What Is a Knowledge Base? How to Create One Your Team Will Actually Use

Most companies store knowledge in multiple places, unintentionally forcing employees to stop their work and search for information they need. This traditional approach wastes time and creates frustration. Today, comprehensive work operating systems are bringing knowledge directly to people where they already work.

A modern knowledge base doesn’t just organize information; it delivers answers within your workflow when you need them. This way, teams can access and share essential information without switching between apps for greater efficiency. 

Let’s explore how knowledge bases are transforming to keep pace with how people actually work. 

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a centralized information hub designed to help people find files, data, process documents, and answers to common questions without spending time searching external systems or involving co-workers. People can search knowledge bases for information about an organization’s products, processes, people, and services.

Examples of knowledge bases include help centers or resource libraries where users can find FAQs, video tutorials, and knowledge articles to help them find answers and solve problems on their own.

Modern knowledge bases, especially those powered by AI and enterprise search technology, actively connect to your most essential information sources to instantly provide relevant answers. This fundamental shift — from passive repositories to active knowledge delivery systems — is transforming how organizations work.

How are knowledge bases used?

Desk workers spend a third of their time on low-value tasks like searching for information and responding to repetitive questions. A well-organized and maintained knowledge base directly addresses this productivity drain. 

When people know where to go for accurate answers, they can focus on meaningful work instead of hunting down information. Modern knowledge bases have matured from simple information repositories into essential tools for innovation and collaboration across every department:

• Marketing teams may store campaign guidelines and creative assets
• HR departments may house onboarding or company policy information
• Sales teams may log and maintain product details and customer insights
• Support teams may document troubleshooting steps and store customer service response scripts.

This cross-functional approach creates a unified organizational knowledge that accelerates decision-making and improves work quality throughout companies.

Benefits of a knowledge base

A knowledge base creates a single source of truth for your organization and an effective way for people to find and share knowledge. Here are some key ways it provides value:

• Improved efficiency. Instead of spending time searching for information buried in emails or sending messages and waiting for replies, employees can find their own answers right away in a knowledge base.
• Reliable customer support. With quick access to accurate information, support teams can provide fast, consistent answers to customers.
• Smarter decision-making. When teams can easily reference past solutions, company policies, and best practices, they can make informed decisions based on proven approaches rather than guesswork.

 

Building your knowledge base: a step-by-step guide

If you don’t currently have a knowledge base set up, it’s important to understand how to build one from scratch. Let’s review the steps involved.

Planning for a knowledge base

Creating an effective knowledge management system, starts with planning for who will use it and how. Begin by identifying your users and their specific needs. Get input from team members across the organization about what information they access most frequently and where they currently struggle to find answers. You’ll likely find that different departments have distinct requirements:

• Marketing teams might need competitive analysis templates and brand guidelines.
• HR departments might require accessible onboarding materials and policy documents.
• Support teams might expect troubleshooting guides and customer response templates.

Each team knows what they need from a knowledge base, and their feedback will help you organize one that supports their workflows. Consider setting up a knowledge-sharing Slack channel, like #marketing-resources, where people can share information and ask questions. This not only helps you identify critical content to include but also builds awareness and familiarity as your knowledge base develops..

Designing for user experience

When you design an effective knowledge base, you directly address fundamental problems your employees face daily: fragmented information, cognitive overload from context-switching, and slow knowledge retrieval that delays decisions. A well-designed knowledge base gives your teams access to the information they need without forcing them to jump between tools or navigate disjointed workflows.

Ideally, your knowledge base will accomplish two things for the end user: 

1. Minimize context-switching. Your system should bring information to users where they already work, rather than forcing them to interrupt their workflow.
2. Make sense of your data. Your system should synthesize data from multiple sources and provide a cohesive answer, along with links to those sources. This approach eliminates the need for users to connect all the information themselves.

There are two basic types of knowledge bases that an organization might create: internal and external.

• Internal corporate knowledge bases. A corporate knowledge base holds information relevant to—and only accessible to—the company itself, including such things as internal processes, vendor contacts, details about benefits, or your company holiday calendar.
• External customer service knowledge bases. This public-facing knowledge base holds information that’s relevant to your customers. Depending on what your company does, that could include tips for using your products, video tutorials, or operating hours and locations.

How you structure your knowledge base is up to you, but the most important thing is to keep it simple. If it’s not intuitive to navigate, people won’t use it. Design your knowledge base with your users’ needs in mind. For example, how will they search? What information do they need most frequently? Create clear categories with intuitive navigation, including cross-links to relevant topics, and consistent formatting. Consider accessibility needs like screen readers, color contrast, and mobile responsiveness.

Above all, design your knowledge base to actively deliver information instead of forcing users to hunt for it. When powered by AI, this shift from passive library to active knowledge delivery can reduce information retrieval time by up to 60%, according to Stanford University research.

Identifying content for your knowledge base

Effective knowledge base articles answer crucial questions in a helpful and straightforward way. This will typically require you to repurpose existing content and create new content. Start by adding existing content first and fill in the gaps later. Interrelated topics should be connected for simple navigation. For example, a product team might include an FAQ about product specifications that cross-links to an in-depth guide with implementation strategies.

And don’t forget about multimedia. Videos, infographics, screenshots, and diagrams often communicate sophisticated concepts more efficiently than text alone. Non-text formats can aid visual learners and are great for breaking down complex processes that are difficult to describe in writing.

Knowledge-base content might include:

• FAQs
• Product or service descriptions
• Customer and employee onboarding flows
• Company or regulatory policies
• Troubleshooting documentation
• Written or video tutorials

 

Choosing the right technology and platforms

After you identify content and settle on a basic organizational structure for your knowledge base, the next step is to implement the right technology solution to support your needs.

Your knowledge base should be easy to access and integrate seamlessly with the rest of your tools. It should draw from your existing structured and unstructured data to create a fully indexed and searchable hub. Additionally, you should encourage employees to collaborate, contribute, and update it as a regular part of their job to ensure accuracy and create a culture of knowledge sharing.

Advantages of using Slack for your knowledge base

When you streamline knowledge sharing within a comprehensive work OS like Slack, you flip the traditional knowledge base model on its head. Instead of people searching for information, information finds people exactly where they need it.

Every conversation in a channel, project update, or file shared in Slack automatically becomes part of your company’s collective knowledge. Your team naturally creates and captures knowledge, right in their workflow.

With enterprise search, you can connect your third-party apps and drives directly to Slack, creating a searchable hub across a far larger share of your company’s knowledge and data. Current connectors include Asana, Box, GitHub, Google Drive, Jira, and Salesforce. This way, your employees won’t have to waste time switching between apps or hunting through folders—they’ll get the right information, delivered where they’re already working.

How to measure the impact of your knowledge base

A knowledge base is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. To keep performing at peak potential, it requires continuous improvement based on how your team actually uses it. 

Instead of just tracking which pages people visit, enterprise search in Slack helps you measure how effectively your team finds and uses information. You can see which searches succeed, track how people engage with results, and spot patterns that show where your knowledge base shines or falls short. With these insights, you can build a more responsive resource that evolves with your organization’s needs.

Be sure to track key metrics such as:

• Click-through rates. Do people click on search results? Low engagement might indicate that results aren’t matching user needs.
• Resolution rates. Are people finding what they’re looking for? Track how often users are asking follow-up questions after consulting your knowledge base.
• Search abandonment. If people search for something but don’t click any results, this may point to a knowledge gap that needs attention.
• Time savings. Measure how long it takes to resolve issues with your knowledge base compared to before it was implemented.
• Contribution patterns. Who’s adding to the knowledge base? A healthy system should include contributions from team members with specific expertise across your organization.
• Knowledge gaps. What are people searching for but not finding? Use these insights to create new content.

In addition to evaluating hard metrics, it always pays to keep the lines of communication open with your team members. Find out how they engage with your knowledge base and ask them for suggestions around improvement. You can do this by sending out short surveys or embedding feedback buttons directly into your knowledge base.

Implement knowledge bases for more connected workplaces

A knowledge base should be a static repository—it’s a dynamic resource that powers collaboration. By centralizing knowledge, making it directly accessible within your workflows, and continuously improving it with AI, you can transform how your teams work. Instead of forcing employees to perform painstaking manual searches across multiple platforms, you can automatically bring answers to them in real time. 

When you use an AI-powered solution to deliver relevant knowledge directly into your team’s workflow, you create a new era of intelligent teamwork, where people and AI collaborate in real time to get things done faster, smarter, and with greater impact. Your teams spend less time searching and more time applying insights to make crucial decisions. Start building your modern knowledge base in Slack and make information your organization’s most powerful asset.

FAQs

Can small businesses benefit from creating a knowledge base?

Yes. Small businesses often rely on institutional knowledge held by a few people, making them vulnerable when those employees are unavailable or leave the company. A knowledge base democratizes information sharing and supports business continuity.

What are the best practices for maintaining a knowledge base?

Schedule regular content reviews, assign clear ownership for different topics, and make contributions part of your team’s regular workflow. Use analytics to identify which information is used most frequently and what might be missing. That helps you prioritize content creation and updates.

How frequently should a knowledge base be updated?

Update your knowledge base whenever processes change, employees with institutional knowledge leave, new products launch, or team members identify gaps. Aim for quarterly reviews at minimum, refreshing critical information as soon as possible after changes occur.