Like many kids growing up, I spent nearly every after-school minute enjoying pickup games and organized sports. But high school track wasn't my favorite. I ran just to stay in shape and goofed off to keep 440-relay practice interesting. In fact, too much fun almost cost me a buddy when I managed to crack a bone in his hand trying to see how hard and fast I could hand off a baton. Lucky for me it only took him two weeks to cool off and speak to me again.
In a more serious moment I learned something about what it takes to win a relay. I learned that it's not just about having the fastest runners in each leg of the race, but you also have to pass the baton. The better you are at passing it, the better your chances of winning. Even with the fastest team, you can blow the whole thing with one lousy baton pass.
So it goes in today's businesses. We hear of employers everywhere griping about not being able to hire enough engineers, programmers, and other technical people. Their concerns are supported in magazines that report U.S. employers will be short 10 million skilled workers by 2012. Even while employers struggle to find the best people, however, they're also fretting about passing the batonensuring that critical knowledge doesn't walk out the door with departing employees.
In some businesses, employees are beginning to retire in droves. Add to that the results of a recent online employment survey suggesting that most employees tenured for three to 10 years are job hunting, and you add a serious knowledge gap to the growing list of public crises. Employees jumping ship at a healthy rate can cost a company as much as 40 percent of annual profit, while losing essential knowledge can cripple a company even to the point of no return.
What employees know about highly technical production methods, software applications, complex processes, and important customer needs is at least as important as finding people with the technical capabilities to learn them. Even in businesses where this bulb has been burning for some time and knowledge sharing has been ingrained, it takes time for people to become fully literate about the business. When employees leave, all that learning investment goes with them.
In one company, a supply chain expert for a highly technical product line retired leaving a slot filled by a supply chain professional who by all accounts has requisite skills, but lacks product-specific knowledge that can only come from the outgoing employee. Now, the operations will feel the pain while the new employee tries to learn on his own what the outgoing employee took 25 years to absorb. In a couple of software firms, the loss of long-term programmers who created core products has created development gaps that will take years to plug as new employees learn customer requirements, system architecture, and legacy code. In the meantime, formerly loyal customers begin to look to competitors for up-to-date solutions. A manufacturer is losing product managers who function as go-to people for any and every problem relating to their product lines. When they leave they will take their knowledge with them, and line productivity will suffer.
Some employers are dealing with the problem by re-hiring retirees as consultants who are only too happy to continue their former jobs at double the previous pay and 10 times the flexibility. It's an expensive band-aid that doesn't work with employees who are switching employers. A better way to secure the future is to identify essential business knowledge and find an effective way to capture it. Some knowledge can be captured and organized with electronic systems, but most situations require some form of human handoff, formal or informal.
Some of my clients have handled the challenge of preserving essential knowledge of resources, processes and precedents by spreading out work in collaborative teams. There, expertise is shared among team members in frequent meetings and inter-dependent activities. Clients that must retain particularly complex knowledge and skills have successfully used senior employees as mentors to newcomers preparing them as current backups and future organization experts. Leadership succession has been provided by some with programs that produce pools of eligible employees who can be selected for next level leadership assignments.
However it is managed, successful organizations make knowledge sharing and retention a top priority identifying potential knowledge gaps and implementing programs to keep the whole system running at peak performance regardless of who moves out of the organization. They recognize that it's not enough to get the best talent if nobody is left with the wherewithal to carry on when that talent leaves. Successful organizations have learned how to pass the baton.
Trying it on for fit: Assemble a group of internal experts from many organization levels and departments. Use them to identify critical knowledge areas for the organization based on current and future strategic needs. Examine who within the organization holds that knowledge and note their tenure and career stages to identify potential knowledge losses including knowledge that could be lost from core workers, support staff, technical contributors, and leaders. Determine the most appropriate process for transferring essential knowledge in order to retain it when employees leave.
Following is a summary of three knowledge-transferring needs and methods. Consider how you might use them to support your particular situation.
" General work groupsBroad capability building through knowledge sharing, distributed decision-making, and cross-training.
" Individuals with highly complex skillsOne-on-one mentoring on a part or full time basis.
" LeadershipAssessment and development programs to create successor pools, or mentoring of identified potential leaders.
