Continuous Knowledge Transfer
Imagine your team’s rockstar - every team has one, or a couple if you’re lucky. Then imagine that team member has to depart the organization suddenly, whether it’s for a once in a lifetime opportunity, to attend to a sudden personal or family health situation, or any of those things that life can throw your way at any time. Would your operations be disrupted? Could the projects they were working on stay on track?
Especially when work is highly individualized, such as in some R&D contexts, the loss of a specific member of the team can be a big derailment. Many organizations recognize this and name Knowledge Transfer and/or Knowledge Management as an activity worth putting energy into. Often this manifests in activities like:
Formal training development and delivery
Mentorship programs
Cross-training team members in each others’ areas
Everyone back to the office! 🙄
While several of those things are good, the first three can be resource-intensive, and the fourth takes away from the Autonomy pillar of employee motivation. What I would suggest instead is shifting toward systems and standard processes that naturally centralize information accessed by the whole team so that everyone builds familiarity with the broader set of work in the group. This can be achieved by building things like:
Project and program level dashboards that keep the real-time status and roadmap visible
Well-organized central information repositories with reasonably standardized hierarchy
Regular and time-efficient opportunities for team members to highlight what’s new and what’s next
When the body of work is something the team builds together in shared space rather than worked on behind-the-scenes, only to emerge when it reaches a major milestone or completion, the risk of disruption from personnel changes decreases significantly. Everyone naturally knows what has been going on in that project, and with some rebalancing, the project can be kept afloat. And better yet, this de-risking is achieved through natural day-to-day ways of working, saving the time it takes to devote separate resources to perform Knowledge Management as a standalone activity.
Invest in the shift toward ways of working that reduce risk while also saving time!
