When they leave, what goes with them?

Bosses on your back to show them the ROI of new media technologies within the enterprise?

Ask them to think about all the money they have spent paying, training, educating and generally investing in employees. Then think about what they get when that investment leaves? The answer is likley very little. In fact, the largest cost of turnover is not the costs associated with severance or recruiting, but the indirect costs of lost organizational knowledge.

I was listening to a Webinar a couple weeks ago on which Robert Scoble mentioned that when he left Microsoft, he left more than 1.5 Gigabytes of information in his email alone. What happens to this information now? It is archived for a couple weeks and likely lost forever. Even if someone were to try to sort through this, there would be no context for the information.

What if this information were on internal blogs and wikis? What if employees were encouraged to post there tricks for unjamming the copier or gave tips for closing a sale with the client?

Most of this information is useless or irrelevant on its own, but within its proper context and for particular individuals it would be invaluable. It is not about knowledge management, but rather about creating a community of information that allows employees to solve their own problems and find new solutions.

If organizations do not provide new media tools within the enterprise, employees will go elsewhere (del.iciio.us, flickr, MySpace, Blogger) to do what they want to do.

It is not so much that employers lose control over employees behavior in these situations, but that they lose any proprietary benefits associated with the information an employee develops, encounters or aggregates.

Presumably, you hire individuals because they are talented and are able to provide some value to your organization. If you engage them through new media technologies, you will be able to access, leverage and retain the information they possess, and it will become a competitive advantage.

(to give credit where credit is due, David Carter of iUpload, who I had the pleasure of having lunch with today, mentioned to me that he discussed this idea with Scoble a while ago)

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Technorati Tags: Employee, turnover, blog, Scoble, iupload

Comments

[Andi B.]

I hope that there will be more software like systemone in order to just solve such common problems you mentioned above. The advantage of systemone ( www.systemone.at ) compared to blogs/wikis is, that you probably won't ever not find prior solutions to a problem that you're trying to solve, which, depending on your internal blog-network's organisation, could easily happen. Short: You won't ever loose any information again.

For anyone interested in the functionalities of their software, systemone provide a comprehensive five minute screencast under http://www.systemone.at/screencast/eng/ .

(only to make sure: I'm not affiliated with systemone in any way, I was pointed to their software at a conference I recently participated in)

[Jeffrey Treem]

Andi,

Thanks for the point. I checked out the screencast and it look pretty impressive. My only worry is that this might all be too much for a lot of organizations.

The advantage of systemone is that it intergrates pages with existing material allowing for a more comprehensive search.

However, theoretically these problems can be solved with tagging, improved internal search and aggregation.

[Joining Dots]

Whilst it is true there are collaborative technologies that can help retain information that would otherwise be lost when an employee leaves, the main cost of turnover is losing access to knowledge - the stuff in peoples' heads. And the best way to address that cost is to create a culture of mentoring and sharing expertise. I've waffled in more detail over on my blog at: http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2006/07/hanging-on-to-knowledge_13.html

[Jeffrey Treem]

I agree that the stuff in people's heads is what is valuable, but the trick is to create a culture where employees want to share what is in their heads. There are several ways to do this (such as through rewards), but I would argue that collaborative technologies, when communicated properly to employees, can encourage sharing of this informal information by creating a community where participants benefit.

Then once people share that information, you need a means of keeping it and finding it.