How a Google Docs Wiki Can Increase Your Bottom Line

There are lots of advantages to creating a wiki for your business. Onboarding and training are streamlined, communications become more efficient, and company-wide documentation has a permanent home where everyone can access or even edit it. 

But the financial benefits of creating a wiki are often overlooked. In this article, we consider how you can maximize profitability, especially for companies already using Google Drive. A Google Docs wiki is one of the most accessible and cost-effective wikis around. That’s why Kbee’s advanced wiki software dovetails with Google specifically.

Savings too great to ignore

Whether your business is a small startup or an established enterprise, cost inefficiencies eat away at profitability. Creating a Google Docs wiki might not seem like an obvious way to save money, but it can significantly improve employee productivity and efficiency.

These are some of the key benefits when you create a wiki with Google Docs, giving everything from technical notes to training materials a dedicated home:

1.  Knowledge isn’t lost when staff members leave

An experienced staff member can leave a huge hole in your company’s operations when they make an exit. The loss of their ingrained (often instinctive) expertise could harm your bottom line as remaining colleagues perform those duties less efficiently. Ditto if their successor struggles to maintain lucrative client relationships, potentially losing years’ worth of income.

If you create a wiki with Google Docs, departing staff members can spend their final weeks recording and noting everything from client preferences to company policies in a repository everyone else can access. If you can’t stop key employees from leaving, at least ensure they don’t take valuable knowledge with them.

2. Training and onboarding are accelerated

As former staff say goodbye, new recruits typically arrive. The onboarding process is a drain on resources, because new team members need to be trained before they can contribute to the company’s bottom line. It’s crucial to speed up that process to free up the trainers for more profitable work and get new recruits up and running more quickly.

Creating a repository of company information (policies, resources, contractor agreements) puts everything a new employee needs in one place. They can access it at any time without having to ask for help. By nature, wikis are easy to access, so even a new recruit will be comfortable navigating between links or using powerful search functionality.

We’ve previously discussed the benefits of using a knowledge base in this blog.

3. Communication is streamlined

Most employees spend too much time reading emails and other internal communications. Over the course of a year, the same information might be requested and sent numerous times across different departments. Duplication is the enemy of both an optimized workplace and also cost-efficiency. Staff may waste numerous hours duplicating communications instead of doing new work.

If everyone knows the data they need is in a Google Docs wiki, there’s no need to increase inbox clutter. They can find a file with a few clicks through a branded and secure internal domain. If it needs updating, they can modify it to retain a single version of that document. And if they make a mistake, version control seamlessly rolls back to previous edits.

4. Customer service is standardized

The benefits of wikis extend far beyond internal communication. They can also influence a company’s reputation among its customers. A wiki is the perfect place for storing external documentation like sales scripts, service contracts, and recurrent presentations. There’s no need to create them from scratch—just choose your document and get to work.

Having a repository of streamlined documents makes each customer interaction quicker and more consistent. Clients will appreciate that, which builds brand loyalty. If document updates are required, one employee can make those tweaks to everyone else’s benefit. There are no data silos anymore, and more customers can be attended to in the same amount of time—and that increased efficiency is better for your bottom line.

5. Access is universal

The pandemic has radically changed working patterns. People who find themselves working at home need access to the same documentation they’d have in the office. That’s vital to maintain the levels of efficiency previously recorded in office environments.

When you create a wiki with Google Docs, you’re giving people unrestricted data access at all times. They can maintain productivity and profitability by working equally efficiently wherever they happen to be, benefitting the bottom line while boosting your workforce’s flexibility. And since Google Drive is a leading cloud-hosted productivity suite, it’s the obvious home for a wiki, alongside regularly used apps like Docs and Sheets.

The best way to create a wiki with Google Docs

Hopefully, this has inspired you to consider bringing company-wide documentation and data into a dedicated wiki. Kbee’s intuitive software turns Google Drive folders into a professional wiki quickly and affordably. Find out more by signing up for a free Kbee trial and take the first step toward substantial efficiency savings. 

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