Our topic for this month’s newsletter and blogs is “Losing Fundamental Technology in the Post-Pandemic Period.” In reacting to the pandemic and the shutdown, many companies strayed from the routine activities that caused them to win in the first place. This resulted in the successful technology of their operations—simply put, how they did things right—becoming lost.
The first way that this occurred stemmed from businesses losing valuable long-term employees. People who were amazingly skilled in their particular fields, and had years of valuable experience, decided during the pandemic that they might as well go ahead and retire. Unfortunately, they took all their invaluable skill and knowledge with them as they left.
This is truly a crisis, and it’s been a trend in numerous industries. In many cases, these were people who were not only great at what they did but really loved their jobs. They could have retired anyway but had remained on the job just because they enjoyed it.
As the pandemic wore on and dramatic changes occurred within their particular businesses and industry the joy and fulfillment from their work tarnished. This resulted in many deciding it was time to move on. They did so, taking their decades of experience and knowledge with them.
There are several examples of significant fields in which this has taken place. One would be education. Someone we are familiar with had thirty years of experience in the school system. Once the pandemic had gotten underway, her school district began forcing her to create forums in which school faculty could formally complain about their situations, without proposing any kind of solutions. It got to the point that anyone actually trying to focus on education was instead directed into dictated non-educational paths.
The school district then began to get federal funding, and any academic freedom teachers had previously experienced began to disappear. Many educators with our friend’s kind of experience decided they wouldn't have this kind of thing enforced on them and decided to retire.
Another example is law enforcement. Officers with considerable experience, valuable to their respective forces, decided to either take retirement or take more lucrative employment in private security.
Each of these examples represents how technology becomes lost. Any one of these considerably experienced individuals who decide to retire takes volumes of information and operational technology along with them when they go. The organizations that employed them didn’t require—or didn’t even request—that they leave behind some kind of record, written or otherwise, of all they had done. That meant that all the successes achieved by each one of these people, each of the standards they set and maintained, disappeared forever. Many unique details of their skills were lost to anyone who came after them.
If you go back and look at how such technology comes about in the first place, it is from people such as this. If it is not passed along in any way, it vanishes for good. Everyone coming along behind them “don’t know what they don’t know," and the business fails to that degree.
How can your organization prevent this from happening? First, do everything you can to hang onto such valuable staff. But second, when they do go, have them leave comprehensive records of their experience to ensure that their valuable contributions to the future success of the company are not lost.
Back to this month's newsletter, click here:https://mailchi.mp/sellability/hidden-losses-during-the-pandemic
