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Across the globe, organizations are hemorrhaging knowledge through attrition. It's an issue affected by retirements, shrinking knowledge pools and often, promotions and relocations. For the knowledge manager, knowledge retention is becoming an increasing headache. Here, Tom Young describes a step-by-step strategy to combat the problem, using multiple examples from oil firm BP and other major organizations.
A step-by-step process to combat organizational knowledge loss
Picture the scene: It's a courtroom and in the dock is a person trying very hard to look like a captain of industry, someone you could trust. The judge turns to this person and says, "You're charged that you did wilfully put at risk the future commercial success of your organization and knowingly allowed valuable assets to be misplaced and carelessly lost to the organization through your negligence. Do you plead guilty or not guilty to the charge?"
Unless your organization does something about knowledge retention, you too could be guilty of letting valuable company knowledge assets disappear. In this article, I'll explain the step-by-step process we use to ensure effective knowledge retention in an organization, including a model for identifying high-risk knowledge and techniques for getting the most from exit interviews and capture sessions.
Global knowledge retention issues
The need for knowledge retention is a global issue. In traditional manufacturing and engineering, it's driven by an aging workforce and a lack of new engineering graduates. It's such a problem that some industries have given it a name; "The Great Crew Change" is the euphemism used in the oil industry to describe this phenomena (based on routine changing of drilling crews on drilling rigs). For companies such as Shell and BP, up to eight percent of organizational knowledge is lost each year, as experienced staff retire.
But companies are also faced with people leaving to join other companies and with the average worker changing jobs 10 times between the ages of 18 and 37, the churn rate amongst staff is also of concern. How can such the issue be tackled?
One answer is to believe that you can purchase knowledge to replace that which you're losing. However, this is an ill-conceived strategy. In many industries, the talent pool is shrinking and the salaries being demanded by those left...
