The Knowledge Retention Dilemma: A Few Key Suggestions

An issue that many companies are dealing with today, as a result of both lay-offs and the retirement of “boomers” is knowledge retention. Too often we let people walk out the door without having fully captured what they know, who they know, and how they did things. And as the economy improves that knowledge loss is going to accelerate as unappreciated workers leave and move to companies where they can make more and feel better. (The unappreciated part is a post for another day.)


A recent article in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, entitled Cos. Can Capture know-how of retiring workers offered a few suggestions on how companies can do some knowledge transfer. These included:

• Mentoring programs
• Cross-generational teams
• Convincing retiring workers to stay longer to teach someone
• Putting retiring workers on a contract to be on call 

To me these suggestions are incomplete and don’t really address how you actually go about capturing information. One possible method comes from the book The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. His book is about becoming an entrepreneur and he suggests that as you set up your company you take the approach that you are setting up a franchise. In order to set up a franchise you have to thoroughly document every process so that someone could step in and take over by reading the documentation on each job. This works well for departments and positions too. However, in my experience too few positions have this documentation. It would be great if every one did and it would be good to have every employee develop this kind of documentation. But that may be a pipe dream. At the very least you certainly need to have every retiring employee create that kind of documentation. If they are training someone to take their place they and the trainee together could develop this documentation.

  

A second method comes from consulting practices. I have read of consulting companies that require consultants to document the assignments they have completed, including problems encountered and solutions developed. This information goes into a central database that is accessible by future consultants. This allows them to see if anyone else has encountered a problem in the past and may prevent them from having to “re-invent the wheel.” Thus knowledge is retained far beyond the tenure of the consultant.

  

A third method comes from one of my favorite business gurus, Harvey Mackay. He realized a long time ago that for his business to be successful he could not afford to re-invent relationships with customers every time a sales rep left his job. He realized that knowing your customer beyond numbers of the business is critical to the success of the company. The soft relationship stuff is important. To this end he developed what he calls his Mackay 66. It is a questionnaire of 66 questions that gets to the wants, likes, dislikes, points-of-view, education, family, interests and aspirations of the customer. He also has versions for competitors and employees. Each successive employee coming into a position has access to these files so that “new” relationships can be forged more quickly than the might normally.

  

So think about your knowledge retention processes and see if some of these tools might help you and your company do a better job in retaining the hard earned knowledge that the company has paid for. At a minimum you as a professional HR person should use these tools yourself.

  

You can find information on the Mackay 66 by visiting here. While you are at it, you may want to sign up for his newsletter. It is an easy read chocked full of great insights.

 

You can find Michael Gerber’s book by clicking on the title The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It.

 

A Lesson from Drucker: Can We Really Ignore People in an Intellectual Capital Economy?

I have a book called The Daily Drucker (Click the title for Amazon) that I enjoy reading for the daily wisdom. Sometimes there is something HR related, sometimes not. Today's subject came from The Practice of Management and deals with balancing objectives and measurements. To Drucker an emphasis totally on PROFIT was dangerous and undermined the future of the company. He suggests that are eight areas in which performance and objectives have to be set. Two of these are people related. These eight include:

1. Market standing
2. Innovation
3. Productivity
4. Physical and financial resources
5. Profitability
6. Manager performance and development
7. Worker performance and attitude
8. Public responsibility

He said these key items may require different emphasis in different businesses at different times and stages, BUT, as he says, "...the areas are the same, whatever the business, whatever the economic conditions, whatever the business's size or stage of growth." 

Manager performance and development and worker performance and attitude WHATEVER THE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS! Unfortunately far too many companies have ignored this sage advice and it is going to cost them. Lack of training in managers and lack of attention to employees in an economic downturn is going to cost many companies the talented people the will sorely need to reap the rewards of an upturn in business. In a day and time when many companies rely so heavily on the talent, intellect, and learning of their people it dooms a company to failure to ignore managerial development.  Stack on top of that a general mistreatment, or at least an lack of understanding and compassion for the plight of your workers and disaster happens.  All this is adding up to what many foresee as a mass exodus from companies by talented workers who supply the intellectual capital so many companies trade on today.

So take a look at your company. What objectives and goals have your set for the development of people that may forestall an exodus of your brain power? It is not too late for everyone. You can still recover but you must move swiftly and with purpose to re-engage and revitalize your workforce.

Boomers, Brain Drain and a Quote

I was quoted in an article entitled Older Workers: Once Trashed, Now Treasured, written by Bill Hendrick for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The article deals with the subject of older workers, primarily baby boomers, and the realization by many organizations that they are facing a brain drain as the boomers retire.

There are alot of human resources issues involved in the impending retirement of large amounts of baby boomers. (BTW, "baby boomers" is a US term for children born during the period following WWII through 1964. Other countries had baby booms at different times.) Some of these issues include: healthcare, retirement income, delivery of services, succession planning, and one of the biggest, loss of knowledge.

Many organizations are struggling with this impending loss and how to retain this "knowledge" within the organization. By the way, this knowledge is not just "how to do the job", that is actually the easier knowledge to retain. The difficult knowledge to retain is the relationships these boomer workers have established with customers, suppliers and co-workers that enhance the selling, buying and problem-solving process on a daily basis.

There are a couple ways to do this that might work. One is a mentoring program. Teaming younger workers with older works. Problems may arise however because not all parties are good mentors or mentees. Younger workers may get impatient and cause discrimination problems. Older workers may feel threatened and feel like the company is trying to push them out too soon. So this process has to be set up correctly and ALOT of training needs to be done.

An approach to transfering "relationship knowledge" that I like is done by Harvey Mackay, author, speaker and company CEO. He uses something called the Mackay 66 , in which he provides a mechanism for tracking a great deal of information on customers. Things such as family information, likes and dislikes, favorite foods and sports, where they went to school, things you should and should not discuss and much more. This information is collected and logged over a period of time and retained by the company. This way if the person who was calling on this customer leaves all of that knowledge does not walk out the door with them. The next person can read that information and get a head start on retaining the relationship.

There are a number of approaches that can be used, you have to pick what fits best with the culture of your organization. But if you have not started working on this today you will soon find yourself between a rock and a hard place. Look at your organization and take stock of who may be retiring in the next 10 years. What and who do they know? Figure out a way you can get them to invest some of themselves in the future of the organization. Wally Bock, at Three Star Leadership, also blogged about this issue and had some suggestions, so check him out as well.