Tribal knowledge: what to protect first, and how
Every company has people who simply know what to do, even though it isn't written in any procedure. As long as they're around, processes run smoothly. How much actually depends on them comes to light with every vacation, every audit, every move to another role — and it hits hardest when someone hands in their notice. Many companies react on reflex: employees get told to write down what they know. And that's exactly where the next problem starts. Writing knowledge down doesn't protect it by itself. A few weeks later there's a binder of procedures, and with it a sense of control. That sense rarely has any backing in reality, and the company only finds out when a crisis hits. So how do you protect employee knowledge, so your company's continuity doesn't hang on one person? How do you identify the knowledge that stops processes when it's missing? And how do you decide what to write down, what to automate, and what to grow in a second person? That's what we look at in this episode. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:03 Key person risk: why processes depend on single people 04:51 Is writing down procedures enough 09:47 Two kinds of knowledge and how to keep each 13:32 An employee working their notice: what you can save in four weeks 18:50 Knowledge retention is a process, not a one-off project 20:11 From debt to asset 21:22 Outro Mentioned in this episode: 🔷 Our conversation with Robert Grelowski of JPB System, whose shift handover notebooks we cite in the episode — https://inwedo.com/blog/factory-of-the-future-digitizing-a-production-plant/ 🔷 Polaris, our internal quality standard for projects, described in a free ebook — https://inwedo.com/ebook-polaris-it-quality-standard/ 🔷 Book a call about extracting knowledge before someone leaves — https://inwedo.com/contact/
