Knowledge is an important asset that business sometimes forget. Only when a vital employee leaves the company, then does the average business owner realize the depth of loss. Business owners can protect themselves from losing the knowledge essential to their company’s success by understanding how to create an effect knowledge transfer.
In days gone by, people worked at one company for their entire career. The idea of sharing your knowledge with an incoming peer fit in the model of long-tenured employees. However, today’s workplaces don’t hold those same ideals. Four generations can be found working together and the knowledge one employee has isn’t always transferred back to the organization before they leave.
Surviving an Emergency Knowledge Transfer
What do you do when you suddenly find out that a key employee in your business is leaving? How do you access all the knowledge they have stored in their brains? How do make sure your business remains viable? Call on an Emergency Knowledge Transfer Expert.
The Emergency Knowledge Transfer process helps the client prioritize the information that absolutely must be transferred and it helps the client use their expert’s remaining time in the best possible manner. By the time the expert leaves, he or she can feel good that they gave everything they possibly could have to the company and helped his or her peers be able to fill the void.
The business minimizes the talent risk because they are sure of what they know and know what they were not able to learn from the expert. But, the entire team can know they used the available time wisely and followed their process, schedule and agenda. The Emergency Knowledge Transfer allowed for crystal clear communication of the expert’s knowledge and vision. It was divided into small portions that the people taking over for the expert could understand and digest, discuss and question in a methodical manner.
Planning for the Future
You can take three easy steps to creating your own plan, as a business owner. First, make your plan formal. There should be a checklist and sample templates to make sure that following the process is easy. Team members will appreciate this because they aren’t just left to figure it out for themselves.
Create overlap in employee duties. You can cross-train individuals so that the risk of having key people leave the company won’t be paralyzing to your company. Try to have at least two people who could step into another employee’s shoes at any moment.
Remember to keep training your employees. This is a great time to cross-train, as well. You can even try a situation where a key person is removed temporarily from your business to see how the team can function without them. It’s like an emergency fire drill. This will help you and your team see how important cross training really is.