A friend of mine was recently advised by a recruiter that he was too experienced for a specific role. The company wanted someone younger who they could train. His experience was dis-regarded without further discussion of the role or salary.
A very strange explanation at best, but it does raise the issue about the experience / knowledge that has left many companies in the last 2 years, ( no, let’s make that 20+ years), without any record of it to support those that remain!
Knowledge Management – With the objective: To be able to access or refer to employee experience/knowledge when they have left the company or are not available.
For the benefit of the rest of this post I shall refer to employee experience, in all respects, as “knowledge”.
Companies invest in their people, (or they should), and expect to gain in return. But experienced people leave for many reasons and, very often, valuable knowledge walks out the door with them.
Their specific role with the company means that they may have developed ideas, ways of working, methodology and/or business solutions that should be recorded, evaluated, managed, shared and implemented if thought beneficial.
In addition, their unrecorded knowledge will probably include details related to:
- Client relationships, key contacts & business personal information
- Specific projects:
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- Project management information & key contacts
- Client requirement & agreed deliverables
- Technical issues, problems & solutions
- Commercial information
- General role related business information w.r.t. contacts, competitors, technology, operations, etc
So how can companies ensure that their most valuable resource and accumulated knowledge continues to benefit them, should their employees leave.
Purely for example:-
Companies should encourage knowledge management & sharing among employees by:
- Leading by example
- Establishing a succinct system for Knowledge Management which can be referenced by:
-
- Project type
- Client
- Issues
- Teamworking & information sharing ethic
- Encourage employees to share their previous knowledge & record on the system
- Create a library of referenced case studies
- Project wash-up meetings and recorded summary of salient points including:
-
- Project type – Clients – Date
- Team members & roles – Contact details
- Project background & objective
- Main issues
- Solutions – implemented, proposed & reasons
- Failure & reasons
- Unresolved issues, if any
- Involve clients, secure reference
- Etc
- Last resort - Interview with employee on leaving… difficult in these redundancy days.
There are many ways to get to the same result but the most important point is to have the means in place to record, manage & access the “knowledge”.