Does your company have experts? You know the ones, employees so valuable they can name their salaries, capture a large balance of internal resources and intimidate managers into any decision.
Do they put you in fear that they will leave the company altogether?
Preventing valuable company knowledge from walking out the door is paramount to building a knowledge-sharing organization. But keeping proprietary information from key people in your own organization can create its own problem — too few experts.
An expert develops when an employee becomes very knowledgeable about one particular issue, gaining information each time the topic is discussed and finally becoming the only person in the company who completely understands every facet of the issue. No decision is made on the subject until the “expert” is available for consultation. Eventually, that person becomes the only one capable of making a decision based on all of the facts.
With too few experts, employees struggle to understand their objectives, unsure of how they add value to the overall process. They may seek guidance from the few experts available, but find there isn’t enough time to fully understand valuable company information. Typically, the missing information is centered on key customer service processes.
Poor customer service results as employees promote unreliable deliverables from one business unit to the next. In this situation, the ultimate loser is the customer.
Getting stuck in this quagmire is avoidable, but it requires developing an information well. Here are several steps to help you get started:
- Establish a training manual for each job role.
- Encourage new hires to contribute to and revise the training manual. When a new hire is taught a task, that person is responsible for updating the manual. Depend on new hires to add tasks not currently found in the training manual.
- Base a portion of each employee’s performance review on the quality of his or her contributions to the department’s or job-role training manual.
- Update the job role description based upon the tasks conducted and detailed in the manual. When a manager requests a new hire for his or her department, human resources can quickly update the job description by reviewing the training manual, which promotes a continuous improvement process.
- Encourage employees to publish or deposit documents in a central location easily accessed by everyone in the department for re-use in new projects.
- Place an expert in a team environment. Encourage that person to train others on certain aspects of his or her knowledge. Eliminate dependency on the expert by forcing others to gather information and make a decision, even if it may not be the best decision.
It is easier to begin this process by creating an action plan and expecting results over time. Creating a training manual for every job role in a short period of time is unrealistic.
When training manuals are a part of the everyday job duty, the process is quite manageable. And, you essentially eliminate the creation of experts.
Darla Root ([email protected]) is the president of BeanDance, an E-Learning solution provider based in Cleveland. The company has more than 200 e-online courses and customizes skill development solutions. Reach her at (440) 257-8687 or online at www.beandance.com.