Survey finds too many people are leaving without sharing their expertise
“If you let them slip out the door, that knowledge is gone with them."
So says Terry Stewart, franchise owner at Express Employment Professionals in Surrey, B.C., in talking about the lack of knowledge transfer when people leave their employment.
When it comes to boomer employers, only about half (54 per cent) say they had shared knowledge with the organization.
Eighty-three per cent of working Canadians say that’s a big loss, and 65 per cent say it is important for these workers to share what they’ve learned over the years with younger colleagues, finds an Express Employment survey of 2,065 people.
‘Not surprising’
The results are not surprising, says Stewart.
“COVID really played a part of it because of the remote working and some of the more mature workers — it was something they weren’t used to and so the work in the office, teamwork, talking around the cooler slipped away and a lot of mentoring opportunities either were passed over or left to slip away,”
This “missed opportunity” might prove detrimental to a young worker’s engagement with the organization, he says.
That’s because it’s important for people to learn the history of an employer, what transpired in the past.
“Just by communicating mentorship programs, or even just assigning a worker who’s been there 10, 12 years to a person who’s got a lot of experience that they can help add value to no matter what they do, but also to encourage that, ‘Hey, there’s some value staying here,’ and it could be part of a retention program,” says Stewart.
When asked, the younger cohort said baby boomer knowledge is valuable (61 per cent) and they also provide good learning opportunities (48 per cent) and role models, according to 36 per cent of workers.
Offboarding checklist
But what can HR do to help this transfer of knowledge be successful?
It starts with a good “offboarding checklist,” says Rebecca Kalison, HR consultancy services manager at Peninsula Canada in Toronto.
“The strategy is just to ensure that employees who are leaving, and... employees who are retiring and leaving the company, to prevent brain drain from occurring and just start off with succession planning; succession planning is simply just a business strategy on passing on leadership roles.”
By adding in a knowledge-transfer component, this could help ensure wisdom is shared for all, she says.
HR could also conduct a detailed job-evaluation process with the retiring workers in order to amass data that could be passed on to more junior colleagues, says Kalison.
“Have a complete, objective perspective on this individual’s role by getting a third-party person to come in and actually sit with the employee for a week and go over what tasks they’re working, kind of like a fly on the wall to see what is happening on their day-to-day and writing that out. And then [it’s about] sharing those docs with the employee and saying, ‘This is what you’ve been doing. Is there anything that you’d like to add or anything that you’d like to change?’ she says. “That’s one great way to also prevent the loss of great knowledge that an individual has.”
Another way to foster this sense of sharing between cohorts is to offer “cross-training” opportunities between older and younger colleagues, says Kalison, especially for those employees who have operated somewhat separately.
“Working on collaborative projects with some employees who are individual contributors, where they’re not working in a team, that’s where we see a lot of knowledge transfer not happening because there’s nobody else in the team who really understands their process; they may have found a little bit of a hack to take away a couple steps and make things a little bit more efficient.”
These efforts do not have to be formal, according to Stewart.
“You should hook up a new person with a mature worker... maybe they only meet once or twice a week, maybe over lunch, maybe over coffee, and just talk because so much stuff that happens in the peripheral edges. Even giving them opportunities at social functions to share their knowledge informally, or even formally, taking away the biggest key takeaways that they had with working and sharing with others.”
By asking people to share their knowledge before they exit, “it’s empowering for the individual who’s leaving because you’re giving them the opportunity to share the knowledge and years of experience they’re bringing to the organization,” says Kalison.
Make this a big part of the workplace culture, she says, so that it become engrained.
“Knowledge transfer is very beneficial to the organization’s culture; it should be a part of what the organization should do on a regular basis. It does come down to that workplace culture.”
