People Leave. Does Their Knowledge Go With Them?

I'm probably not going to ruffle a lot of feathers by asserting that the days of "thirty years and a gold watch from the same employer" are over.

 
[flickr photo credit:  "Carla Carpenter Retirement Party" by grantlairdjr:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/grantlairdjr/1804423/in/photostream/]

Attrition is a fact of life, and the dialogue at a recent meeting of the Boston SIKM (System Integrators and Knowledge Managers) Leaders group made me think about knowledge management and attrition, so I did some research and learned:

• The average member of the U.S. workforce will have 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44.
• Among jobs started by 39- to 44-year olds, 33 percent ended in less than a year and 68 percent ended in fewer than 5 years.
• The annual separation rates for both information work and financial work is roughly one in three over the past decade.

Plenty has been written about the graying of the U.S. workforce, and how this macro trend will only exacerbate the problem. 

Unlike our government's executive branch, with a well-defined time between election and inauguration telling them precisely how much time they have for transition, we in the commercial sector know not the day nor the hour of many transitions.  The potential exists for HUGE loss of knowledge assets as aging workers leave the workforce in planned (retirement) or worse, unplanned (health issues) ways.

So, are you convinced yet that you, as a steward of an organization, a team, or a pile of knowledge, are standing on a platform burning up from attrition?  How, then, do we help build "orderly transitions" of power and information?

The answers are right in front of us, effective and simple to the point of being boring:  Knowledge management systems comprised of people, process and tools.  More specifically, here are some excellent questions to ask yourself, as you think late at night about your organization (or department or project), if the risk of key persons leaving your team keeps you counting ceiling tiles:

People:  What are the competencies and characteristics for which we hire?  How do we assimilate new people to the organization?  How are training requests created and prioritized? How do we promote both formal and informal mentoring from both the supply and demand side?

Process:  What is your organization's knowledge infrastructure like?  Do you have common definitions, processes, and focus?   Is the harvest of knowledge assets built into day-to-day activities?

Tools:  Do you have centralized, searchable repositories of knowledge that are integrated into your core business processes?

Beware the consultant who promotes one of these facets at the expense of the others ("SharePoint solves this problem!"  "What you need is our unique KM methodology!" etc.). There are literally hundreds more questions you can ask yourself about your own knowledge management system based on the people/process/tools framework, but the framework provides a useful prism through which to look at areas of business at risk of knowledge loss through attrition. 

Note:  A great reference source I found on this issue, in the context of the U.S. Federal Government workforce, is an SIKM presentation shared by Acquisition Solutions.