Saving Institutional Knowledge Before Baby Boomers Disappear
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The departure of Baby Boomers will leave an enormous gap in the workplace. Managers should be worried because specialized knowledge and skills will be walking out the door. Younger workers are looking forward to increased opportunities, though perhaps with some anxiety because their mentors will no longer be around to consult. By working together and planning ahead, we can reduce the impact of the departure. Similarly, some STC Chapters struggle to recruit new members, especially members who actively work to support Chapter activities. The leadership worries what will happen when older active members stop participating.
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Saving Institutional Knowledge Before Baby Boomers Disappear
- 1. Saving Institutional Knowledge Before Boomers Disappear What do you do when that smart person down the hall retires Betsy Kent
- 2. Issues with the brain drain • Losing history • Losing accumulated knowledge • Very few articles on the tech comm aspects of the issue
- 3. People who have been working a long time know a lot • Some of the knowledge is in their heads • Some is lessons learned
- 4. From a management point of view • Analyze the prospective retirees and their key skills • Enable older workers to work fewer hours while they train and mentor younger workers
- 5. Management point of view Strategy: • Analyze your workforce/Appraise them • Refine your retention strategy • Indentify the keepers: make it attractive for boomers to stay • Prepare senior and emerging leaders
- 6. For a person with an eye on the retirement clock • Start prepping early, just in case (health, family issues) • Document historical reasons for the way things are done • Analyze where changes can and should be done • Tips and tricks that are intuitive, subjective, and contextual
- 7. For a person with an eye on the retirement clock (continued) • Share information on people, o who is who o who used to be who o who do you ask • How to prioritize • communicating with SMEs in general and advice on specific people
- 8. For coworkers with years to go • Learn/document the history • Analyze procedures and find out if there are new ways to do the time-consuming tasks and why not to do them • Learn/observe things that older colleagues do from sheer experience and instinct
- 9. What they want in a job
- 10. Transferring knowledge • Blogs • Video • Mentoring and shadowing
- 11. Blogs and wikis • Encourage blogging to capture thoughts as they occur. • Wikis allow for more of a group effort .
- 12. How Agile can help • Tasks focused and limited • Team has reasons to support each other • Format encourages senior people to assist those with less experience
- 13. Final Words In 2015, Millennials became the largest demographic in the workforce, outnumbering Gen X and the rapidly-departing Baby Boomers. Prepare yourselves.
- 14. For more information • A “Brain Dump” Before The Boomer Retiree “Brain Drain”: http://www.skilledup.com/insights/a-brain-dump-before-the-boomer-retiree-brain- drain • How To Pick the Brains of Your Retiring Baby Boomershttp://www.skilledup.com/insights/pick-brains-retiring-baby-boomers • Baby Boomer Brain Drain #Retirement http://corporatehrgirl.com/2015/05/15/baby-boomer-brain-drain-retirement/ • Coping with the baby boomer brain drain http://www.changefactory.com.au/our-thinking/articles/coping-with-the-baby-boomer-brain-drain// • What Millennials Want From Work. Jennifer J. Deal and Alec Levenson. McGraw-Hill Education. 2016.
- 15. For more information • Survey: 53% of Employers Concerned About Retirement Plans, Brain Drain. https://www.challengergray.com/press/press-releases/survey-53-employers-concerned-about-retirement-plans-brain-drain • “Baby Boomer Brain Drain [Infographic]”. https://onlinemba.unc.edu/blog/baby-boomer-brain-drain-infographic/ • “Phased Retirement”. https://www.opm.gov/retirement-services/phased-retirement/ • “A Generation of Leaders.” The Hartford. http://www.thehartford.com/sites/thehartford/files/millennial-leadership-2015.pdf. • “BPM - A Cure for Institutional Memory Loss.” BPMInstitute.org. http://www.bpminstitute.org/resources/articles/bpm-cure-institutional- memory-loss
Editor's Notes
- In the US, roughly 10,000 people a day reach full retirement age. And many of them are leaving the workplace, taking decades of experience and history with them. The same trend is happening in many countries. Today, baby boomers account 24.3% of the US population, with 31% of jobs in the US. Only 19% of workers over 65 are working. The same issue applies to STC capters: many of our active members are Baby Boomers.
- Brain drain can slow the work process when employees lose that smart person who knows everything. Operations slow while the remaining staff figures out where to find information they need, and the right way to handle it. To help slow the loss of knowledge, skills, and experience in the U.S. government, Congress and President Obama approved the creation of a phased-retirement program that took effect in November 2014.
- When you’re training someone, you need to make sure to pace the process. But When senior people are getting ready to leave, you want to capture the most important information they know. Suggestion: Pace the process. Encourage Boomers to record knowledge in a blog or video well in advance Senior people should start tracking Great Truths, and identifying information and important “hostorical” information.
- In a corporate environment, ask Human Resources for a report on which employees are nearing retirement, if such a report is available. One Human Resources report indicated that 24% of the companies surveyed either didn’t know or didn’t track how many of their employees were over 55. Find out what options are available for offering reduced work hours or staged retirement for keeping valued employees. Remember that as older workers are getting nearer retirement, they might have more appointments and commitments outside the offices, for family or health reasons. For example, they might be taking care of parents or grandchildren (or both), or have to deal with illness or a death in the family
- • Reduce workload of new projects so the employees have time to document what they know and train replacements. Encourage the departing staff to talk aloud and explain the reason for doing something. One approach might be to assign junior members of the team to practice interviewing subject matter experts by Interviewing senior members of the team about procedures and processes. Prepare senior and emerging leaders. Many Millennials are interested in becoming leaders, and pick their jobs for leadership opportunities. They are also interested in learning about technologies. More junior members of the team might be looking forward to having more responsibility, or perhaps switching projects. Do some strategic grooming to help them to succeed
- At some point, even very dedicated people are going to find a countdown clock. And even the best might develop “short timers disease.” This group needs to consider the good of the profession and the company, and make sure that information and wisdom they have spent a career accumulating is available for others to use. Remember that your health or family obligations might not cooperate with your long-range plans to work until age 72, or until the mortgage is paid off, or the retirement fund reaches a particular number. And you might just reach a point where you are ready to move on. Audit the department procedures. This might include migrating the content from an old FrameMaker file to the corporate wiki. Analyze where steps can be simplified or removed. For example, does the procedure include steps that were needed for a long-defunct version of the build software? Document historical reasons for the way things are done. In some cases, you might add notes in files using the <draft-comment> element in DITA, or a comparable feature in another technology directly in the source files. Update the list of tips and tricks, and again, remove the tips for software that your group no longer uses. Check your stash of cheat sheets and copy the substance to the appropriate procedure, wiki, or blog. Check emails for useful history or tricks (you’ll be wanting to clear that out anyway)
- Big rocks, little rocks
- This group is probably aware which of their colleagues are counting down the days. This group needs to make opportunities to watch and learn, and position themselves to take on more interesting opportunities. Work with your older colleagues to update internal procedures, and identify what can be simplified If the group is moving toward videos, practice interview techniques with the older colleagues. You get a record of the knowledge, and practice the process internally before interviewing in “prime time.”
- In Millennials in the Work Place, the authors stress over and over that many Millennials, like other workers, want to take on leadership roles. They are also looking to their managers for help in getting better technical skills so they can keep themselves marketable. They are also aware of what comparable jobs are paying, so if they aren’t getting the pay and training they want, they will leave.
- In 2015, Millennials became the largest demographic in the workforce, outnumbering Gen X and the rapidly-departing Baby Boomers. Training needs to balance the techniques and technology that Boomers are comfortable with and what Gen X and Millennials will be willing to use. Fortunately, senior technical communications practitioners are likely to be comfortable with many of the tools that make sharing information easier. Don't let them play in traffic but don't hover.
- It's like filling a glass with soda pop or beer. When you pour fast, the glass fills up and might even overflow. But when you pour slowly, and let the contents settle, you can get more beer (or soda pop) in the glass.
- Agile also provides some institutional memory. Morning standups can include discussions of problems, and the people with longer memories can bring up reasons why things were done in a particular way. And maybe things don’t have to be that way anymore. Many companies are using Agile in their development process. Teams meet regularly, usually daily, to discuss how the projects are going. Most companies use tracking software to monitor the progress of stories and issues. If stories and tasks are detailed enough, they can provide additional historical support. If the team does not use a template to set up standard routines, such as release processes, encourage them to do so. According to Millennials in the Work Place, Millennials are attunded to teams, and do better in them. If possible, have a mix of senior people and Millennials to make the mentoring and sharing more natural. Example: Some years back, one of our products had to meet Federal guidelines for encryption. It added steps to the release process and a lot of running around at the end of the cycle because people would forget the extra steps. The product was retired, but a similar product took its place. I was the only one on the team who knew to lean on management to find out if the encryption rules still applied.
- The departure of Baby Boomers will leave an enormous gap in the workplace. Managers should be worried because specialized knowledge and skills will be walking out the door. Younger workers are looking forward to increased opportunities, though perhaps with some anxiety because their mentors will no longer be around to consult. By working together and planning ahead, we can reduce the impact of the departure.
- BPM=Business Processing Model