Institutional knowledge loss can seem like an abstract or even fanciful problem. But your business lives and breathes. It’s obvious every time you think about its people and their relationships. They come together in sometimes unpredictable ways to create a unique organization with its own character.
Your business also knows things. It combines and profits from the knowledge of every person that passes through it. And when it loses employees, all too often it loses the benefit of their experience as well.
But it doesn’t have to.
The problem of institutional knowledge loss
Institutional knowledge loss hurts your business on multiple fronts. Not only do you lose when employees leave, high degrees of loss also make it harder to retain new employees. According to a study conducted by Panopto, 61% of employees struggle to obtain necessary information, and 81% are frustrated when they cannot find information that they need to do their jobs.
Your knowledge base includes two official categories of information that organizations store: Explicit/tangible and Implicit/intangible. You want to preserve both, but doing so provides various challenges.
Explicit/tangible information
Thanks to computers and the cloud, the kinds of documents that make up an organization’s official database of information are no longer strictly tangible, but they are concrete.
Tangible information includes all of your manuals, publications, advertisements, and reports. It also includes intellectual property, websites, contact information, and legal documents.
This material is admittedly easier to store than its counterpart. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t real challenges involved. You can divide them into two categories: challenges to preservation and challenges to recall. Issues include:
- Non-digitized material
- Archive and memory limitations
- Data loss due to human error or system failure
- Digital debris
- Decentralized storage
- Disorganization
It’s important to hold onto the things you need, but it’s also important to discard the things that you don’t. Clutter slows down computers and humans alike. Panopto’s Workplace and Productivity Report further found that inefficient knowledge sharing costs businesses with 1000 employees $2.7 million annually.
You need to ensure that the right people can find the right information efficiently. They lose time when they have to go hunting between several possible reservoirs.
Information and data silos can develop between generations of employees as well as between individuals and departments.
Implicit/intangible knowledge
You lose more than just concrete information over time. Employee turnover means that you lose what the authors of the book Critical Knowledge Transfer[1]Leonard-Barton, D., Swap, W. C., & Barton, G., (2014). Critical Knowledge Transfer, Harvard Business Review Press. call “deep smarts.” In an article in Harvard Business Review, they identify multiple areas of loss.
Lost relationships undermine the utility of contact information. Names and numbers don’t tell you where an individual excels and can be of use. You also lose the working rapport that often eases communication.
Lost work processes and job understanding further hamper a new employee from stepping into old shoes. Moreover, business partners and clients know it. Reputation takes a hit when established experts retire.
Solutions to institutional knowledge loss
100% employee retention is impossible. It’s also undesirable. Fresh ideas and insight matter as well as deep smarts. The trick is to combine the best of both.
So how can you minimize institutional knowledge loss across the board? You need strong document and content management services, tools to facilitate collaboration, and effective mentoring and training programs.
But perhaps the most important thing is not to wait until employees are gone before recognizing their particular expertise and encouraging them to share it.
Mentoring and succession planning
Of course, you want to encourage your employees to share knowledge, but what do you gain from formalizing that communication through official mentorship programs?
Older employees often don’t know what they know. Certain aspects of their job become so automatic that it’s hard to recognize what a newer hire might need. Pairing them up gives that new employee an easy place to go with their spontaneous questions. Mentoring also helps to integrate people into your corporate culture and community.
It benefits the mentor as well as the mentee. Experts refine both their expertise and their ability to teach it to someone else.
Succession planning is also important. If you know that someone plans to leave within a couple of years, make sure that they begin training their replacement as soon as possible. Encourage introductions to key partners and regular check-ins/chances to observe the outgoing employee.
Demonstrations, presentations, and recordings
Have your employees teach wider audiences as well. Inviting them to give presentations and demonstrations has the added benefits of honing their public-speaking skills and showing them that you recognize their value.
You can also do video presentations in order to reach a larger audience. And when it comes to key processes, you should absolutely record them and store the video with collaboration software.
Which leads into the next solution.
Collaboration software
Use a central knowledge base and collaboration tool such as SharePoint or Alfresco, intranet solutions that make it easier to share and extend your organization’s knowledge.
These document and content management systems make it possible to work together and optimize both content and processes. Extensive documentation and records ensure that you can find what you need.
Data storage and loss prevention
Its also important to protect your knowledge base with reliable backup, disaster recovery, and data loss prevention solutions. This allows your organization to recover and resume operation in the event of a hardware failure, cyberattack, disaster, or accident.
Culture of sharing
Preserving institutional knowledge requires a company-wide buy-in. It isn’t a single and finite project. It needs to be a core value at every level.
Build better documentation into your business processes. Encourage both formal and casual exchanges. Develop a culture in which the first thing employees ask themselves is “who else needs this information?”.
Let us help
At Ramsey Consulting Services, we can help you implement collaboration and document management solutions to preserve your institutional knowledge. Contact us today to discuss the right solution for your organization.
References
| ↑1 | Leonard-Barton, D., Swap, W. C., & Barton, G., (2014). Critical Knowledge Transfer, Harvard Business Review Press. |
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