101: Knowledge lost

Institutional knowledge is something companies invest in, yet much of it gets lost, as it is kept in the brains of individual leaders or highly skilled team members who move to new jobs or retire. Some of this knowledge may stay intact in the form of company policies, but some may get muddled if new leadership introduces a different agenda not meshing with the earlier knowledge. A merger or reorganization also causes knowledge to disappear. Planning is paramount. A strategy must be mindful. Leaders who aren’t paying attention risk atrophy of their company’s knowledge base, says Ron Ashkenas at Harvard Business Review. He recommends identifying key things each team member should know. “Figure out how to turn this from an implicit assumption to an explicit expectation. You might for example, build the mastery of this core knowledge into the onboarding process … and have refresher sessions as part of your off sites or leadership meetings,” he writes. Using technology to create an internal body of knowledge, like Intel’s wiki called Intelpedia, is another recommendation. It wastes valuable time. James Davis at HR Daily Advisor says the average new hire spends almost 200 hours working inefficiently, “asking colleagues for information and waiting for responses, forging ahead by trial and error, ‘reinventing the wheel’ to duplicate the work of his or her predecessor,” he writes. The results? Frustrated employees, delays in products getting to customers, and a hit to your company’s bottom line. More skill means more is at stake. The level of turnover shouldn’t be the focus as much as the level of knowledge of people leaving a company possess, says Workforce.com’s Andrew Pena. “Organizations routinely sustain the loss of employees,” he says, “but when those employees are highly skilled, possessing knowledge not readily replaceable, the organizations suffer.”