Help, the expert is on vacation!
During every holiday period, it is a challenge to ensure all activities and processes run as smoothly as possible. A significant number of colleagues are often absent, including the experts who serve as a resource for the rest of the team throughout the year.
What we observe in practice is that it often becomes painfully clear during these holiday periods just how dependent you actually are on the experts within your company. When he or she is away for a week or longer, you are left to your own devices and cannot call for assistance.
How can you best navigate this holiday period?
Dependency on expert knowledge
As a result, certain matters may remain unresolved for unnecessarily long periods, a customer may have to wait longer than you would like, or production may suffer unnecessary delays. Therefore, extract the knowledge from the minds of your experts and make it accessible to everyone.
It may be too late to address this for the current holiday period, but you can certainly use this time to identify the moments and areas where you lack access to the knowledge of the experts within your company.
What went wrong?
View this holiday period as a baseline measurement and keep track of where difficulties arose and what was required to resolve them.
- Did it cost time?
- And money?
- And did the absence of expert knowledge cause stress or other problems?
Once everyone has returned from vacation, put it on the agenda and discuss how the people within your team experienced the holiday period in this regard. Now that you know where the shortcomings lie, it is easy to do things differently during the next holiday period. This prevents stress, reduces errors or downtime, and ensures that these periods—which can be more hectic than the rest of the year—remain manageable within your company.
And if we go one level deeper, why would you only want to arrange this for holiday periods? Similar issues can arise every day. What if the expert falls ill, finds another job, or retires…
Solution
Curious about how we have helped other companies with this? Please feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to show you how we capture expert knowledge quickly and completely and make it available to all colleagues.