Chris A Watkins

Employment Costs – Parting is such sweet sorrow…

Losing expertise is costly and uneccesary.  A slight change to each employee's job function may serve to plug the leak

Every employer has experienced it.

You spend time on the selection and recruitment, you take care over the training and grooming, you commit resources and fine tune the individuals to turn them into superb representatives of the company. Answering the telephones just so, supporting their teams and the customers in just the same way you would if you did everything yourself.

Then they leave.

It’s not that they’re ungrateful, just that someone else is offering more money, better prospects, they want to move away, or start a family. The net result is always the same – You Lose.

Okay, the wise employer always builds the cost of recruitment and training into the strategy and usually that helps. Yet too often the parting of the ways happens at the times you least need it. Times when you are already pressed because your competitors have the edge on you, or, when other staff are sick, or when budgets are tight.

Even if there were no pressures, unlikely in today’s business climate, you still have to shoulder the burden of lost time and extra load. With nearly one million unemployed in the UK (Incomes Data Services July 2006) it would seem probable that the right person may be just around the corner. But, you still have to train them in your methods and procedures. You could always bring in a temp or contractor to cover the gap. Buy off-the-shelf expertise for as long as you need it, but that would mean even more expense.

The trade off between loss of service output and short term cost increase is difficult to judge.

A possible alternative is to ensure that business knowledge is retained when employees leave. This involves a slight, but fundamental, change in the job function of each employee in order to ensure that knowledge, discovered by individuals in the course of their duties, is retained by our organisation.

The basic steps are as follows –

1. Discovery. Procedures used to fulfil the demands of any job are constantly changed by external influences. New contacts, new methods, new requirements are all discovered by the employee in the performance of day to day tasks.
2. Documentation. The new discoveries are rarely documented in any organisation. Sometimes knowledge is passed around by word of mouth, but only select people gain access. This leads to the common scenario where an employee wanders around the office asking - “What do you do when…”. A common answer is often  - “Oh, Fred dealt with something like that last week, try him.”To overcome this, the discovery needs to be documented and stored in a common place for other to use.At this point the documentation requires some level of formalisation, so that the documents are all similarly structured and users can be trained quickly in how to use them.
3. Categorisation. In steps one and two a knowledgebase is being created, but as the knowledgebase gets larger, finding a particular item becomes impossible. Each individual adding to the information store will use different naming and storage conventions. Categorisation can be achieved by indexing.

If the knowledge is stored electronically, it may be useful to add a search engine function. The knowledgebase can be stored on personal computers, networks, the Internet and even distributed by data-stick or CD.

Over the course of a few months the knowledgebase will grow to cover all common processes and many specialist processes. Access to documents detailing technical, legal, financial processes must of course be restricted, but for most functions even a relatively inexperienced employee can discover process steps and action them with minimum support.

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