“I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.” Maybe not. But you should be afraid of your most experienced employee ghosting you.
True, it’s unlikely your best team member will suddenly disappear without giving a reason. But sooner or later, we all leave. We retire, accept new jobs, transfer departments, move into new roles, or just…die. (How’s that for macabre?)
Having someone who knows the business inside and out is a HUGE competitive advantage. Experienced team members accumulate years of problem-solving skills and company-specific knowledge that can’t be learned from a handbook.
The scary part isn’t that your top performer knows everything; it’s that ONLY your top performer knows everything. All that expertise lives inside one person’s head – a head that can walk out the door at any moment.
A good microlearning app and a strategy for capturing employee-generated content can help turn “Oh, crap!” into “There’s an answer for that!”
“I’ve Worked In The Private Sector – They Expect Results.”
Business depends on results, and results depend on documentation. You likely have SOPs, onboarding materials, training courses and enough PDFs to last a lifetime. But that doesn’t mean you’ve documented how work actually gets done.
Your most experienced employees know things that aren’t in the manual. They know the noise a machine makes right before something goes wrong. They know how best to answer customer questions. They know what to double-check because they’ve seen what happens when someone doesn’t.
This is the knowledge people pick up through experience. It’s acquired through doing the job, making mistakes, and fixing problems and learning what works.
But if that expertise only exists inside one person’s head, you risk losing incredibly company-specific, nuanced skill when he leaves.
“Try To Imagine All Life As You Know It, Stopping Instantaneously…”
The problem with the “Ask So-And-So” system is it stops the flow of work and productivity grinds to a halt. For instance, let’s say Ray, your senior manager, gets five questions a day from coworkers, and each interruption takes about 10 minutes. That’s 50 minutes of Ray’s day spent answering questions.
Over a five-day week, that’s more than four hours. Over 50 working weeks, it’s more than 200 hours. Assuming Ray makes the average hourly wage in the U.S., that 200 hours translates to over $7,500. Ouch.
And that’s just RAY’S time.
The employee asking the question also has to stop working, find Ray and wait until he’s available. If Ray’s in a meeting, at another location, on vacation or helping somebody else, the delay gets longer. A small knowledge problem suddenly becomes a BIG productivity problem.
Microlearning apps give teams somewhere else to turn. Instead of asking Ray the same question for the bazillionth time, he can answer it once in a short video. Then the next employee can find that answer without interrupting anyone.
Coworkers get answers faster, and Ray can get back to studying parapsychology or not thinking about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Everybody wins.
“This Job is Definitely Not Worth $11.5 A Year.”
Knowledge bottlenecks are easy to ignore while the expert is still around. The system technically works because team members can always ask the person who knows. Then that go-to employee isn’t there anymore. Suddenly, leaders realize they aren’t replacing one person. They’re trying to replace years, sometimes decades, of accumulated experience.
You can hire someone with similar qualifications. You can teach them your processes. You can hand them the SOPs. What you can’t instantly replace is the company-specific judgment their predecessor developed over thousands of hours on the job.
Capturing institutional knowledge shouldn’t start during someone’s last two weeks: It should be part of everyday work. A microlearning app makes that much easier because team members don’t have to sit down and document everything they know in one giant knowledge dump.
Instead of hoping top performers will remember to put it in a manual someday, they pull out their phones and record a quick explanation using the Four-Step Formula:
Question → Answer → The Why → Result
Done.
They can capture useful pieces of expertise and upload them into a searchable knowledge library. Microlearning apps give organizations a way to take those everyday teaching moments and make them available to everyone. One employee’s solution can help coworkers across different shifts, departments or locations.
The expert doesn’t have to be in the room for their expertise to be useful.
“Back Off, Man, I’m a Scientist.”
You have some pretty smart professionals on your payroll. The frightening thing about institutional knowledge isn’t simply that your best people eventually leave. It’s discovering how much depended on them only after they’re gone.
You don’t want the first sign of a knowledge gap to be a new guy saying, “Does anyone know how Ray used to do this?”
Start looking for your go-to people now. Who gets the most questions? Who understands the history behind your processes? Who makes difficult work look easy?
Then start capturing what they know. Let team members record short demonstrations, tips, solutions and best practices as part of their normal work. Put those lessons somewhere searchable. Encourage other employees to contribute what they’ve learned.
Over time, your microlearning app becomes more than a place teams go to complete training. It becomes a living library of the experience your organization has spent years building.
Your people will still leave. Ray will eventually retire. And someday, something will get slimed. But this time, when someone asks, “Who you gonna call?” You can say, “Nobody. There’s a video for that.”
So if you’re tired of getting left all alone, pick up the phone and call Tyfoom! Or schedule a meeting to speak with a Tyfoom training consultant today. Stay “Puft” my friends! 😉