Passing on know-how: knowledge retention strategies can keep employees' workplace-acquired wisdom from walking out the door when they retire

HR Magazine,  June, 2008  by Jean Thilmany

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When retirees walk out the door, they take with them everything they've learned on their jobs. Their replacements must slowly regain the on-the-job knowledge the exemployees spent years accumulating.

In certain industries where special technical information is the norm, a retiree may be the only person who knows how to operate certain heavy machinery or expertly mix a chemical solution.

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To prevent valuable information accumulated on the job from getting lost in the transition, HR professionals at many companies are finding ways to retain employees' know-how and best practices so that the information can be passed on to future workers. Tapping into--or capturing--and documenting employee knowledge takes a number of forms. Some companies interview employees and keep written records of their answers. Others make employees the stars of their own "how-to" videotapes. Still others encourage workers seen as experts in specific areas to mentor other staffers or to remain on call after their departure dates.

In addition to capturing instructions for performing everyday tasks, these methods apply to the transfer of so-called soft knowledge, such as tips and tricks that no written manual is likely to include and that the departing employee often doesn't think to pass on.

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How To Begin

Why are companies focusing on knowledge capture now? Many experts point to the baby boomers now reaching retirement age, saying information will be walking off the job with them.

"We have a confluence of factors hitting organizations at the same time," says David DeLong, author of Lost knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2004). "A major demographic bubble is bursting--that is, the retirement of baby boomers--and we're now retiring the first generation of professionals and managers who have deep knowledge of certain management practices, scientific fields, and complex and technical systems."

DeLong says baby boomer retirement is only one cause of employee knowledge loss, albeit a significant one. Another cause: In some areas, science and technology changes occur so quickly that even young employees leaving a company may take with them information that can't be easily replicated, including critical knowledge of external systems, social networks or new-product development, DeLong adds.

How a company implements a knowledge capture program depends on its structure, size and specialty as well as its business practices, says Darlene Lamp, a technical superintendent at LyondellBasell, a worldwide polymer manufacturer based in Clinton, Iowa.

Foreseeing a spate of retirements, LyondellBasell kicked off a knowledge retention program early last year. The first step was asking key employees to take notes on what they'd learned during their tenures, items "that they knew weren't already documented," Lamp says.

Though the practice was somewhat effective, Lamp's team soon sought a more formal method to capture and disseminate vital job knowledge. Last fall, the company contracted with Knowledge Harvesting, a Birmingham, Ala.-based consulting firm whose employees capture and formally record the sometimes-amorphous information departing employees have learned on the job. LyondellBasell chose two soon-to-retire experts with vital job skills to work with Knowledge Harvesting.

One of the employees was a chemical specialist who had become an expert on a chemical catalyst process. During the course of one week, Pam Holloway, co-partner of Knowledge Harvesting, conducted structured interviews, of two to three hours each, with the employee.

"The majority of the important knowledge in an organization is in somebody's head. You really don't know what you have until you've lost it," Holloway says. "Our focus is on the difficult stuff that people do. That's not the same as documenting procedures that could be collected and made easily explicit."

As she did with the retiring chemical specialist at LyondellBasell, Holloway carefully structures interviews with departing workers to elicit employees' soft knowledge.

"I'm a psychologist by education and use many of those skills during those types of interviews," Holloway says.

She videotapes portions of the sessions that she finds need visual aids. When she interviewed the chemical specialist, for example, he told her that when the chemical reached a particular fluidity and color, it was ready--a tidbit of information hard. to pick up on the job. She videotaped the solution at the moment it achieved the desired color so future employees would have a visual reference.

The second LyondellBasell subject-matter specialist selected for the Knowledge Harvesting process rebuilt special mechanical equipment. Although the employee previously had been involved in training other workers during one-on-one sessions, trainees left those sessions with few documents to refer to, Lamp says.

"There were only so many instructions he could give trainees and still do his job," she explains.