Skills evaporation

Skills evaporation is a blight that affects many businesses, particularly monolithic large businesses and governments. Skills evaporation will happen when good people leave a business to pursue better opportunities, taking knowledge with them – but also the culture of the remaining people is that their skills are reduced by the skilled people leaving.

Evaporation

As a hypothetical analogy, there is an island with just one city. Once people on the island have earnt enough money to leave, they get on a boat and take all their money with them. This reduces the overall pool of money on the island (ignoring trade and other factors).

When a liquid starts evaporating, a molecule will absorb enough energy (in the form of heat) to evaporate, which takes the energy out of the liquid – decreasing the overall temperature of the liquid.

Skills are tied to people

It might sound obvious, but skills are tied to people, not to the organisation. There are many tasks that are infrequent, complex, exceptions or simply undocumented. These tasks are normally performed by someone “in the know” and are considered by individuals as being so irregular that they do not need to be documented or standardised. For skilled people, they may assume that others have a similar background or base level of experience, and so there are implied assumptions that others will also have some basic knowledge. This can be dangerous to assume – for example a person may see a carpenter drive a nail into wood, and assume they can do the same task – but not have the foundation of background knowledge that will allow them to choose the right nail, or the right location for the nail.

Those with the most, leave

It will come as no surprise that highly skilled and capable people are in high demand. These are the people that are targeted by headhunters and recruiters – to join new organisations and bring their skills with them. Even those who are not approached will be able to find new jobs offers if they are having a hard time, or encounter a bad manager or colleague. When it comes to highly capable people leaving, this tends to happen rapidly, and with little handover or skills exchange.

Reduction of surviving skills

So here is the controversial viewpoint – that when highly skilled people leave, not only do they take their skills with them, but they also decrease the skills of the remaining people. During normal work, when there is a mix of skilled people with others, the culture tends to be affected that people depend upon work and functions being performed by the efficient, effective and skilled people.

If Jane is the fastest and most experienced person at performing an activity, then others will come to depend upon her skills in the task – they won’t be driven to learn or practice the task. If the task occasionally requires some additional skill (such as, the task occasionally fails), then Jane will be the one frequently assigned, and soon it becomes that she is the only one who can do it.

Skilled people also often tend to have a personality or approach that may not be very effective at documenting a task – a skilled person will think it is obvious or simple, and not put sufficient focus into skills exchange because of implicit assumptions.

Retain the skills if you can’t retain the people

Many low maturity organisations will not give adequate focus to retaining skills. People and process is often given a lower focus than technology and tools. As an organisation improves overall maturity, activities increase in areas such as competency development, process standardisation and documentation, succession planning and career planning, even performance management for skills development. Organisational change, including change management and training, become fundamental to a successfully maturing organisation.