Key Takeaways
- Building a successful knowledge base isn't about comprehensively documenting everything; it's about solving the "findability" problem for the 20% of questions that cause 80% of the interruptions.
- By organizing content around natural language questions rather than administrative taxonomies, and integrating AI for instant retrieval, you can create a system that employees trust and actually use.
You've probably seen a knowledge base fail before.
Someone spent months building it out. There was an announcement, maybe a training session. People used it for a few weeks. Then they stopped.
Now it sits there, slowly going out of date, while employees keep asking the same questions they've always asked—to each other, to HR, to whoever will answer.
The frustrating thing is that the content was probably good. The tool was probably fine. Something else broke down between "we built this" and "people use it."
I've seen knowledge bases succeed and fail across dozens of organizations, and the difference usually isn't the technology or even the content quality. It's whether the thing was designed around how people actually behave, or around how someone imagined they should behave.
Here's what actually works.
Mistake 1: The Comprehensiveness Trap
The first mistake is building too much before launching. The instinct is to make it comprehensive. Document everything. Cover every policy, every process, every FAQ. Don't launch until it's complete.
This takes forever. By the time you're "done," half of what you wrote is already outdated. You've burned out the people doing the work. And you've delayed getting any value by months or years.
Worse, you don't actually know what people need until they start using it. Your guess about which questions are most common might be wrong. The way you organized things might not match how people look for them. You won't find out until it's live.
The MVP Approach
Start with the 20% of content that will answer 80% of the questions. The most common HR questions. The most frequent IT requests. The policies people ask about constantly.
Source: Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)Get that live, see how people use it, then expand based on what you learn. A small knowledge base that's accurate, current, and actually used beats a comprehensive one that nobody touches.
Mistake 2: Organization-Centric Design
The second mistake is organizing for the people who built it, not the people who'll use it.
You know the content intimately. You know that the PTO policy is under "Benefits" and the sick leave policy is under "Time & Attendance," and the difference makes sense to you because you understand how these things are structured.
The employee searching for "how many sick days do I get" has no idea about your taxonomy. They're just trying to find an answer.
User-Centric Taxonomy
This is why traditional folder-based organization often fails. It requires users to think the way the organizers thought. What works better: design around questions, not categories. Think about the actual questions people ask. "How do I submit an expense report?" "Who approves my vacation request?" Build your knowledge base to answer those questions directly, not to organize documents about those topics.
Mistake 3: Friction in Retrieval
The third mistake is making it hard to search.
If your knowledge base requires people to navigate through menus and folders to find things, most people won't bother. They'll ask a human instead.
Search has to work. Really work. Not "here are 47 documents that mention the word you searched" but "here's the answer to what you asked."
The AI Advantage
What if employees could simply ask a question in plain language and get the exact answer they need—with a source they can verify?
This is where AI changes the game. Traditional search returns documents, but grounded AI transforms retrieval. AI can return answers—the specific information someone needs, pulled from whatever documents contain it, with citations so they can verify. This is exactly what an AI knowledge assistant does. If you're building a knowledge base today and not thinking about how AI can power the retrieval, you're building for the past.
But even with good search or AI, you need content that's written to be found. Short paragraphs. Clear headings. Specific rather than generic titles. "How to submit an expense report" is findable. "Expense Policy Guidelines and Procedures v2.3" is not.
Mistake 4: Ignoring the Gatekeepers
The fourth mistake is launching without buy-in from the people who field questions.
Your HR team, your IT help desk, your operations managers—whoever currently answers the questions you're trying to deflect—need to be part of this. Not because they have to write all the content (though they should help). Because they need to believe in it enough to point people there.
If someone asks an HR question and the HR person answers it directly without mentioning the knowledge base, you've missed an opportunity. If they instead say, "Great question, that's covered in the knowledge base—let me send you the link, and you can find similar stuff there in the future," you've created a moment of training.
The people who answer questions are your distribution channel. Get them involved early. Show them how it makes their lives easier. Make sure the content is actually accurate. Give them credit for contributing. Make it their success, not something inflicted on them.
Mistake 5: The Maintenance Void
The fifth mistake is not keeping it current.
Nothing destroys trust faster than finding outdated information. Regular knowledge audits are essential to maintaining credibility. An employee looks up the PTO policy, finds something from 2019, makes a decision based on it, and then discovers the policy changed last year. Now they don't trust anything in the knowledge base.
One bad experience with outdated information spreads fast. People tell each other. "Don't bother with the wiki, it's never up to date." That reputation is incredibly hard to recover from.
Currency requires two things: a process for updates and clear ownership. The process can be simple. Quarterly reviews of high-traffic content. Triggers when policies change to update related articles. A way for employees to flag outdated information. Whatever works for your organization—but something systematic, not just hoping someone remembers.
Ownership means someone is accountable. Not a committee. A person whose job includes keeping this current. Without individual ownership, updates become everyone's job, which means they're no one's job.
Mistake 6: Set-and-Forget Mentality
The sixth mistake is treating launch as the finish line.
Launch is the starting line. What happens after is what determines success.
Watch how people use it. What are they searching for? What are they finding? What are they not finding? Most knowledge base tools have analytics—use them. The patterns tell you what's working and what's missing.
Track what questions still come to humans. Every question that comes to your HR team is either something the knowledge base should answer (and isn't, for some reason) or something that genuinely needs human judgment. The first category is a gap to close.
Ask for feedback explicitly. Not just "what do you think of the knowledge base?" but "when was the last time you couldn't find something?" and "what do you wish was in there?" People will tell you if you ask.
Iterate continuously. Add content based on gaps you discover. Improve the content that people find but don't find helpful. Remove content that's never accessed. A knowledge base is a product, and products improve over time through feedback.
Practical Tips for Success
A few practical things that help:
Write at the level of the person asking, not the expert answering. Skip the jargon. Assume no context. If someone needs to understand three other things to understand this answer, they probably won't.
Keep articles short and focused. One question, one answer. If an article is running long, it probably should be multiple articles. People are scanning, not reading.
Use the words people actually use. If employees say "PTO" and your official policy says "Paid Time Off," make sure both terms find the same article.
Make it easy to give feedback. A thumbs up/down, a "flag this as outdated" button, and a way to ask a follow-up question. The friction to give feedback should be near zero.
Link related content. Someone reading about parental leave might also need information about benefits continuation or how to request leave. Don't make them search again—connect them to the next thing they might need.
A good internal knowledge base isn't about having a place to put documents. It's about employees getting answers when they need them, without having to interrupt someone else, without having to wait, without having to wonder if what they found is current and accurate.
That requires thinking about the experience from their perspective, not yours. What are they trying to do? What's standing in their way? How do you make the path from question to answer as short as possible?
Build for that, and people will use it. Build for anything else, and you'll have a very organized collection of documents that nobody reads.
JoySuite turns your knowledge base into something employees actually use—because they ask questions in plain language and get answers instantly, with sources they can trust. No navigation required. No hunting through folders. Just answers.
