How to Prevent Knowledge Loss Caused by the Great Resignation

The Great Resignation is expected to continue for the better part of 2022, and it has already affected businesses in many ways. From low productivity to poor morale, the impact is quite severe. However, nothing is more serious than the knowledge loss that resulted from it. In this blog, we’ll explore the impact of knowledge loss from an IT perspective and how you can overcome it with smart documentation.

Why is knowledge loss a serious concern?

Knowledge loss has always been a byproduct of employee turnover. Organizations in certain industries are always prepared for this eventuality. For instance, fast-food chains always have a high turnover rate compared to other industries. These organizations prefer to have their institutional knowledge codified rather than just letting it reside in their employees’ heads.

Most organizations, however, don’t experience massive employee turnover at the same time. Due to this, they don’t incorporate a robust system in place to document their institutional knowledge. Everything from processes to passwords typically remains with certain key employees.

When one of these key employees leaves the organization, it puts day-to-day operations in jeopardy. Besides affecting the workflow, it also puts additional pressure on existing employees. Overworked team members may get dissatisfied very soon, and this may eventually result in massive turnover across the whole organization.

Unstructured information that is hard to locate is also a serious issue. What good is documentation if you don’t know where to find the documented information? For instance, every client-facing organization documents its SSL information, and this information is accessible to only a few key employees. However, if no one knows where to locate this information after these key employees depart, it presents a serious problem. This is why losing institutional knowledge will always be problematic for organizations.

4 ways IT Glue can eliminate knowledge loss

Certain losses associated with employee attrition are inevitable. For instance, the cost of replacing a departed employee cannot be avoided. However, you can prevent knowledge loss to a great extent. Documentation holds the key to that. With the power of documentation, you might even learn to operate efficiently with fewer people.

An automated documentation tool like IT Glue can help you create knowledge bases in your IT infrastructure and ensure operational efficiency even with fewer resources. Here are four simple ways by which IT Glue can help you achieve that.

• Leverage the power of smart documentation: Smart documentation can help your team become more self-reliant by decreasing the dependency on individual team members. IT Glue can help you plan ahead and always be prepared to deal with challenging scenarios. Most importantly, you can create consistency across the whole organization. When you have a well-documented and standardized process, your team members and your clients won’t have to suffer due to the departure of a single team member.
• Use automation to boost efficiency: Automation can help boost efficiency by allowing your team to manage more service requests with fewer technicians. In addition to boosting efficiency, automation can also reduce inaccuracies in your documentation process. IT Glue’s automated documentation capabilities can help remove error-prone manual documentation processes in your IT environment. This can lower costs, boost productivity, improve service quality and help you gain a competitive advantage.
• Create powerful knowledge bases and SOPs: To reduce dependency on a single team member, you must make processes repeatable. You can achieve this by creating powerful knowledge bases and standard operating procedures in IT Glue. Here, you can embed diagrams and link your articles easily with the rest of your documentation. Moreover, IT Glue is integrated with Microsoft Word and Lucidchart to allow for Word and .csv imports. When you have a step-by-step process for every task, your technicians’ outcomes will always be consistent, which helps keep your team on point.
• Create a central hub for your data with IT Glue: With IT Glue, you can create a central hub for all your data and processes. This promotes collaborative documentation with all your team members. As a result, you can reduce dependency on individual team members. Our SOC 2 Type II compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine, all of which are fully integrated and linked with all your documentation. It also ensures that your data is accessible to the right person only and eliminates the chances of a data breach.

Conclusion

Knowledge loss can have serious consequences in the business world. From strategic misalignment of your workforce to declining work quantity or quality, it can directly affect the growth of an organization. The best way you can avoid this is by documenting all mission-critical information including institutional knowledge, processes, passwords, SOPs and more.

When you have everything properly documented with the help of a powerful tool like IT Glue, you no longer have to worry about the knowledge loss caused by employee attrition. This will help you become more resilient even when faced with an adversity like The Great Resignation.

To learn more about how to eliminate knowledge loss with IT Glue, request a demo.

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