As your business grows, creating a system where each employee can quickly find the information they need becomes ever more important. A workplace where everyone is scrambling to find important information slows down your processes, limits your growth potential and is not helpful for anyone.
This is why building an internal resource library is essential to reach certain levels of growth within our business. Whether you’re using a platform explicitly built for file storage like Dropbox and Document360, or a more all-around tool like Asana, there are some key tips to keep in mind in order to create a system that’s both efficient and comprehensive. Keep reading to learn what these tips are.
Make PDF your File Format of Choice
When building an internal resource library, you should first decide on a standardised file format to use. We strongly recommend saving your documents as PDFs due to the fact that they can be accessed on any device. If any changes need to be made, you can also use Adobe Acrobat's free PDF editor tool online to edit the content of your files.
Another advantage of using PDF files is that they always retain the internal formatting of the original document, no matter what device or operating system you use to open them. This stands in contrast to other popular file types like Microsoft Word. Alongside this, PDFs are relatively small when it comes to file size, which is an important consideration if space is a limitation of your chosen document storage platform. You can also enhance the security of your documents through features like passwords and encryption. If you’re looking to build a secure, efficient and easy-to-use resource library, save your files as PDFs.
Organise your Resource Library
Good organisational skills are essential if you want your resource library to be easy to use. While simply uploading all your documents onto a file storage platform might work for the first few files, as your business grows, this approach can cause plenty of confusion and hinder your team from finding what they need. This ends up defeating the purpose of an internal resource library.
The simplest way to organise a file library is by team. For instance, you might have a section dedicated to the marketing team containing passwords to digital marketing tools, market research data and brand books. You can then have a separate section of your internal resource library containing HR-related documents like employee contracts and performance reports. By organising your information strategically, you’ll make it easier to scale your resource library and improve your team’s quality of life immensely.
Grant Access on a Need-to-Know Basis
If you’re working with a small team, document management is easy. However, as your business grows and you begin to take on more staff, making sure that everyone has access to the information they need while still maintaining a high level of security becomes more challenging.
When you divide your internal resource library into categories, like team- or department-specific areas, it makes it much easier for each team member to have access to the resources that are relevant to them. You can then password-protect each of the sections and provide the passwords to people who need the information. You can even have sub-groups of documents within a particular section. If you want to be even more granular, add passwords to your most important files and entrust these passwords to the members of your team who need to access them.
Of course, the lines between different teams aren’t always so clear-cut, and lots of cross-departmental work needs to take place for your business to thrive. It’s important to set up a system where individual employees or teams can request access to a resource that’s not necessarily under their care. This way, you can maintain a level of professionalism while still allowing for the free transfer of information around your company.
Lean on Expertise
You may have people within your organisation with process-oriented roles, or even an operational department. Using their expertise to create a workflow for creating and accessing your resource library means you can use professionals already available to you to create the best system possible. This way, there will be a clear, logical structure and process to the library, which is necessary when working with lots of information, because things can get confusing quickly.
Another great way to utilise the expertise within your business is to ask each department to create documents within their resource library, like process documents for completing specific tasks. Doing so will mean the information is as relevant and accurate as possible, as it has come from the people completing the tasks, who are the most knowledgeable in this area of the business’s operations.
Prioritise Security
Inevitably, some of the files within your internal resource library are going to contain sensitive information like sales figures or passwords. Given the growing number of cybersecurity threats like malware and hackers out there, it’s more important than ever to invest in high-quality cybersecurity.
One basic cybersecurity tip that many businesses fail to follow is that passwords should only be shared internally. This means that even friends, family and business partners should not have access to your resource library. As soon as you detect a breach, quickly change your password. It’s also important to invest in a reliable anti-virus software that can catch and disarm threats as soon as they arise. A security breach can set you back millions, so don’t be afraid to invest money into cybersecurity.
Final Points
In business, information is power. One of the most powerful business management tools and ways to empower your employees is by giving them easy access to the resources they need in order to do their jobs. The most efficient way to do this is to create an internal resource library that they can access at any time.
However, building a usable resource library involves more than simply uploading all your files onto a file storage platform. You’ll need to take factors like security, file format and organisation. Use what you’ve learned today to build your resource library and improve information flow throughout your business.