ARE THE COMPANIES PREPARED FOR THE NEXT GENERATION?

With the exponential growth of information and the increasingly rapid rate of change, one of the most valuable resources in organizations today is the worker's knowledge. The worker's knowledge process, synthesize and generate new knowledge in order to problem-solve and innovate in organizations and it’s very important retain that knowledge, especially when people are about to retire or moving into new positions.

According to Nonaka y Takeuchi Model (1995) the knowledge has the following cycle, and for each of the phases there is a knowledge management action to consider:

The most important actions for these people who leave the company or leave their positions to other positions are Knowledge Retention and Knowledge Transfer.

KNOWLEDGE RETENTION

Knowledge retention involves capturing knowledge in the organization so that it can be used later but not all knowledge has to be retained. Three basic questions that must be asked when considering knowledge retention:

1. What knowledge may be lost?
2. What are the organizational consequences of losing that knowledge?
3. What actions can be taken to retain that knowledge?

Here are some examples of tools & techniques which can be used for it:

• Implementing reward structures to encourage sharing of key knowledge.
• Storytelling.
• Lesson Learned Systems
• Mentoring programs & job shadowing.
• Documented Interviews & exit interviews.
• Company procedures/processes manuals.
• Wikis (i.e., Interactive documentation instead rigid digital documents)
• Forums (i.e., discussions to solve problems/challenges or to make technical decisions instead meetings and emails)
• Taking advantage of the knowledge of retirees. (i.e., providing documented lessons learned and best practices to next generation)

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

Knowledge Transfer is the process of capturing skills and information from people and share them between employees and parts of the organization. Knowledge transfer represents a cost to the source of knowledge, in terms of time and effort spent helping others to understand the source's knowledge. Presumably, the easier the transfer, the less time and effort required and the more likely that a transfer will occur and be successful.

Choosing the right people: People find it easier to absorb new ideas in areas in which they have some expertise and find it more difficult to absorb new ideas outside of their immediate area of expertise. An implication is that it is easier for knowledge to transfer from the source to a recipient when the source and the recipient have knowledge in common. Consequently, knowledge is more likely to be transferred between people with similar training and background characteristics. Also it’s very important to take the time to understand generational differences and use this awareness to facilitate knowledge transfer.