Knowledge retention - replacing the traditional exit interview
07-Mar-06
One of the crucial organisational challenges facing us in 2006 and beyond is the undeniable fact that a lot of the working population is coming up to retirement age or already eligible for companies’ retirement schemes. In his book on the subject of Lost Knowledge, David DeLong illustrates this point arguing that fully 50% of NASA employees will be eligible for retirement this year should they wish to do so.
NASA, on the other hand, hasn’t yet developed a strategy for dealing with this problem. Even if they could recruit sufficient numbers of young scientists, they could not replace the experiences or the knowledge of the retirees. Despite US government ambitions to reinvigorate a campaign to land people on the moon, DeLong argues that NASA’s knowledge retention problem means that it literally does not know how to achieve that goal. Previous processes and procedures were not well documented and the people are already retired or moved on – the knowledge is lost.
Even with normal staff attrition and especially in sectors facing re-structuring and or downsizing, most organisations will need to find ways of addressing this serious organisational crisis, if not this year, certainly within a short period of time. The loss of knowledge has implications for learning and development professionals, as strategies will need to be developed to accelerate the learning curve of any new staff as well as attempt to contribute to the existing corporate memory, where it exists. HRD staff can assist in a process of identifying new learning and development programmes for individuals, teams and at the organisational level itself.
Traditionally, organisations undertake exit interviews with staff that are about to leave. These tend to focus on typical HR issues, such as the reasons for moving on and what they liked or did not like about their time as employees. The results of these interviews can help to arm HR departments with information that can assist the retention of staff – a laudable strategy given the above scenario.
However, they rarely, if ever, provide sufficient material to address the key problem. That is, they should not be about a loss of that person’s capacity to undertake the role – a capacity that can be replaced by a new recruit - but about the loss of knowledge to the organisation. This loss can take many years to replace. The problem is exacerbated when the person is regarded as an expert in their field, either though skills and qualifications or simply through length of time in employment.
Of primary importance is the identification of the key knowledge areas that your organisation needs to retain. Are they domain specific? In other words, are they technically specific to certain tasks or roles? Are they procedural, relating to systems and processes? Are they social – embedded in individual relationships with internal staff and external contacts? Whatever the knowledge area, you need to assess the impact of the potential loss to your organisation.
Should that impact analysis suggest that efforts to retain at least some of that knowledge would be beneficial, there are some options open to you as to how to undertake a new form of exit interview – a knowledge debrief.
There are a large number of potential deliverables available to you, including job manuals, case studies, stories, best practices, top 5 knowledge assets etc. Once you know the focus (technical, procedural, social, amongst others), you need to decide how the results of the debrief will manifest themselves. This decision will be based on your understanding of how best to ensure that others in the organisation are able to access the results in ways that are meaningful to them. Examples include Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and metadocuments.
If you already have an intranet with sets of FAQs, then this might be one way of structuring the results and consequently will inform your approach to getting the answers. By definition, these may not necessarily be “frequently asked” and are more strictly “most anticipated” questions. However, FAQs are so predominant on the Internet that the term will be familiar to your employees. If you have a content management system, those FAQs can be stored using metadata that people are familiar with. If you don’t use a content management system, then it might be sensible to approach the debrief with a metadocument in mind.
Metadocuments are simply, highest-level documents. These contain as much relevant information about a person’s knowledge and experience as possible. By inserting hyperlinks into key phrases, projects, people’s names etc, access to more detail is made available at the click of a mouse. The keys to their success are fourfold in that they are:
• Simple to design, often being no more than one side of an A4 document in WORD, or other MS Office tool.
• Linked to the knowledge areas that concern the organisation.
• Visible to staff – or least they know where to find it.
• Provide access to further information through their hyperlinks despite the possibilities that the files are stored in different drives and directories. Of course, any cleansing of directories from time to time will necessitate re-editing the metadocument.
The knowledge debrief process clearly requires facilitation and the explicit alignment with the induction of new staff and / or the diffusion of the knowledge amongst remaining staff. Any perceived “lost” knowledge may require an explicit approach to support other staff members to acquire such knowledge within their own professional development process. Is this not a role for HRD professionals? If not you, then who?
Michael Kelleher is a Senior Consultant at CIBIT Consultants|Educators and is based in Wales. He is a Visiting Professor at Nottingham Trent University.
Mike can be contacted at mkelleher@cibit.com
This article has also been published on TrainingZone
Details
- Author:
- Mike Kelleher
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 07-Mar-06
- Categories:
- Human Side of KM
- Sections:
- News
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Member comments (12)
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flexibility in methods for knowledge transfer
Instead of working with knowledge retention, I prefer flexible methods for knowledge transfer. This might include knowledge transfer sessions as well. Information can be documented in an adecuate representational mode. (There is certainly a cut-off where documentation turns into over-production of material.)
Apart from knowledge transfer sessions, we also use other representational and learning modes, e.g. video sequences for manual tasks.
Only after a thorough analysis of the social and technological environment, the expert (knowledge sender in a communicative setting) and the novice (recipient) we select the methods to use. All in all: good experience with transfer sessions and flexibility in the application of knowledge transfer methods.
Leadership concern
I am just wondering if the upper management could not give full support to it, how could it be successfully implemented. On the other hand, no visualized Return on Investment pic, why the upper management would do that.
If they decide to innovate the whole NASA culture, wow.... wow... better prepare lots of money and personnel and be ready to fail.
who is going to read all that stuff?
After any major disaster there is a public or judicial enquiry and a big thick report is produced. Hardly anyone reads these reports. But often the major lessons learned will be included in a short video which “cuts to the chase” and explains the key learning points.
A lot more people who need to know will watch a 20 minute safety video about why the train crashed or why the factory exploded. Recognising this we should consider capturing the exit interview on video and editing it so that it becomes a way of harvesting and transferring the key expertise and the hard lessons learned by the departing individual.
KM is Too Big for Any Single Group to Own
If any one function / LOB try to hijack enterprise-wide KM, then KM will be killed. All the groups such as Technies, HR, PMO, R&D, Support and so on have significant role to play in KM.
HR and Training should focus on the competency, initial learning and compensation part of it. There is enough challenge here to prove and add value. How would HR know about Project KM or Support KM? PMO - the Project Management Office - should focus on driving KM within the PM processes. R&D should drive innovation across the organization.
Support will drive the Support KM to ensure quick and quality response to customers. Of course, there will be little bit of overlap. Every group should focus on experiential learning based on the way they perform or experience.
KM champions should focus on driving the initiative across the organization. They have to realize their boundary as well. In some organizations, KM taskforce spend most of their energy in building tools rather than in driving KM. It is too expensive for any organization to build KM tools for their own use.
Leveraging the best KM systems available in the market and focusing on implementing KM will help organizations move up the value chain.
As long as everyone feel that they are greatly contributing to KM both from a strategic and tactical perspective, KM will be alive. Collective mind rather than a controlling mind will make True KM that will in turn increase the longevity of the organization too!
Too Late Too Little?
How about treat them well while they are employed? Would disgrunted employees care so much as to part or leave behind knowledge???
Treat them well and they just might remember you.
Some background might help
Hi everyone and thanks for your interest / critiques. This article is one of three prepared for TrainingZONE, KB's sister community of learning & development professionals. They were produced as a result of interest I have heard from many HRD practitioners over the last five years as to "how to rescue KM from the techies" - and that is how KM is still perceived by non-KMers (3 meetings in Ireland this week confirm the point). Many organisatons will have an HR / HRD function but may not yet have anyone with the responsibility for KM - so why not HR? Ed saw the article in another forum and thought it might be of interest here on KB and it appears unedited before this more mature KM community. I think the issue is worthy of debate, so am happy if the article sparked it. has anyone else read David DeLong's book "Lost Knowledge"?
Old Vs New
There has to be a convergence of old and new. Listening to the stories of those highly experienced people will definitely give us good insight. No free stories, please. Rewards and recognitions will make them feel that they are still working and contributing.
Codification is little difficult at that stage.
Knowledge retention -
Knowledge retention has no short cuts for an organisation,an organisation needs to promote appraisal programmes for exploring
the tacit knowledge of individuals, simple jotting down in paper doesnt serve the purpose.
...and what they don't know or know wrong
IF we look at the reasons why a company would want to retain the "knowledge" of a retiring member of staff -- or any member of staff really -- two main points spring to mind: contiuitiy of operations and innovation. Certainly for continuity it is good to know what people know and how they go about their business.
However, looking at innovation (which seems to be more important for many organisations, at least according to us consultants) it could be even more interesting to know what retirees don't know or where their knowledge fails them. So while the FAQ approach might help continuity (but beware of the caveats mentioned by Dave and Denham) I still wonder how it would be possible to detect these blind spots of retiring experts ... or do we need to?
Keep the relationship
The key to knowledge retention IMO is finding ways to retain and build on the relationship rather than capturing the content. Connection is the pathway down which tacit knowledge flows. Enourage contact, mentoring, continued interest and involvement, form a club, open a virtual forum, offer recognition and find ways for those leaving the organization to maintain their identity.
Sometimes this can be a simple as a free lunch in the corporate cafeteria once a month, combining old and new folk in a kBok project, capturing lessons learned or having 'shaddows' attached to existing work.
Its not enough
While I agree that a knowledge interview is a good idea, why repeat all the basic errors of 90's KM by focusing on written knowledge? Its difficult enough to get people who are staying in a company (and who may get some use from what they do) to codify their knowledge, but if they are leaving what is the motivation?
I think the other big mistake in this posting is the PRIOR identification of key knowledge areas - its the categorisation approach which is all to common to management consultants. The danger with categorisation is that it makes assumptions about future needs based on a partial understanding of the past.
True KM capture from retiring or resigning emplloyees is more about allowing them to determine what is relevant, and not using pre0defined structures and formal wrtten records. I
An all time process
Exit interview or debriefing appear last minute efforts. The best policy and practice is to do these and similar organizational learning from time to time on a regular and continuous basis. In fact, interviewing and debrief at times when employees are at their time of good mode, good performance and joy in their job would result in information and feedback for good organizational learning. We should also endevoure to utilize equally good systems and approaches in oganizational learning.
Abayneh
Ethiopia