Knowledge attrition is increasing at an extremely rapid rate as companies lose portions of their workforce, either quickly or over time. Establishing a strategy to nip this in the bud would save them millions, if not billions of dollars every year.
The greatest deterrence to knowledge attrition is a robust KM initiative. This enables existing information to circulate efficiently and thereby reducing the impact of attrition on the knowledge of the company. However, let's face it even the most robust Knowledge retention strategies can't hope to replace a lost knowledge asset.
This awareness in companies of how knowledge attrition affects then has prompted a large number of companies to institutionalize certain processes to capture as much knowledge from their employees as possible. Listed below are a few of these methods ( you might want to check if your company uses any of these strategies of retention )
- CoP’s and internal networks
- Interviews
- Videotaping
- SME directories
- Repositories
- After action / project milestone reviews
- Mentoring Programs
- Knowledge Maps
- Recruiting Strategies
- Retention Strategies
While a lot of these seem very useful a large percentage of companies find it difficult to measure the effectiveness they have. Knowledge transfer quality seems to be the single biggest reason why corporates shy away from establishing robust knowledge retention strategies.
Validating the quality of knowledge transfer can be very difficult so there are other ways around the problem. Identifying critical information areas and concentrating on these ensure that a higher quality of knowledge is recorded and retained instead of a “Jack of all trades - Master of none” approach.
There are a ton of research articles out there on this topic, so browse around, now that you know what to look for.