Where Did Everybody Go?

For those of you not familiar with what I do, I create customized educational and training solutions for my clients. So, with all of the technological shifts going on, what do you think is the most pressing need my clients have? Some sexy augmented reality or VR environment where users interact with a virtual universe in order to learn? Micolearning for an increasingly attention-deficit audience? A comprehensive set of e-learning courses? I would like to digress for a moment before I answer that question.

A good friend of mine, David Shlagbaum, is a lawyer that specializes in succession planning for family-run businesses. One of the many exercises he has the family run through is to excuse the older generation from the boardroom, close the door, and turn to the next generation and announce: “Mom and Dad just died. How do we keep everything business as usual?” More often than not, their reaction is a blank stare followed by a lack of certainty or direction how to proceed.

Getting back to my opening question, the most common and increasing need we are seeing is a solution for the bus/lottery parable, in which you imagine that a particular employee just got hit by a bus or won the lottery. In either case, they’re not coming back to the office. Ever. Are you prepared for that?

If he or she is a developer, is the code stored somewhere accessible and is fully documented so that someone else can read it, follow the logic, and resume where the developer left off? If the person is a manager, are there clear mandates, policies and procedures that someone else can inherit and use, as well as clear and current projects and where they stand? If it is an employee, are there lists of competencies and tasks performed so that someone else can step in their stead without halting production?

Yes, each of these will disrupt your output, but there is a major difference between disrupting and halting. I have been at companies where a huge portion of their employees left to join the competition within the span of a few months, almost crippling the company which then had to scramble and create ad hoc and largely ineffective training. I also know of a different company that had to reverse engineer their product because their chief developer went on vacation and never came back and the company could not access the source code.

Buses and lotteries can’t be anticipated (which is why the parable can be so scary), but retirement can be. What plan do you have in place for those who are retiring in the next five years so that the knowledge does not leave with them?

Unlike a lot of my prior articles, this one asks a lot of questions but does not provide so many answers. If these questions don’t scare you then either you have a plan in place or you are in denial how vulnerable your company is. If these questions do give you pause, then you have taken the first step to addressing the problem. There are some simple things you can do such as implementing role-based templates and creating a culture of documenting processes, but that is just a start. There is no set solution as every case is unique. You know your company and industry and what is at risk. If it’s not clear to you how to mitigate that risk, then reach out and let’s see how I can help.