Intraversed myth busting:
No staff member is irreplaceable

ESTIMATED READING TIME: 2 MINUTES

The Myth

No staff member is irreplaceable.

Or to be a little clearer: every staff member is replaceable.

Why people believe the myth

It seems a fairly obvious truth — we have a job description; applicants who meet the requirements will be considered for the position. No one has so unique a set of skills, training and experience that no-one else could fulfil that job description.

Sure, it might be hard to find a good applicant. Or it might be expensive. You may even have to compromise on a few things. But surely it's possible to find a comparable person to fill the shoes of any exiting staff member, yes?

The Problem with the Myth

Suitably meeting requirements on a job description is one thing, but replacing the corporate and business function/process knowledge that may have left with your previous employee can be impossible.

Enter the unseen risk inherent in staff attrition.

Employees can carry huge amounts of very important, yet unacknowledged, business knowledge in their heads. Knowledge that no one, not even they, think to capture and retain.

Loss of this knowledge represents a huge risk, particularly in large businesses. Vital knowledge loss has the power to significantly impact business process, stall future projects, leave existing staff floundering and use up existing staff time & business budget as teams must re-learn/re-build/re-trace information now lost to the organisation.

What We Suggest Instead of This Myth

The only answer to this potential loss is to ensure business processes are documented — but not just that. These documents must be treated like valuable business artefacts, requiring more comprehensive management than simply a shared document repository. They require management that allows businesses to see all such information artefacts they have, where they're stored, who owns each one, how recently each was reviewed, any issues raised about any artefact's content and, most importantly, artefacts need to be searchable by the business terms they reference.

Until you have that, not all your staff are replaceable.

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Our award-winning Intralign Ecosystem methodology enables cultural shift towards business-managed encyclopaedias of organisational IP through education, software, business glossary writing expertise, and expert mentoring & support. Learn more here.

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