Tacit knowledge sharing is the knowledge that is shared indirectly through practices instead of explicit knowledge sharing that is written and formal, in the hospital world we refer to this as silent knowledge ( Mäkelä 2006, 25). Kristiina Mäkelä presents hypothesizes in three categories in which she describes various actions affecting knowledge sharing. (Mäkelä 2006, 115-120).

Hypothesis 1: The more frequent the non-face-to-face interaction, the more knowledge is shared. This is critical issue in my organization as discussion concerning the lack of face-to-face time because of remote work is real. The threshold to ask simple minute questions remotely is higher than in face-to-face interaction, this affects workers and management. Because of this, employers must think of ways to get personnel to return to the office to maximize transfer of knowledge. Also, tacit knowledge can pass more easily when dealing in person versus remotely. We have taken steps to increase knowledge sharing through teams calls, as chat only is less efficient in passing information.

Hypotesis 2: The higher the perceived level of trust in firm affects information sharing. Trust plays a part in our firm when it comes to achieving mutual goals. If personnel don’t trust each other, they will not share information as easy, this is especially true for tacit knowledge, as it is the information that is not required to be shared. Trust is shown as a possibility to ask “stupid” questions without having the fear to be belittled by peers, one way this is created is by having volunteer group activities to get us know each other better. We also have open channel to discussion in which we can even critically challenge common practices without fearing repercussions form colleagues or managers. The management side is open to opposing ideas and while they will not always obviously select the opposite way, the reason for that is given. I am personally pleased with the practices of this company as I have had employers that did not listen to us and were close minded to new ideas.

Hypothesis 3: Shared cognitive ground affects knowledge sharing. In my organization people do share the vision and have the same general focus on the matters at hand. We in general know what is needed to be done as a group and share our knowledge the best we can to move our projects along. We realize that the knowledge we gain ourselves can be useful for others and share that knowledge. This is slightly problematic for management, as their vision might be slightly unrealistic. Here are a few ways to improve our knowledge management practices in the three hypothesis described above. To increase face-to-face interactions, management should make office visits worth-while, this can be done through regular breakfast meetings or arranging group meetings with pastries, we already do these in irregular terms so this would be easy to implement. To increase trust, the management should be more transparent in keeping the staff informed about the status of the organization, and maybe add a regular forum where they would answer staff’s questions and worries. Cognitive ground is hard to achieve, but making sure that everyone understands their works meaning, and gets appreciation when their work is done correctly can increase this, the difficult part is to recognize the invisible work that is important to the company but is not publicly visible, such as maintaining the working platform and servers.