Baby boomers are retiring and the experience they will take with them represents a huge potential loss for Australian businesses. Mark Wheeler investigates how this know-how can be retained.
In the 2002 film "About Schmidt" Jack Nicholson's character, 66-year-old Warren Schmidt, retires from his long held insurance job to face an ambiguous future. At a loose end in the days afterwards, he finds himself loitering around his old office interfering with advice for his replacement. The film may hold a satirical and fairly colourless view of retirement, but it also shows another great concern held by employers -- that the Schmidts in their own office may also retire a great deal of the company savvy and tacit wisdom.
It's a given that years of experience are valuable. Job specifications demand it and people are hired almost exclusively because of it. What employers clearly seek is the real "know how" required to get the job done. But "tacit" wisdom extends beyond this. A long-serving employee will know the answer to so many problems -- from how to best handle a particular client through to who you might ask about ordering new copy paper. Not having someone with this offhand knowledge can put you at a distinct disadvantage. Sure you can write it all down and hand it to a new starter as an enormous file, or put it on a database, but the sheer volume and complexity of doing it this way can make it worthless to do so.
Australia's baby boomer generation is currently contemplating retirement, meaning a large percentage of the workforce is about to collectively exit, taking with them a large proportion of their wisdom. This represents more than a few wrinkles of concern to those left behind but it seems that until recently, no one has really been that successful at implementing a system to maintain continuity of tacit knowledge.
Knowledge management
The issue has broadly been considered from two different approaches, says Phillip Allen, services research manager at IDC. "There is the codifying of knowledge -- extracting, recording, structuring, and storing knowledge into a library of data; and an idea of the water cooler -- tacit knowledge that is more difficult to document."
Knowledge management (KM), the documenting, recording, and storage of useful business knowledge is a well known "codifying" approach used by many businesses with varying success. Other manifestations such as customer relationship management (CRM), or business intelligence (BI) all offer specific knowledge, analysis, or understandings for useful purposes, but cannot capture the tacit experience that can seem uniquely illusive and so advantageous to business.
Most managers would agree that even careful documentation and structuring of any organisation's processes, contacts, policies, approaches, habits, relationships, systems, expectations, and so on -- down to knowing not to bother 'Big Kev' when he's just got back from a sales meeting -- is never achievable at the instinctual level of a seasoned employee.
So as an unparalleled number of employees begin to invest in caravans and look to the north, wise businesses are beginning to rethink their relationships with their prospective retirees -- and it turns out that gold watches might indeed be flashed around the office for a while to come.
15%
7%
Interesting reading. Certainly a subject at the forefront of strategic organisational planning (3, 5 and 9 year) at the moment for my organisation and a number of clients. Knowledge management, capture and 'Corporate Memory' systems are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s organisations that are recognising the true risk of today’s skills shortages and aging workforce and the effect which it will have as we move forward. I wonder how Gen Y will rectify the oversights of the Gen X management philosophies?