A competent employee has left your company, and amid the
confusion, you realize you've lost something irreplaceable:
that person's knowledge and experience. You're facing a
knowledge gap that could have been avoided by asking yourself a few
questions: How am I encouraging our employees to share their
knowledge of products and procedures? How am I documenting it for
future reference?
Heather Hesketh, 29, saw this knowledge gap from the employee
perspective when she was a technical writer for a manufacturer of
scientific devices. "It took me six months to get up to speed
when I started," she says. "They showed me the room that
had all the documents I would need, and that was it. I'm sure
the person before me had a system, but I didn't know what it
was."
Today, Hesketh is president of Raleigh, North Carolina-based
hesketh.com, the Web consulting firm she founded in 1994. She's
been lucky and hasn't lost any of her seven full-time
employees . . . yet. "Losing
people-ugh," she laments. "I hate to see that happen, but
that day will come."
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Hesketh, who is an avid notetaker, is anticipating turnover by
having her employees document everything they do, information
that's stored on the company's intranet as a sort of
history lesson. It's her way of preserving the past and
preparing for the future. "In our business," Hesketh
says, "we can't afford to have some people who are so
pivotal that if we lose them, we get stuck."
Getting "stuck" isn't that far-fetched these days.
According to statistics compiled by the Bureau of National Affairs,
roughly 13.2 percent of permanent full-time U.S. workers changed
jobs in 1998. The turnover this creates is costly. Says Frances
Summers, president of Insights for Business, a human resources
consulting firm in Medford, Oregon, "It costs an average of
$9,100 to find and train a new permanent employee," Summers
says. "And this is in direct costs that don't include the
cost of recruiting, management time, and signing bonuses, which can
make the figure even higher."
In The Know
Passing on knowledge and information to employees is the oil
that keeps the entrepreneurial gears turning, no matter what type
of business you have. "Part of the reason many small
businesses fail is that they don't focus on those areas where
they have world-class knowledge," says Vijay Govindarajan, a
professor of international business at the Tuck School of Business
at Dartmouth College. Integral to this knowledge is your staff. If
you own a software business and one of your talented programmers
moves on, can her replacement pick up where she left off?
"If your employees aren't encouraged to share knowledge
and information, it's not getting passed on. So when good
performers leave, they take their knowledge with them," says
Morten Hansen, assistant professor of business administration at
Harvard Business School.
A field called knowledge management (KM) focuses on the ways
companies use knowledge and information. Experts have found that
companies, just like people, have their own ways of communicating.
Some people prefer to communicate on paper, while others like to
speak face-to-face. Some companies place the majority of their
information on intranets, where employees can access it and apply
it to a broad customer base, while others emphasize verbal
interaction between co-workers, and projects are tailored to each
client.
Entrepreneurs need to understand there's a difference
between knowledge and information, Govindarajan says. Information,
he says, is the "know what" of a company, the readily
accessible data at employees' fingertips. But knowledge is a
company's "know how," its history, mission and
creativity. "About 80 percent of the interesting things about
a company aren't on a computer," Govindarajan says.
"Employees can't get the 'know how' and 'know
why' there. That's tacit knowledge, the things that cannot
be written."
As you add new employees, what are you giving them that will
help them understand your company's big picture? Many companies
depend on mission statements-those manifestoes infused with purpose
and lofty ideals-to relay a sense of purpose, printing them in the
employee manual or posting them online. But do they do their job?
"Spending a lot of time on mission statements without the
strategy to back them up is a waste of time in the age of
information overload," says Amy Newman, principal and co-owner
of Organization Blueprint Inc., a training and consulting firm
based in Floral Park, New York. She says companies don't
realize that communicating their mission takes more than just
whipping up a document and expecting employees to read it.
"Some databases are ghost houses," she says.
"Employees often miss the most important pieces of
information. Who wants to read a mission statement online? Make the
information come to life."
Chris Penttila is a freelance journalist who covers workplace
issues from her home base in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, area.
She can be reached at chris@sitting-duck.com or
through her Web site, www.sitting-duck.com.
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