Key measures to prevent brain drain

Ayu Pramitasari, Manager, Accenture

The need to retain knowledge is going to become more critical. Companies are typically not aware of the risk of lost knowledge until the damage is actually done.

An ongoing study by the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change has identified a number of consequences of knowledge loss, including compromised growth strategies, reduced efficiency and costly errors.

Knowledge loss, often an unintended consequence of downsizing, can be one of the costliest problems confronting organizations today. Better workforce planning and targeted knowledge-retention initiatives can help a company avoid losing its key source of competitive advantage.

This brain-drain phenomenon is occurring in both the public sector and the private sector, including the chemical, utilities, oil and gas, health care, automotive, aerospace and defense industries.

Suppose there was a big explosion at an ethylene reactor of a petrochemical plant, one of the town's largest employers. A subsequent internal investigation found that the company's engineer and the operators in the control room at the time of the incident had all been on the job less than a year, and that they probably lacked the experience needed to prevent the accident.

The only way to sustain the pace of innovation was to rehire the old hand as a consultant. Experience in doing things the old way is often necessary to do them in a new and better way.

Whether it is in chemical, aerospace industries or government offices, knowledge loss is a systemic problem involving the entire employment life cycle of recruiting, employee retention and retirement. There are seven critical success factors that make up the framework for successful knowledge retention. They are:

- Identifying knowledge at risk

Understanding where an organization is most at risk. It usually requires a process to identify which employees have the most critical knowledge.

- Career development

A career development program is needed to build knowledge that professionals need to prepare for future roles.

- Knowledge transfer

At the heart of any knowledge-retention strategy is the actual practices used to transfer knowledge. Tacit or cultural knowledge needs to be transferred through face-to-face interaction, such as mentoring or after action reviews.

- Using information technology

Most experiential knowledge cannot be absorbed right away from a computer screen. Therefore, it is important to provide the correct keywords to get the right documents and also provide the names of who was responsible to be able to ask them further questions.

- Phased retirements

As knowledge-retention and recruiting problems become more acute, companies are looking for new ways to extend the tenure of their most valuable employees. One objective is to entice those nearing retirement to stay on longer to mentor and train their successors.

- Utilizing retirees

A growing number of organizations are becoming dependent on retirees as contractors or consultants.

- Building a retention culture

Organizations trying to retain the knowledge needed to sustain performance have to create a culture that absorbs the knowledge, shares it and reuses it in normal, everyday practice.

Employees are much more likely to want to share their knowledge if they feel emotionally committed to the organization's long-term mission. Managers may feel that they simply don't have any time to change their culture to support more knowledge sharing. But they don't have a choice. It is, therefore, impossible to compete in a knowledge economy when your most valuable intellectual capital is constantly walking out the door. Employing better workforce planning and targeted knowledge- retention initiatives is the only way to avoid losing key sources of competitive advantage.