By now everyone knows there's a war for talent going on, and many companies are struggling to come up with front-end recruiting strategies in the midst of the current economic turmoil. But there is a related back-end problem many companies have not come to grips with: As baby boomers continue to retire, how will organizations retain their knowledge and pass it on to the new guard?
"What happens to all that great tacit knowledge that's in the heads of those workers? And when it walks out the door, are we going to be losing all that great knowledge?" said Kevin Oakes, CEO of the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp). "It's a big issue right now with a lot of companies, particularly in some old-line industries where they've had a workforce that's been around for 25, 30, 35 years. In the companies that I'm talking with, it's something that they're not exactly sure how to tackle right now."
To help organizations figure out how best to address this issue, i4cp created a new program called the Knowledge Retention Accelerator, which seeks to establish best practices in this area. Oakes said he hopes the program will open members' eyes to different ways they can tackle this problem.
There are several key ways companies might address it.
"The right solution might be a phased retirement program [where] an employee gradually reduces their hours and workload so you can more effectively manage that knowledge transfer," he said.
"Another way is to allow alumni networks for ex-employees to interact regularly with current employees [or to set up] mentoring and coaching programs and an apprentice model, where a retiring worker can take their potential successor under their wing and help with that knowledge transfer," Oakes said.
The Knowledge Retention Accelerator program will progress in three main steps: First, i4cp will conduct a general overview of the participating organizations; second, it will engage in benchmarking and assessment; and third, it will undertake strategy development.
"[Then] we move from that third step into a second phase of the whole program, which we call council participation," Oakes said. "It's an ongoing group that will share what they've learned with others, as well as share within the group, what's working [and] what's not working, so we have continuous feedback with the participants."
This collaboration is key for organizations with limited time and resources, as Oakes said it helps them understand what other methods are out there and prevents them from reinventing the wheel.
By Agatha Gilmore
