Synaptus

I have had an interesting experience the last few days. I have been going through all my old business cards to try to reconnect to people whom I have met with over the last decade. My goal is to expand my network of people I have met with in the past and introduce them to the blog. The interesting thing is how many of the people no longer work at the business they worked at in the past. My sample is about 300 business cards that I held onto and is not a very controlled study. These are only people that I spoke with and sent an email to after meeting them.

A brief survey says that only business owners are still at the companies they were at 10 years ago.  Over 70% of people are not with companies they were with five years ago. About 50% are not with the companies they were with over 2 years ago. I don’t know how this matches up to national averages.  But I bet it is representative of the huge amount of employee turnover faced by most companies. In many businesses the knowledge lives within the people. Sales people and customer service people have relationships with customers. Working consultants have practical knowledge about how products "actually" work at the customer. Internal management and employees have the knowledge of how things got the way they are. All of this is critical to the success of the business and the costs of turnover are much higher than just the cost of hiring and training a new person.

What are the steps to managing this cost? Maybe we should reduce the ability of people to hold value away from the business. But this reduces their sense of contribution, reducing performance and driving up turnover. Maybe we should capture knowledge in large databases. But even knowledge management practitioners realize that capturing the knowledge is very difficult and that getting people to go out and find the knowledge to reuse is impractical. Another way is to encourage people to talk about their knowledge with their co-workers. Build out the knowledge in the business. Increase the sense of contribution of knowledge workers and increase productivity by sharing learned experiences throughout the business. What are some ways to manage the relationship between employee retention and knowledge? What have you seen that works to address this problem?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Talent Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.