Losing an employee can be a giant step back for your team -- leading to the loss of critical knowledge, additional stress, and impacts on innovation. (Check out Dan Mallin's article* in Forbes below that deep-dives into this below).
I remember what it felt like when I worked at Walt Disney Imagineering when staff would cycle off our team. Not only because we were a tight group who enjoyed working together -- we also lost the invaluable wealth of knowledge stored in people’s minds. No more walking by Steve’s desk to ask: “Hey, who do I go to for….?”
Losing an employee means losing critical knowledge, as Ari Bixhorn shared in the HR Management link below**. Research suggests that the departure of an employee costs a company 200+% of their salary because of the time it takes to onboard new staff. And, onboarding debt builds up over time as a company grows.
We can’t control when people leave a company - but we can prepare. Here are a few tips to experiment with on your teams:
🧠 1. Storing knowledge isn’t enough, we need to manage it. It takes a commitment to keeping your data updated to assure accessibility. Invest in knowledge managers to make sure that when people need information, it’s at their fingertips.
📣 2. Build a sharing culture. People shouldn’t be gatekeepers of knowledge, but they are also really busy and need to be encouraged to share regularly. Create opportunities for people to share what they are working on and what/why decisions were made.
💬 3. Capture tacit knowledge. Invest in tools to help capture what doesn’t make it into documentation - with attributions to the staff to reward them for their contributions.
For more information on how PairUp solves for retaining critical knowledge - check out: www.pairupapp.com, and join us for our next webinar on this theme in September!
**https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2018/07/18/knowledge-loss-turnover-means-losing-employees/
