Saying goodbye to a longtime employee can be a sad, emotional experience. Saying goodbye to 15% of your employees is even more painful. But that’s how many employees the average U.S. business lost last year. And what’s worse, they took an incredible amount of knowledge and experience right out the door with them.
Yet until technology lets you just download an employee’s brain, you’re going to need a way to retain and manage your employee’s knowledge without also adding a lot of extra work that just kills their productivity. And that’s where Enterprise Social Networking can help.
Whenever an employee leaves, you have to deal with three potentially costly knowledge management issues:
1.) Risk
Though I hate to start off negatively, there are distinct dangers to your company when an employee leaves or is fired. We all know that IT and Legal don’t condone unauthorized downloads, yet it happens all the time — employees frequently download and use insecure consumer apps to store and manipulate privileged company information. Then, when the time comes for employee off-boarding, how can you recover information stored on outside apps or services? The sad truth is… you can’t.
Obviously, the best way to prevent employees from installing unapproved apps is to give them all the tools they need to do their job. And an Enterprise Social Network does just that, giving your people an app-agnostic platform that integrates with all their favorite apps, eliminating the need for them to go rogue. By being able to do their work entirely inside the ESN, employees never expose business-critical information to risk. Without a private social network, your HR department needs to make sure all your employees leave on good terms.
2.) Continuity
In an ideal world, your employee’s replacement would step right in and seamlessly continue the work their predecessor was doing. Too bad this isn’t that world. In our world, the acclimation process can be weeks, even months before the new employee is effectively filling the hole that was left behind. This continuity monkey-wrench can cost your company serious money in derailed projects, stalled releases, and/or lost sales. That’s why a smooth hand-off is so important. Using a private social network, a former employee’s projects and participants can be easily transferred to the new employee, giving them access to the relationships, content and conversations, as well as the ability to find any other information they need to get started doing “real work.”
3.) Lost Knowledge
But potentially, the greatest loss to the company when an employee leaves is the knowledge they gained while in your employ, and that’s still locked up inside their brain. As a company, you are paying employees to do their job, and in the process they gain invaluable experience and expertise — experience and expertise you don’t want disappearing whenever an employee leaves.
Inside of a private social network, every employee’s experience and learning is effortlessly retained through the simple act of just doing their job. All communications and content are captured, stored and backed up so the knowledge is always easily accessible to all.
Sure, you could ask employees to file, manage and backup every iota of information they generate over the course of doing their job every day, but good luck with that. Asking employees to waste a big chunk of their time doing knowledge management is a serious productivity killer. A private social network lets employees do their job while the platform itself captures and categorizes everything. Then, whenever people leave, the remaining employees still have full access to everything they ever produced, all ORGANIZED for easy access at any time.
If you would like to share your stories of off-boarding and how enterprise social networking helped the process, feel free to do so in the comment section below! Or, if you’d like to experience knowledge-management without all the management, click here to get a free trial of tibbr!
