Building a culture of documentation starts from the top.
Today our 40 person org has 1,337 knowledge base articles (as of yesterday, a coincidence, and we probably have a different number today).
It started with myself (CEO) creating all of the initial documentation.
3 months after my first employee joined, I started holding her accountable to creating and updating documentation.
It's not a one time thing.
You can't say, "your job is to do documentation" once.
It's consistently talking about it.
It's scoping in documentation updates and refreshes into bi-weekly sprints and quarterly goals.
Once she was onboard, we began to hold everyone else in our organization accountable too.
Again, it's never a one time thing to get anyone bought it.
It needs to be constantly discussed and scoped.
Today, all of the managers are bought in.
Instead of me explaining the importance of documentation, it's our org's managers embodying and instilling the culture of documentation into everyone new.
They understand the value of having their reports check the KB first.
They understand the value of being able to link someone to a KB instead of repeating themselves.
They understand the value of being able to work more async.
They understand the value of not being a bottleneck for someone else.
I stopped spending much time creating documentation about 6 months ago - and the number of documents just keeps increasing.
Today, I'll push documentation forward for new position / roles.
I'm working on delegating finance - and spent a bunch of time putting together documentation on how to handle the company's money.
- Expense policies
- Org software purchases
- Invoicing and payroll
- Phishing and security
- etc