A familiar problem with organizations is the preservation of the knowledge of employees who leave the company, when they have critical knowledge for the organization and after leaving, there is no one who can fill the position in their place. In other words, all the knowledge accumulated over the years in the organization will disappear. The reasons for leaving an employee can be many - whether it is retirement or if it is beyond the company.
The cost of training a new employee who will teach all of the expert's work is very high.
The fact that the expert's knowledge remains with him only makes his departure more difficult because a new employee will need to be re-examined and at the beginning of the road there will be slowdowns and malfunctions.
The article focuses on two cases of expert departure . The first , leaving an expert worker in the core product of a small organization that deals with the chemical field. The expert has unique knowledge of the organization regarding the chemical conductors of the product. The expert is a single source of knowledge for this specific knowledge, and moreover, the above organization is a single organization in its field - there are no other employees in the market engaged in the same job
The second case mentioned in the article is the departure of an expert to standardize intellectual capital management processes in a large organization. The expert - the expert remained in good contact with the organization, and in the course of the last two years of his work, he cooperated with the various organizational teams to define the standardization processes.
In the article there are also solutions.
For the small organization, the author proposes to plan in advance, up to a year before the date of departure, the knowledge transfer strategy, as well as to find a suitable candidate for replacement of the employee by means of overlapping.
The overlap will be full and intensive - the expert and his partner must share knowledge of important projects and customer affairs.
For the large organization, the solution is to split the knowledge into a number of replacements. Briefings were made for each of the surrogates, each of whom was assigned. In addition, the employee's built-in knowledge prior to his departure enabled the number of meetings to be trained for the designated replacements to be streamlined. The organization also encouraged increased knowledge sharing among teams with which the expert was a member, so that more knowledge would be shared and found among more members of the group. Finally, a knowledge map was created in connection with the standardization process, which connects the intellectual capital to the employee holding it.