When Your Star Employee Walks Out the Door, So Does Their Knowledge
What Exactly is Tribal Knowledge? Tribal knowledge is all about the methods, techniques, practices, products, and customers that only a few of your most experienced or longest-serving staff are familiar with. This knowledge is rarely written down and is mostly held in the heads of a select few.
Throughout a technician’s career, you invest in them through training, support, and other learning opportunities to help them continuously improve and grow their skill sets. Unfortunately, due to retirement or another opportunity, it’s only a matter of time before someone with a lot of knowledge about your company, your clients and the very best business processes and practices walks out the door. When they go, that knowledge goes with them. You will be losing a lot more than just a great team member if you don’t have a mechanism to record and keep all that tribal knowledge they have acquired over their career.
The consequences of not digitizing tribal knowledge
It’s not hard to understand why a high rate of turnover and an aging workforce can have a negative impact on KPIs. The drop in productivity due to the loss of an employee and the steep learning curve of the new hire, coupled with the loss of knowledge and expertise of experienced staff, is a recipe for disaster.
- Errors
- Downtimes
- Rescheduling
- Inefficient use of resources
- Frustration
- Safety issues
- Loss of customers
- Loss of profit
The key to preserving the wisdom of your most experienced workers: Resco Guides
FIELDBOSS Mobile is powered by resco.net, the industry leading mobile solution for Microsoft partners worldwide. The Resco Guides feature was designed with collaboration and integration in mind to help rectify the knowledge gap. With Resco Guides, all tribal knowledge, guides, and manuals are packed in a single app with easy access, anytime, anywhere….even when offline
Features
- Guides: Step-by-step instructions that incorporate text, images, videos, and PDF files that are related to a specific record (for example, a piece of machinery).
- Guides editor: A web application accessible from the Resco Cloud landing page and Dynamics which allows you to create, edit, and publish guides.
- Feedback: App users have the option to rate the guides and provide feedback to the guide editors in the back office.
- Guides harvesting: App users can quickly collect simple guides from the field (take/upload photos and add comments) if they identify missing processes. Guide editors in the back office can then standardize the guides, add proper language and associations, and then publish them to make the information available to all users in the field.
Benefits of capturing and sharing tribal knowledge
- Increased customer & employee’s satisfaction and retention
- Increased quality & safety
- Increased first-time resolutions
- Decreased overall time-to-resolution
- Decreased dispatches & costs
- Shortened workers’ learning curve
- Smooth and efficient onboarding process
- Simplified processes & instructions
- Increased team collaboration
- Safeguard for the future
Preserve Tribal Knowledge
The aging workforce and associated turnover impact operational efficiency, customer service, and operating costs. Losing an employee and/or having to retrain somebody is a huge expense — not only because of the training process itself, but due to the time both trainer and trainee are not as productive as independently working, fully trained techs. And the gap in experience and knowledge is exacerbated by rapidly rising levels of equipment and machinery complexity. Junior and seasonal employees need to be trained quickly and efficiently, and experienced workers need to capture their know-how and be retained through engagement and recognition. Ultimately, we need to shorten the learning curve and “do more with less”.
Providing comprehensive access to valuable know-how obtained in the field or outlined in company manuals and training materials is not only empowering to field service technicians, it also ensures an overall improved customer experience, standardized service, more first-time fixes, and an overall increase in productivity and drop in service costs.
Contact FIELDBOSS for more information on how RESCO GUIDES can improve your customer experience and your bottom line.