White Paper Pundit

Layoff news has become a common news item these days, with once stalwart companies laying off thousands of workers.

But tech companies shouldn’t let their knowledge workers and sources for their white paper content go out the door. Such moves can have a severe impact on future marketing activities, competitiveness, and business opportunities.

In an article published on ReadWriteWeb, the effects from such a move could linger for years afterward:

• Besides the emotional damage that occurs when people are forced out, there is a tangible cost to companies when knowledge and experience walk out the door. Once that knowledge and experience are gone, no amount of TARP money will bring them back. It may be too late for some companies to prevent this now, but putting measures in place will lessen the blow in future.

ReadWriteWeb provides four suggestions for companies to address this growing problem:

1. Use tools and process. Companies must have infrastructure in place to encourage, or force, employees to share information. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it is at least marginally effective. Anything is better than nothing. How many managers around the world are at this moment digging through abandoned email folders trying to figure what their employees were working on and what they knew.

2. Measure collaboration. Again, it doesn’t matter how, just do something that you think has a good chance of success. You could measure the number of contributions to a knowledge base, the frequency of mentoring sessions, the number of white papers written, whatever. What you measure is less important than doing it consistently over time and measuring improvement. Of course, the metrics are not irrelevant, but don’t wait to choose the perfect ones to track. Start small and simply, and go from there.

3. Reward employees for sharing. If you don’t measure and reward productive behavior, it isn’t going to happen. Collaboration is a bit fuzzy and can’t be measured like the number of phone calls answered per hour, but there are ways.

4. Focus on informal information. This is often where the best information resides. For example, many employees send emails back and forth answering questions and trading best practices. You need a way to harvest these nuggets of information.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help companies to retain key information when knowledge workers leave. The current economic conditions put even more pressure on companies to wring as much information as possible from remaining and future employees.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t consider the long-term implications of lost resources when layoff occur. Executives should consider the impact of a layoff on their knowledge base when evaluating areas for cost reduction. I have certainly seen my far share of tech companies that have said to themselves, “What were we thinking”, when economic times improve and those knowledge workers now are employed at the competition.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 7:48 am and is filed under Industry Insights, WP Components, WP Opinions, WP Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.