Thoughts

“The Great Resignation” Offers Great Opportunity


The Great Resignation: How Video is saving organizations from losing long-term knowledge to retirement.

By: Kate Comella, Client Services Specialist | Focus Media Services

Current labor shortages are affecting every business, from small shops to Fortune 500 companies, in very significant ways. With demands for better wages and quality of life, we’re seeing the creation of a new social movement called “The Great Resignation”. People of all ages are quitting or retiring from their jobs to search for a better or safer lifestyle, and they’re doing so without much notice. Experienced leaders are weighing the pros and cons of returning to the workplace during a global pandemic and choosing en masse to opt for retirement. With the risk of losing their most valuable assets, how are businesses going to cope with such an extreme loss of knowledge and talent?

Baby boomers are getting older and edging ever closer to retirement. Add in a global pandemic where they’re now falling into the high-risk age group, and this is a recipe for disaster. According to Miguel Faria e Castro of the Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, over three million baby boomers have been forced to retire since the beginning of the pandemic. Citing dangers to their health and rising asset values, there is more reason than ever for our largest generation to leave the workforce. 

We are now seeing a phenomenon that Forbes has named “Boomer Brain Drain”. The boomers, many of whom in leadership positions, are leaving the workforce and taking their knowledge with them. According to Dorothy Leonard of Harvard Business School, this information is called “tribal knowledge” and is defined as “the stuff in your head that’s never been written down, never been documented.” Without mentors, new employees are struggling to quickly transition into these new opportunities.  

On top of “Boomer Brain Drain”, employers are feeling the costs of recruiting and training new employees. According to PeopleKeep.com, it costs six to nine months of the positions’ salary to find and train a new employee, and it usually takes one to two years for them to reach peak productivity. And this doesn’t account for the lost productivity of corporate leaders who must abruptly shift their focus to the training (and re-training) of new employees. Considering the costs alone, it is in every employer’s best interest to safeguard and streamline their knowledge and recruitment practices.

So how can a business protect from ‘Boomer Brain Drain’? How can it capture this knowledge before it’s too late? Creating an archive of a companies’ knowledge is most easily achieved through one medium: 

Video.

Video has been used since its inception to capture moments in a way that had never been done before. It is digital, preserved, and easily transferrable. Video can be edited down into small achievable, digestible chunks and then used to train new employees over and over again. Plus, it offers a guarantee that all exployees are being trained in exactly the same manner. A three-hour interview, for example, can be divided into smaller segments (think chapters) to ensure employees get all the information they need and none of the information they don’t. Go further and compile all of your company’s knowledge into a searchable database that allows your employees to access their training on demand. There is no better way.

The pandemic has been hard enough on businesses without having to lose critical knowledge that cannot be easily, if ever, replaced.  Don’t be caught off-guard and lose the tribal knowledge of your best staff. Protect yourself and your business from Boomer Brain Drain by archiving your knowledge before it’s gone. 

For more more strategies on knowledge capture and knowledge management, connect with us at www.focusmediaservices.com.