This article was originally posted on LinkedIn, here.
Someone once shared a story with me about a VP who was hit by a truck and died. The company spent more than 3 years trying to recreate the knowledge that was lost in that tragic accident. It was the whole reason they started their KM program.
I have thought about knowledge loss from layoffs, retirements, voluntary resignations on and off for years. There is so much knowledge lost and many organisations don’t seem to care.
When I first started in KM the big issue was how organisations needed to prepare for Baby Boomers leaving the workforce and what needed to be done to try to save their knowledge for those who were left behind still working.
Later, in the early years of the pandemic, there were waves of layoffs, without any thought given to saving the knowledge. Employees were notified in the middle of the night and locked out of the organisation’s systems.
Now there are the layoffs attributed to AI, and companies discovering a few months later that AI doesn’t live up to the promises and they have to re-hire people to fill the roles they just laid people off from and the new hires need to ramp up quickly from knowledge and information that was never saved.
Knowledge is lost again and again and again. No one seems to care. (Some organisations seem to figure it’s in the repositories somewhere, AI will find it–not if it wasn’t actually put in the repositories in the first place, not if there was no governance, not if it was tacit and not able to be captured.)
Many of the situations I just outlined are done at the organisation’s discretion, but what happens when someone leaves an organisation of their own free will, and the organisation replaces them? We normally think about recruitment fees and lost productivity–the onboarding and ramp-up costs. We rarely count what walks out the door with them: the context behind decisions they were part of, the relationships that made projects work, the knowledge nobody wrote down.
In Canada, the average cost of turnover is now over $30,000 per departure. Much of that is hidden, and much of it is knowledge loss.
I have been thinking about the role Radical KM could have in a situation like that–organisations that want to keep their people and what those people know. What would help people be more engaged so that they didn’t want to leave? What would help capture their knowledge and encourage them to share it while they were still part of the organisation? What would help new hires develop a sense of belonging?
Radical KM uses arts-based activities to build meaning, agency and community, the conditions that make people stay and share. It captures knowledge before people leave, rather than after.
It isn’t a fix for pay or workload (which are some of the reasons why people leave) and I would never claim that it is. But if you’re an HR or L&D leader who’s felt the cost of people leaving, I’d like to hear how you’re seeing it.
What’s the most expensive departure you’ve seen, in knowledge rather than money?