing a learning system within onboarding. Because simply passing on information isn't enough. It's about active knowledge sharing and putting it into practice - a two-way process, close to real experience. Our goal should be to draw the employee into an interactive relationship in which knowledge is acquired bit by bit, in small doses, and above all in practice. What might that look like? Here's a handful of proven methods!

1. Information always at hand

A new hire should have constant, convenient access to all the important information, including what came up along the way during onboarding - for example, training scripts, webinar recordings, or written summaries of onboarding meetings. It's a kind of personal virtual library you can reach for at any moment. That role can be played by a separate space on Google Drive or in whatever other cloud the organization happens to use. 

It's worth remembering, though, that like any library, this one can quickly fall into disorder and chaos. That's why you can also opt for solutions designed specifically for gathering information during onboarding into a new workplace. Ideally, these aren't simply document aggregators but thoughtful systems that interact with the employee and serve up information in an accessible, engaging way. In the Gamfi onboarding app, knowledge is broken into small portions and - crucially! - delivered only at the moment when it's truly needed. We don't bury the employee in all the knowledge on their first day of work; instead we dose out content piece by piece, starting with preonboarding and finishing even a few months after hiring.

Knowledge served this way is absorbed more willingly and more actively by the employee than in the traditional model. What's more, this lets the newcomer learn ad hoc, looking for answers to nagging questions the moment the need arises. This is, among other things, where an onboarding app has the edge over a traditional course.

2. Microlearning - feeding knowledge in small portions

The truth is that we forget most of the information passed to us in a flash. Studies show that within an hour about 50% of it slips out of our heads, after 24 hours we forget 70% of the knowledge, and after a week as much as 90%. The first to describe this phenomenon, back in 1885, was the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. He plotted the process on a graph and called it the forgetting curve. The good news is that it's a completely natural - even necessary - process. Necessary so that we're able to remember the most important 10%. 

What's the takeaway?

Researchers, including Art Kohn, who specializes in studying effective learning methods, recommend putting only one - at most two - pieces of information into people's heads at a time. The lessons themselves should be as short as possible, lasting anywhere from a dozen-odd seconds to 20-30 minutes.

We call this microlearning - a learning method in which knowledge is broken into many tiny, easy-to-digest portions and served to the audience at appropriate intervals. We recommend this learning method with a clear conscience, because we know it works! It's used day to day by companies onboarding employees with our onboarding app.

There's one more very important advantage that comes with delivering knowledge as microlearning. Remember that lecturing knowledge in the form of a course ties listeners up for many hours, even several days. During that time, employees who've been with the organization longer can't focus on their daily responsibilities. Meanwhile, the people being onboarded lose time that could be spent on, among other things, integrating with the team, or even on the formalities that can't be avoided. With microlearning, larger sets of information are by design broken into small portions that can easily be woven into the daily rhythm of work.

3. The spacing effect - not everything at once

In learning theory, the so-called spacing effect was described many years ago. It refers to the discovery that we "save" new knowledge into long-term memory more efficiently if the learning process is divided into chunks spaced out at intervals over time, rather than crammed together one immediately after another.

How does the spacing effect relate to passing on knowledge during onboarding? A strategy of dosing out knowledge to a new hire in a series of actions triggered at intervals (every week, for example) will be far more effective at teaching them than one in which we run a single training session crammed to the brim with information.

The successive actions, spaced at intervals, should also be varied and surprising in order to avoid the habituation effect - the gradual fading of a reaction to a repeated, unchanging stimulus. It's precisely the habituation effect that makes us not notice yet another PDF of company guidelines in our inbox.

4. Format matters

In onboarding, the format in which content is delivered is now just as important as the content itself. Employees live in a world of Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok - used to deciding for themselves what, when, and in what form they'll "consume." Then they join a company and get... PDFs, multi-page presentations, and chats where finding anything borders on a miracle. No wonder a dissonance appears: private life is modern, while professional life is surprisingly analog.

It's worth thinking about onboarding and internal communication as an experience, not just the transfer of information. In practice, this might mean, for example, creating short, dynamic video content in the style of Instagram Stories or reels, instead of long hours of recordings "to watch someday." You can also use interactive checklists, micro-quizzes, audio recordings from leaders, infographics instead of walls of text, or short "how-to" clips filmed on a smartphone without excessive production. The point is to deliver knowledge in a format that's natural for the modern audience - light, engaging, and available on demand.

Against this backdrop, one of the most modern ways of delivering knowledge is scripted training series - professionally produced, modular, and built on a story that guides the employee through the most important topics. It's an example of a solution that fits today's employees' expectations very well, because instead of classic, formulaic training it gives them something on par with the quality of content they watch outside of work every day.

5. Stronger together - a safe space for newcomers

Among the various modern approaches to knowledge sharing in organizations, so-called peer-to-peer learning is making quite a career. What is it? The idea is very simple. It's about the informal exchange of information between employees at the same rung of the company hierarchy. In short: during everyday work we learn from one another, swap tips, good advice, and so on. 

In practice, peer-to-peer learning happens, for example, during Slack conversations, in the new hire-buddy relationship, or during a chat over a shared coffee break. Usually the mechanism is based on pairing new hires with already-onboarded employees. We propose a slightly different approach. We'll tell you up front that it has proven itself brilliantly in the field.

The Newbies Community

During our collaboration with T-Mobile Polska, together with the client we redirected the peer-to-peer learning mechanism from a newcomer-employee relationship to a newcomer-newcomer one. This is how a virtual safe space exclusively for first-timers came to be in our app. It's a space where new hires can exchange knowledge and good practices without worrying about what more experienced employees think. Our client even gave the initiative its own name: the Newbies Community.

Why is an approach like this effective?

• Because shared experience bonds people. Newcomers share the same perspective, which makes it easier for them to understand each other's worries, questions, and doubts.

• Because it enables a free exchange of knowledge in comfortable, safe conditions. For many people, the first days and weeks of work are a constant fear of embarrassing themselves. One wrong question and I'm written off - they think. Among "their own," it's easier to ask and to answer.

• Because it creates a never-ending loop of knowledge exchange. I don't remember topic A from the training, but I remember topic B perfectly. You, in turn, know A inside out, but B slipped past you. What's more, each of us has our own separate thoughts and ways of getting onboarding tasks done. By sharing them with each other, we're unstoppable.

6. Connect the "why" with the "how"

In the knowledge organizations pass on during onboarding, the "why" approach dominates. For example, a company teaches that it prioritizes high-quality customer service because one of its values is respect. But how do you build that quality in practice when you work on the front line? How do you handle a difficult, emotional situation with a customer in a way that's consistent with company values? This is where the need arises to ground knowledge in a specific situation (why?) and to harness the social nature of the learning process (how?). Joshua R. Eyler writes about this in his book "How Humans Learn." According to him, effective learning requires, among other things, a clearly outlined context for using a given piece of knowledge and entering into a relationship with other people.

This is where other employees come to the rescue, becoming an invaluable source of knowledge about how to act. One of our clients in the retail industry created a space in their onboarding app where difficult customer-service situations were "worked out" by store staff. Around an (example) question like "A customer comes into the store with a complaint but has no receipt and quickly gets angry. What do you do?" the company gathered dozens of tips from employees themselves, which became one of the ways of educating new hires.

7. Learning by doing

Created in the 1980s by researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership, the 70-20-10 model holds that as much as 70% of our learning is the result of individual experience. In short: we learn most effectively and fastest in practice. Experiences connect with emotions and concrete images. Under their influence, connections form in our brain that help us remember new information.

The 70-20-10 method in practice

What's the simplest way to describe the components of this method?

• a small but important part of the knowledge is delivered in formal settings, e.g., during training, onboarding meetings, or as educational missions in an online platform (10%),
• we bring the buddy or the newcomer's teammates into the learning process (20%),
• we assign the new hire plenty of real tasks in which they can put their freshly acquired knowledge into practice (70%).

With this approach, learning happens in the employee's natural environment. At the same time, passing on knowledge and general guidelines beforehand means the newcomer isn't thrown completely in at the deep end and is able to find answers to the questions on their mind that they need to solve a given problem. Decathlon adopted a similar strategy in its onboarding process: the Gamfi onboarding app passes on knowledge and then directs the employee to complete a task on the store floor. Only after the manager confirms it's done can the employee move on to the next stage of onboarding.

8. Finger on the pulse

And last but not least: a condition of effective learning is systematic evaluation. But note: this time it's not about assessing new employees - it's about evaluating how the onboarding process is going, by checking the level of satisfaction, engagement, and knowledge of new hires.

In a smoothly running organization where communication is top-notch, knowledge is passed on both vertically and horizontally. What's more, the information flows both ways. That means managers are interested in the opinions of their reports, including, in this case, the newcomers.

Gaps in knowledge spotted in an employee who has just been onboarded don't necessarily mean - contrary to appearances - that they approached the matter carelessly. A state of affairs like this can help answer the question of which elements of the onboarding process weren't properly fine-tuned.

By asking newcomers for their opinion, we're able to keep tabs on how their onboarding is going in real time. We know what works and what needs improving. We can also quickly catch any gaps in knowledge and fill them on the fly.

Effective knowledge sharing in onboarding pays off in both the short and the long term. Here and now, it means a faster, smoother onboarding process. Over the long run, it gives employees a solid, substantive foundation for everything that follows. They can lean on it for years, without having to backfill basic gaps along the way. 

We admit it: planning and rolling out an effective learning system in an organization is a challenge - but this is where we and our onboarding app are happy to step in 🫂