Layoffs Send People and Knowledge Packing
The scale of layoffs over the past few weeks is unprecedented. The impact on these people who have been shown the door and on the companies that have let them go will linger for years to come. Besides the emotional damage that occurs when people are forced out, there is a tangible cost to companies when knowledge and experience walk out the door. Once that knowledge and experience are gone, no amount of TARP money will bring them back. It may be too late for some companies to prevent this now, but putting measures in place will lessen the blow in future.
One of the few ways to address the problem is to adopt collaborative tools and processes that capture the information companies need to be able to thrive.
Every company in the world relies on the bits of information that live in its employees' heads. The accounts payable clerk may know a small nugget on how to negotiate the best price with an important vendor. A salesperson may repeat the same pitch when selling to a certain kind of customer that works every time. An engineer may be the only person who knows why software was originally built with ColdFusion. The branch manager may know the precise spot to kick the box compactor when it acts up.
All of these bits of knowledge add up to a vast amount of information that a healthy business requires. But the vast majority of companies do a poor job of gathering this information in a systematic way. When people leave, either by choice or not, what inevitably happens is that the company and its future employees are forced to relearn it all through trial and error. The cycle repeats over and over again. The scale of this problem is huge in the current environment.
So, what does a company do to address the problem?
1. Use tools and process. Companies must have infrastructure in place to encourage, or force, employees to share information. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it is at least marginally effective. Anything is better than nothing. How many managers around the world are at this moment digging through abandoned email folders trying to figure what their employees were working on and what they knew.
2. Measure collaboration. Again, it doesn't matter how, just do something that you think has a good chance of success. You could measure the number of contributions to a knowledge base, the frequency of mentoring sessions, the number of white papers written, whatever. What you measure is less important than doing it consistently over time and measuring improvement. Of course, the metrics are not irrelevant, but don't wait to choose the perfect ones to track. Start small and simply, and go from there.
3. Reward employees for sharing. If you don't measure and reward productive behavior, it isn't going to happen. Collaboration is a bit fuzzy and can't be measured like the number of phone calls answered per hour, but there are ways.
4. Focus on informal information. This is often where the best information resides. For example, many employees send emails back and forth answering questions and trading best practices. You need a way to harvest these nuggets of information.
None of this stuff is rocket science, but few companies nail this process. We recently spoke with David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies, who said only 10% of his clients focus on "back-end" collaboration. The majority have invested in front-end collaboration technology, like web conferencing, to save money and reduce travel. This is also important but doesn't help companies retain information when people leave. The current economic conditions put even more pressure on companies to wring as much information as possible from remaining and future employees. The important thing now, if you are a business owner or manager, is to do something before it is too late again.
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Comments
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"The current economic conditions put even more pressure on companies to wring as much information as possible from remaining and future employees." Which is why employees would be complete suckers to participate in the schemes described here. The knowledge that employees hold is their only bargaining chip in a brutal economy. The last thing they should do is hand that advantage over to unpredictable employers.
The problem I see with this argument in this environment is that collaboration tools will not be viewed as empowering knowledge workers to make the firm more agile or robust but enabling the firm to downsize more easily.
All this sounds nice but the truth is whoever it's friends with the boss gets to stay. I've been many examples.
Interesting comments. Frankly, I never anticipated that people would read this post and think I was advocating a strategy to screw employees over. As I have advocated in many of my posts, I'm a huge fan and proponent of collaboration, period. The point of this post is to identify benefits to companies that people may not normally consider. Frankly, I think collaborating with each other benefits employees as well. They learn from each other as they collaborate, making them more valuable as they progress in their career. They also enable the company where the work to excel, which lessens the chance they do get laid off - everyone wins. I'm assuming most employees hope their employer does will. If they don't, they should probably do something else. The notion that I'm advocating collaboration just so companies can lay off people more easily completely misses the point.
If you are irreplaceable, then you are not doing your job properly. Even on a full-fledged employment contract we are in fact all consultants bouncing from company to company. This means that it is more important to maintain your reputation as an information sharer than to to cling to a seat that will eject you anyway sooner or later. All industries are small world - after ten years in the French telco and ISP community I see many people with experience in at least half of the companies on the market. With jobs just like with girls, once you get over the fact that nothing lasts forever you can then concentrate on contributing fully with whatever you have on your hands at the moment.
> 4. Focus on informal information. This is often where the best
> information resides. For example, many employees send emails back
> and forth answering questions and trading best practices. You need
> a way to harvest these nuggets of information.
It is quite simple, but you need a manager with a cluebat backing it up. The policy is that if someone has a question, he asks it in the thematic forum designated for that use. Any questions asked by email are bounced back with the forum's URL. It works, but only if you don't let the whiners have their way.
With a searchable forum building up from people questions, you have the discursive phase of knowledge capitalization mostly covered. Then you need a wiki for community managers (or anyone motivated - although it generally boils down to a few key individuals doing most of the work) to pick the best bits and lay them out in an organized manner.
This makes everyone's work so much less frustrating that people then begin to wonder why they have not begun doing
Jason,
Your advice -- the best proactive piece of advice leaders and managers should heed right now. I've consulted with many companies who resisted or just failed to do knowledge management. Now they are paying the price, big time.
Capturing tacit knowledge within an organization can be done but only, as you say, with collaboration. Executives don't want to spend the money, managers don't want to spend the time, employees see no reward hoping to hold some trump card or at least get some revenge if laid off. This is the legacy from old management thinking/labor-management relations. Organization systems that refuse to adapt and change. Leaders who saw the new vision of work and leadership are probably in a good place right now, or at least a less painful place. For everyone else, we will struggle.
Thanks for your cogent insight. I'll share it.
Nancy Dailey, Ph.D.
www.drnancydailey.com
Thanks for the excellent distinction between "front end" and "back end" collaboration. With the start of the Baby Boomer retirement wave (hard as that is to believe right now) and predicted talent shortages over the next decade employee collaboration will only become more important.
To get started I'd encourage companies - or at least team leaders - to use a "business continuity" mindset to prioritize the information to retain. Companies and people already have too much information to wade through and it may be hard to know where to begin.
If the office were bombed / technology became unavailable / bird flu struck....what would be the absolute key info / documents you couldn't do without? Then break it down: 1. during the first hour of interrupted operations (think important contact info and urgent processes / knowledge); 2. during the first day (think financial info, customer and supplier info, and operations knowledge); 3. during the first month.
Good and valid point in your article. As a middle manager of several decades, I've faced this on both a departmental level and an enterprise level. Also as a person that enjoys the Dilbert comics - there's way too much truth often in the comic strip.
Two key elements must be in place for a company to even attempt to gather that valuable knowledge.
1. There must be a very easy tool that allows the knowledge worker to quickly record how they complete a process or task.
2. There must be a reward for the person to give up their "tricks or knowledge". We can all relate to mom's special recipe or being appreciated for being able to deliver a unique deliverable.
Unless those two points are met a company can never fully document and maintain informal knowledge.
Oh, in addition to making it easy for the knowledge worker to share, the company has to commit full time resources to maintain in a way that the information can be quickly retrieved.
I dare you to talk about taxonomy and the importance of metadata tags to any Sr. Executive.
Jason, I concur with Nancy that you're comments are spot on. I'm surprised the media hasn't given knowledge drain more coverage. Thanks! The other related issue is retirement. My state government is planning a huge workforce reduction within the aging employee base, which means years of bottled knowledge going out the door.
To your point on tools and process, I think the next generation of project management tools should be redesigned for knowledge process and best practice management along with collaboration. This would help Nancy's point about managers not wanting to spend the time on knowledge management since many managers are already comfortable with project management tools. This process/project technology platform needs to be designed from the ground up with knowledge as the focus rather than tasks. Also, it should be truly simple and intuitive for user adoption and collaboration to work and needs to be enterprise-friendly so any business unit could implement it without IT support. It has to be designed for easy knowledge creation, maintainability, and distribution. Finally, a process governance dashboard would make it simple for executives to be involved, thus providing incentives for investing.
Once this infrastructure is in place, the best practice platform would not only help reduce the knowledge drain, but would also enhance efficiencies, help firms stay out of trouble (i.e., compliance, regulation), and go after new opportunities with the power of the crowd.
Knowledge management tools are easier to use and cheaper to deploy than ever before, but the fundamental problem remains: the person who writes the note has to spend time doing so, but only the person who reads the note saves time. So there are only three ways to reap the time savings:
1 - the person doing the writing is altruistic to the point of being foolish.
2 - the reader is the writer, e.g. if the team is small.
3 - the boss recognizes the person contributing the data rather than the one retrieving it.
To me this post is not about managers encouraging knowledge management tools so that they can fire employees, rather it is about managers rewarding the altruists.
Re: None of this stuff is rocket science, but few companies nail this process...
Possibly because what you describe sounds absolutely abysmal. Everbody monitored, persuaded, forced you say, to provide information. I'm fairly skint, but I do earn from a couple of little websites, and frankly I'd rather do that than come anywhere near what you describe.
Andrew Preston
All good so far. I would just throw a very small wrench into everybody's kvetching about the importance of retaining tribal knowledge. That wrench being that some(not all) knowledge has a shelf life.
The urgency to capture hard earned intangible tribal knowledge mostly has value, but....every once in a while (NOT always) old processes and the people and knowledge that support them should just fade away. Just because some old nasty IT guy (or girl) learned something the hard way in 1996 about how to reboot a server does not always mean that bit of knowledge is still crucial years later. Maybe it would just be better to abandon the old "thing" and make use of some new improvement to replace and improve it.
The urge to capture this "knowledge" should be SLIGHTLY tempered with the question of whether or not the original bit of information is really as valuable as everybody worries that it is.
In the end though, unique knowledge obtained while on the company clock should be shared by at least one other person.
Jeff Bach
Being layoff is not a bad thing, it's giving the individuals a chance to start over. Maybe they will just find a job that they love in the future. Or discover their long lost hobby, or catch up with their old buddies. Let's look on the bright side. They can even treat it as a long vacation. :-)
The more you know about how your company is running, the harder it is for you to get sacked.
Not too surprised that those who most enjoyed this post are managers -- it's pitched to them. Doesn't change the fact that in a contracting economy employees and employers have different goals: employers aim to reduce headcount to control costs and employees aim to not be a counted head. The post refers to intellectual property only from the employers POV, but knowledge of how they do their work is the employees' intellectual property -- that they would be foolish to give away.