Knowledge Retention: How to deal with a departing workforce
5 min readFeb 10, 2018
Originally published December 1, 2014
For the past 20 years, much has been written about the big brain drain, the great shift change, and the aging workforce. No matter what it is called, the issue is that important knowledge is walking out the door of many organizations and will not be returning. This post discusses this problem and what can be done about it.
Experience and expertise are being lost from work units for a variety of reasons, including:
- Retirement: Workers retire, either due to age or being unable or unwilling to find new jobs.
- Promotions, relocations, and role changes: People leave their jobs due to taking on new ones.
- Temporary workers, contractors, and consultants: Full-time roles are replaced with part-time or non-permanent ones, reducing continuity.
- Mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, and reorganizations: Organizational restructuring leads to voluntary and involuntary departures.
- Changes in strategy, focus, or specialty: Organizations take new directions and replace the workforce accordingly.
- Workforce reductions: Cost-cutting measures result in layoffs.
- Short-term job mentality: Long-time, loyal employees are not valued as fads and quick profits are chased.
- Disillusionment: Employees see endless changes, widespread layoffs. and leadership failures, and become cynical about the organization.
- Illness, death, or care giving: People become sick, die, or have to devote themselves to caring for relatives.
- Leaving for new jobs: Workers find work at other organizations.
Here are five approaches to dealing with this challenge:
- Share: Ask those who may be departing to share documents, insights, nuggets, tips, tricks, and techniques.
- Innovate: Ask veteran workers to create better ways of doing things based on their experience.
- Reuse: Institutionalize processes to reuse lessons learned, proven practices, and deliverables.
- Collaborate: Enable collaboration between those departing and those remaining.
- Learn: Assign apprentices to experienced mentors.
Here are ten knowledge management methods that can be used:
- Proven practices: Document, replicate, and repeat.
- Lessons learned: Record, review, and reuse.
- Communities of Practice: Ask everyone with a common specialty, ranging from newbies to long-time practitioners to retirees, to join and participate.
- Social Network Analysis: Identify the key connectors and go-to-resources.
- Enterprise Social Networks: Enable online conversations that can be tagged, preserved, and searched.
- Videos: Record tutorials, nuggets, and stories, and then get others to watch them.
- Document collection: Contribute, tag, and make searchable.
- Storytelling: Ask people to tell stories on community calls, in apprenticeships, and in recorded videos.
- Incentives: Offer incentives to share, reuse, and stay connected after departing, especially as active members of communities of practice.
- Knowledge maps: Map essential knowledge, including what is needed. who has it, how it is used, and how it flows.
Here are ten suggestions for retaining organizational knowledge:
- Make sure you have a knowledge management program in place. Don’t wait until people are about to retire or depart.
- Preserve community contributions and community discussion threads in an archive.
- Ask thought leaders to develop training courses on their specialties.
- Provide incentives for creating personal guides to processes, contacts, and content.
- Conduct interviews using videos and community spotlights to collect stories, instructions, and tips.
- Ask people to submit their top ten most used documents.
- Produce a knowledge map to define knowledge sources, flows, and constraints.
- Establish mentor/apprentice pairs as far in advance of departures as possible.
- Hold transition workshops to allow departing people to tell stories and answer questions.
- Form a community for former members of the organization and allow retirees to continue to participate in communities as long as they can contribute.
Resources
- LinkedIn Topic
- SlideShare
- Knowledge Retention by Alan Frost
- Knowledge Retention: Beyond Guidelines and Rhetoric by Edgar Tan
- Sharing hidden know-how by Kate Pugh
- Losing your minds: capturing, retaining, and leveraging organizational knowledge by Bill Kaplan
- Managing the risk of loss due to workforce attrition by Bill Kaplan
- When expertise departs by Knoco
- Knowledge Retention and Transfer Strategy by Knoco
- Knowledge Retention: Preventing Knowledge From Walking Out the Door by Jerry Landon and John Walker of the Tennessee Valley Authority
- Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis by Salvatore Parise, Rob Cross, and Thomas H. Davenport
- When Knowledge Walks Out: Connecting, Sharing and Capturing Alumni Knowledge for Development by Lesley Shneier
- Knowledge Transfer Across Generations by Susan McCabe
- Make the Most of Your Current Experts While Developing New Ones by Lauren Trees
- APQC Best practices report: Transferring and Applying Critical Knowledge
- Future of Knowledge Work: Developing Your Next Generation Experts by Jeff Stemke
- Where does your knowledge go when you leave? by Ian Thorpe
- Getting Ahead of the Silver Tsunami by Jean Martin and Joe Ungemah
- Knowledge retention: What practitioners need to know by Jay Liebowitz
- Knowledge Management (KM) — How to Beat the Baby Boomer Retirement Blues by Susannah Patton
- 6 Steps to Take Before Key Employees Retire by Roy Strauss
- The Right Way to Off-Board a Departing Employee by Rebecca Knight
- Halting the Corporate Brain Drain by Gerald C. Kane
- 5 Ways To Keep Your Company’s Knowledge From Walking Out The Door by Eishay Smith
- Building and Maintaining a Knowledge Transfer Toolkit by Keith De La Rue
- Knowledge retention: 5 clusters of knowledge loss, and 5 interventions by Bruce Boyes
- Multigenerational Workforce
- Bridging the Gaps: How to Transfer Knowledge in Today’s Multigenerational Workplace
- Changes and Choices The Rapidly Evolving Business Cases for Employing Mature Workers
- What is knowledge transfer?
- How can tacit knowledge be transferred or shared?
- What’s the best way to transfer knowledge from an SME to the rest of the organization?
- SIKM Leaders Community thread: Knowledge Retention from Select ‘At Risk’ Employees
- SIKM Leaders Community: other threads and #knowledge-retention hashtag
- SIKM presentation: Dorothy Leonard on Sharing Deep Smarts — Experience-based Knowledge
- SIKM presentation: Rocio Sanz and John Hovell on Knowledge Retention Framework and Maturity Model
- Knowledge Retention Strategies presentation
- Knowledge Retention presentation
Books
- Knowledge Retention: Strategies and Solutions by Jay Liebowitz
- Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce by David W. DeLong
- Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom by Dorothy Leonard and Walter C. Swap
- Critical Knowledge Transfer: Tools for Managing Your Company’s Deep Smarts by Dorothy Leonard, Walter C. Swap, and Gavin Barton
- Surviving the Baby Boomer Exodus: Capturing Knowledge for Gen X and Y Employees by Ken Ball and Gina Gotsill
- Losing your minds: Capturing, Retaining and Leveraging Organizational Knowledge by Bill Kaplan