When an employee leaves your organization, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, their absence can be felt by the whole organization. An employee’s departure is often a domino effect—hiring managers are in full swing trying to fill the position, and colleagues are covering the responsibilities for that role.
Beyond leaving their job duties behind, employees who leave an organization may be taking knowledge with them. This can often be knowledge they learned while in the role that isn’t easily transferable to the employee who takes over. While hard to prevent, employees hoarding knowledge could be detrimental to your organization’s success.
Here’s how to spot knowledge hoarding and proactively prevent it from happening.
What Is Knowledge Hoarding?
Knowledge hoarding can be a complex concept to grasp because it isn’t always tangible. When an employee hoards knowledge, they keep information or knowledge they learned in their role to themselves. Often this is unintentional, stemming from employees learning and growing in their position and not realizing they aren’t sharing what they learn.
Hoarding knowledge can be damaging to an organization when turnover is involved. For employees who leave your organization and take knowledge with them, there often isn’t a paper trail or instructions on what they learned over time. This can be a significant setback for the new hire who steps into their role.
Employees naturally learn skills and knowledge over time when they stay in the same role for a while. Veteran employees are always hard to replace, but when your organization considers the knowledge they take with them, it can be much harder to train a new hire.
To combat knowledge hoarding, it’s essential to encourage the opposite—knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing is the intentional act of distributing learned skills or pieces of information with other employees and can create an overall positive company culture where employees feel inspired to grow.
Here are a few tips for creating an environment where sharing is encouraged and enjoyable.
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