Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Introduction

Scenario 1. Over the previous 12-month period, 70 percent of the employees in the sales department of your Fortune 100 company have left. More alarmingly, you discover that they have taken their knowledge with them, leaving a knowledge vacuum of stunning proportions that their successors are struggling to fill—while productivity drops and revenue plummets.

Scenario 2. An internal survey reveals that 25 percent of your employees intend to look for a new job within the year. But you have no way to harvest their knowledge—knowledge that is about to walk out the door when they do. And you don't even know who will be leaving.

Scenario 3. Your organization is about to implement a downsizing program that will result in the termination of hundreds of experienced individuals with critical operational knowledge. When their terminations are announced, they will leave quickly and unhappily, and their knowledge will leave with them. What will the organization do without that knowledge? What will you do?

These scenarios are not imaginary. They have already happened. Scenario 1 is based on a 70 percent annual turnover in the sales departments of some Fortune 100 corporations in the information technology industry for the year 2000 (Web-programmers rule, 2001, p. 154). Scenario 2 is based on the results of a survey by Development Dimensions, International, the Pittsburgh-based human resource consulting firm, reporting that 25 percent of the workers surveyed intended to look for a new ...