If you are at all involved in the planning process for your firm, it’s a good idea to keep the old Mike Tyson quote top-of-mind: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
The former heavyweight champion’s thoughts on the potentially unpleasant results of being married to a plan hold especially true in our current employment climate, which has already earned the title “The Great Resignation.”
After the extended COVID-19 lockdown, many employees are deciding they don’t want to go back to an actual office workplace full time, while others have determined that their future professional bliss lies down a different path. With that in mind, it’s important that you don’t let the changing plans of others put your firm’s plan down for the count.
Beyond the obvious advantages of having veteran and experienced teammates, one of the great benefits of retaining staff for years is that it streamlines the collective institutional knowledge it engenders through shared understanding of company policies, processes, staff-client communication and relationships, partnerships, relevant tech, etc. It’s basically everything you and your team members know about the work you do for your business — which is a lot.
But in 2020, according to the
While you can and should address these factors within your own company to try to boost employee engagement, lessen those negative emotions, and encourage mutual respect firmwide, it’s also now vital that you prepare for the potential loss of employees through the implementation of a strong backup plan.
Backing up important personal data is something we have all come to be familiar with in the iPhone era. Similarly, your memories captured via photograph now likely reside in digital storage rather than in a photograph album tucked away in a closet.
The equivalent backup is available to protect your firm’s institutional memories, including its workflows, contact lists, calendars and other key information for managing client relationships. Client relationship management systems allow you to back up every bit of important data you track about your clients and prospects while at the same time creating a trail of employee accountability for all processes involving each of those contacts.
That means if you lose a team member who was managing a client’s account or a project that seemingly has a million pieces to it, the next in line can pick up right where they left off. With CRM as a central component of your tech stack, digitally retracing all previous steps taken, as well as plotting a future course of action, becomes a much simpler process.
Regardless of when or why an employee leaves, there’s that feeling of nervousness that institutional knowledge will be lost and, at least temporarily, that things will fall through the cracks or become more difficult. Now each client’s information and all your firm’s essential history with them is deeply embedded within the fabric of your tech stack. Institutional knowledge remains at the firm.
In times of great employment upheaval such as these, you can’t necessarily plan for or predict all the ways your firm might be impacted. But you can proactively protect your firm’s institutional knowledge, preventing employees from walking away with their metaphorical Rolodexes under their arm, leaving you without access to important process and client management information.
You can, in other words, take the blow and move on to Plan B.
