Millions of baby boomers worldwide, aged above 50 will be leaving their jobs in the next few years as they retire from the workforce. This unprecedented wave of baby boomer retirement, which has attracted plenty of media attention, is hitting Hong Kong now and will continue into the next 10 years. Many baby boomers have spent their entire career, or high portion of them in one organization. Besides their own expertise, they have also accumulated a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience about how mechanisms work, how tasks got done, and who to contact when issues and weak signals emerge. In many cases, this practice and decision making knowledge is extremely difficult to replicate because it has been developed in an era of unprecedented technological advances and complex business landscape.
Join us for this talk which will outline some measures organizations can adopt in order to retain critical know-how and reduce knowledge loss due to staff retirement. Supplemented with case examples, the speakers will share some solutions on enabling knowledge sharing and retention in an organization.
Event details
Date and time : Wednesday 16th May 2012 (6.30pm – 8.00 pm)
Venue: Conference Room 2, 22/F, United Centre 95 Queensway (Admiralty MTR Station)
The event is free for HKKMS and KMIRC members and $200 for non-members.
Registrations for this event have finished. Photos from the evenings presentation and discussion can be found HERE
Speaker bios:
Reflections on “Knowledge loss from retirees”
In the May meeting of the society, Cherie Lui and Jessica Yip from the KMIRC eloquently spoke about knowledge loss from baby boomers retiring. They painted a picture of the cost of knowledge loss, quoting examples such as Nasa’s collective loss of memory on how to land on the moon, a fact that has proven to be very expensive.
Various useful techniques were presented and discussed; good pragmatic and necessary approaches such as knowledge audits, storytelling, story circles/dialogues, team learning. As well as finding ways to engage and recall ex-workers for e.g. mentorship schemes, community facilitators etc etc.
The subject certainly provoked interest and discussion within the packed room with varying points of views raised and an active debate ensued.
Some of the interesting points raised was actually ultimately about whether retirees knowledge actually should be retained, shouldn’t we let the new vanguard drive their own vision of how a company should be run? Isn’t “Organisational Unlearning” just as important.? Also maybe what is needed is some way that coming retirees can impart their wisdom and insights into various scenarios and workplace challenges.?
The discussion was active and could have gone on and on, but alas we had to give the room back.
For what it is worth, my view is that there is a need to retain valuable knowledge, this much we all know. The question is what to retain and how? Knowledge loss from baby boomer retirees is an issue, we need to be proactive to ensure that invaluable insights are codified or retained where possible and that important individual retirees can continue to bring value to the party. They won’t continue to run the show, but their wisdom and insights on an ongoing basis can and will make a difference. But will they be willing to come back to the party.?
Any and all comments are welcome
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged km, knowledge loss, knowledge management, knowledge retention, mentoring, organisational unlearning