A business is only as good as the people who work there, and they’re only as good as the knowledge they have. So the key to success is making sure you always have good people with good knowledge. Sounds simple, sure, but it’s a combination that only gets harder and harder to maintain over time. Here’s why:
How smart companies inevitably become less smart.
In a very funny (and fictional) Halloween episode of “The Simpson’s®,” Homer purchases a hammock from a passing hammock vendor(?) who warns him that the hammock is evil — that is, it produces clones of whoever lies in it.
Immediately, Homer realizes the great, labor-saving opportunity this is and makes a few clones to do all of his work for him. Unfortunately for Homer, his clones soon make the same realization and clone themselves, too. In no time, there are countless Homer clones running around (and hilarity ensues).
Yet with each successive generation, the Homer clones become less exact and less intelligent — i.e., they suffer from the classic clone-of-a-clone effect. Predictably, the cloned clones start screwing up and making lots of costly mistakes (D’oh!).
Business owners with a growing workforce face a “similar” situation (insert a VERY long list of differences, exceptions and caveats here). How?
Stay with me…this analogy kinda almost works.
Continuing with this admittedly forced analogy, let’s say your current employees are the original Homer, and any new employees you hire in the future are the cloned Homers.
When your original Homers — i.e., your most knowledgeable and experienced employees — are unavailable or leave the company, they withhold critical information from the rest of the company creating a knowledge deficiency.
Without the original Homers’ knowledge and experience, the cloned Homers will have to re-learn the solutions original Homers already knew and re-solve the problems original Homers had already solved. It can be a very lengthy process that needlessly burns both employee time and company money.
Worse, this kind of knowledge erosion is a continual, evergreen problem. Constant employee attrition dilutes your brain-trust over and over — unless you have a way to retain it.
How to backup your company’s best brains.
With tibbr, a leading Enterprise Social Networking platform, you can preserve all that information, content and context for future Homers…I mean, employees.
Unlike other knowledge management systems that require extra employee effort, tibbr’s social platform automatically retains expertise and experience as soon as it’s generated, in the course of doing the work.
tibbr lets employees focus on doing their job while the platform itself captures and categorizes everything. The content and context are then searchable for use by your entire workforce at any time in the future.
With tibbr, valuable company knowledge and experience doesn’t have to go out the door every time an employee does. If you’d like to see how Enterprise Social Networking can prevent knowledge erosion within your company, click here for a free trial!
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