Exit Interviews done right: Knowledge Onboarding from the Outgoing Employees.

When an employee exits an organization, he or she takes along wealth of experience, insights, learnings, and knowledge. If this knowledge is not captured and passed forward to other peers before the employees exit, it implies a huge loss for the organization – not only from the perspective of loss of employee but also the wealth of knowledge the employee carried with the job experience.

Traditionally exit interview was considered a discussion between HR and the employee leaving to understand their reasons for quitting. However, now they have evolved and considered as a critical learning process to capture the knowledge and insights from the outgoing employee and making the learning curve short for the successor. 

The exit process should make sure that the wealth of experience and competencies employee has should be accessible to the organization even after the employee is gone. This experience comes both as tacit knowledge in the form of best practices, insights, tips and tricks, client experiences and learnings and explicit in the form of trainings, process documents, client discussions etc.

  • The key is to design a robust exit process that gets initiated not when it is time for employee to leave but from the start when the employee hands over the resignation to have enough overlap between the outgoing and succeeding employee for knowledge transfer.
  • Make sure explicit knowledge is transferred in a systematic way in a folder or document library with detailed notes of each file to be accessed by the successor.
  • Capturing tacit knowledge is a big challenge and key is to start reviewing from initial notice period the key tasks, projects and clients of the exiting employee and getting a detailed handover to the replacement or team-member so that all aspects and experiences from the job are covered.
  • A detailed checklist developed based on knowledge mapping and including information for each project, client, knowledge sources, network, work achievements, challenges, pitfalls, and success stories are the sort of tacit information that is valuable to the organization and must be captured.

Having a robust exit process design is a win-win for both the employee and the organization. If done right, exit interview allows the organization to persevere knowledge which otherwise will be lost with the outgoing employee and provide a quick start and learning curve to the employee succeeding. At the same time, leaver gets to reflect on their achievement and leave on a positive note of achievement and contribution to the team and company.

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