One of your team members is getting ready to leave your company. Your organization doesn’t have a formal knowledge transfer plan, but the team member finishes their deliverables in their last two weeks, facilitates hand-offs where necessary, and heads out the door. After they leave, you realize your team doesn’t know how to complete a process that the departing employee always handled, or you have a burning question that you’re pretty sure only your former team member can answer. This leads to project bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and slower onboarding for new team members as you struggle to fill the knowledge gaps.
Now imagine this scenario playing out every time someone leaves your company or transitions to a new team. It’s no wonder that the average large US business loses $47 million in productivity per year due to inefficient knowledge sharing.
Developing a proactive knowledge transfer plan can help your business avoid the headaches–and the substantial cost–of lost knowledge. Below, we’ll take a closer look at what goes into a knowledge transfer plan and how you can develop one that is repeatable, efficient, and built into a knowledge-sharing culture.
In today’s rapidly changing business environment, knowledge is power. Organizations that can effectively capture, manage, and transfer knowledge have a distinct competitive advantage. A knowledge transfer plan is a strategic process for sharing and retaining critical organizational knowledge.
What is Knowledge Transfer?
Knowledge transfer refers to the methods and practices for sharing knowledge throughout an organization, The goal is to transfer information and skills from experts to other employees who can benefit from it
Knowledge transfer enables organizations to:
- Preserve institutional knowledge as employees change roles or leave the company
- Build expertise rapidly by leveraging existing knowledge
- Break down silos and foster collaboration by sharing information across teams and departments
- Drive innovation by combining ideas and insights from different parts of the business
- Onboard new hires more quickly and cost effectively
- Identify knowledge gaps and develop training programs to address them
Effective knowledge transfer is especially crucial for growing companies and remote or distributed workforces where there is increased risk of communication breakdowns
What is a Knowledge Transfer Plan?
A knowledge transfer plan provides a structured approach to identifying, capturing, and disseminating knowledge across an organization. It facilitates both short-term and long-term knowledge sharing.
The main elements of a knowledge transfer plan include:
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Knowledge audit – Identify what knowledge should be transferred, where it resides, and what the priorities are.
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Capture methods – Use techniques like mentorship, documentation, and post-project reviews to capture knowledge.
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Transfer mechanisms – Share knowledge via methods like training, communities of practice, and lesson learned libraries.
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Governance – Establish roles and responsibilities for managing the ongoing knowledge transfer process.
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Technology – Use knowledge management systems and tools to store, structure, and make knowledge accessible.
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Metrics – Track the effectiveness of knowledge transfer and iterate on the approach as needed.
An effective knowledge transfer plan both preserves existing knowledge and sets up reusable frameworks for continual knowledge sharing within the organization.
Why is a Knowledge Transfer Plan Important?
There are several key benefits that a well-constructed knowledge transfer plan provides:
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Mitigates risk – Ensures critical information and skills are retained when employees leave the organization.
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Accelerates learning – Allows new employees to ramp up faster by leveraging existing knowledge.
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Drives consistency – Standardizes skills and process knowledge across the organization.
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Enables innovation – Connects people across silos to share ideas and insights.
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Reduces costs – Decreases spend on external training and consultants by leveraging internal knowledge.
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Supports remote workers – Provides tools and frameworks for knowledge sharing across distributed teams.
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Improves collaboration – Breaks down knowledge silos by encouraging open sharing of information.
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Identifies gaps – Highlights skills gaps that can be addressed through training programs.
For both established companies and high-growth startups, an effective knowledge transfer plan is essential for optimizing human capital.
How to Build a Knowledge Transfer Plan
Developing and implementing a successful knowledge transfer plan involves several key steps:
Identify Critical Knowledge
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Conduct a knowledge audit to determine what knowledge is most critical for business operations and growth.
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Interview subject matter experts to identify tacit knowledge they apply that should be preserved.
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Assess potential knowledge loss due to upcoming retirements, attrition, or organizational changes.
Prioritize Needs
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Classify knowledge by importance, availability, and frequency of use.
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Focus first on transferring knowledge that is high value, hard to replace, and frequently utilized.
Capture Knowledge
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Use techniques like mentorship, exit interviews, documentation, and post-project reviews.
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Transfer both explicit and tacit knowledge.
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Store documented knowledge in repositories like intranets, wikis, and e-learning platforms.
Transfer Knowledge
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Develop training programs, communities of practice, lesson learned initiatives, and job shadowing.
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Connect employees through cross-training, mentor programs, and cross-departmental collaboration.
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Provide coaching and leadership opportunities to ingrain knowledge transfer.
Measure Impact
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Gather feedback from participants and managers on effectiveness of knowledge transfer.
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Track operational metrics like time to productivity and training costs pre and post-implementation.
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Continuously refine knowledge transfer approach based on data.
Best Practices for Effective Knowledge Transfer
Some key best practices include:
- Make knowledge transfer part of daily work rather than a separate initiative
- Incentivize sharing of knowledge throughout the organization
- Use technology to organize and distribute information efficiently
- Capture knowledge early and often, not just when employees leave
- Employ multiple transfer methods appealing to diverse learning styles
- Focus on communicating context and purpose, not just facts
- Budget time and resources expressly for knowledge transfer activities
- Celebrate and recognize employees who actively participate in sharing knowledge
Knowledge Transfer Plan Example
Here is an example of a simple knowledge transfer plan for an engineering organization expecting significant retirements:
Goals
- Capture tribal knowledge before retirement of 40% of senior engineers over next 3 years
- Shorten new engineer onboarding ramp-up time from 12 months to 6 months
Critical Knowledge
- Design principles and best practices
- Lessons learned from past projects
- Company-specific engineering processes and standards
- Client history and requirements
Knowledge Capture
- Document project post mortems
- Shadow senior engineers
- Conduct interviews to collect insights
Knowledge Transfer
- Create a mentorship program between retiring and new engineers
- Develop an e-learning course on company engineering practices
- Share post mortem info via presentations and a database
- Host informal monthly “lessons learned” sessions for engineers
Metrics
- Measure time for new engineers to reach stated productivity milestones
- Gather feedback on effectiveness of mentorship and training programs
- Track usage of post mortem databases and resources
A thoughtful knowledge transfer plan considers both what knowledge is critical to retain as well as how to effectively extract and share that information.
Key Takeaways on Knowledge Transfer Plans
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Knowledge transfer plans provide a structured approach to preserving and disseminating critical organizational knowledge.
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Effective plans identify priority knowledge, capture it through various techniques, transfer it across the business, and measure impact.
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Knowledge transfer minimizes risk, accelerates learning, reduces costs, and drives innovation.
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Best practices include integrating knowledge transfer into daily work, providing incentives, and using technology to share information.
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A strategic, well-executed knowledge transfer plan is crucial for organizational agility and optimizing human capital.
Knowledge is a core competitive asset. A knowledge transfer plan enables companies to fully leverage this intangible asset both now and into the future. With proper strategy and execution, knowledge transfer delivers immense value.
What is a Knowledge Transfer Plan?
In the workplace, knowledge transfer is defined as the process of storing and sharing employees’ institutional knowledge and best practices. A knowledge transfer plan is a documented approach to capturing, preserving, and sharing three different types of knowledge:
- Explicit knowledge: Knowledge that is easy to articulate and write down (e.g., step-by-step instructions to complete a process).
- Implicit knowledge: The application of explicit knowledge (e.g., best practices an employee has learned from completing a process).
- Tacit knowledge: Knowledge gained from personal experience that is more difficult to express (e.g., skills an employee developed while completing a process.
Implementing a knowledge transfer plan will prevent knowledge loss when tenured employees leave. It will also help you establish a central source of company information, where all employees—whether they are new, experienced, on-site, or remote—can access up-to-date company knowledge.
And because employees will always know where to find accurate company information, you’ll minimize the time employees spend searching through emails, files, and Slack messages to find the information they need, therefore boosting productivity.
Here are five steps to creating an efficient and effective knowledge transfer plan:
Define the Knowledge You Need to Keep
If you haven’t given much thought to what information you should make available to your team or how to capture and provide access to it, there’s no time like the present.
Begin by carefully considering what kinds of knowledge are useful to people every day—from simple information, like how to log a customer service call in your CRM, to more complex knowledge, like the best strategies for responding to tough customer objections throughout the sales process. If you don’t identify this information, you’ll not only fail to ensure processes and behaviors are consistent across the organization, but you’ll leave documentation to chance and risk losing valuable knowledge every time someone moves on.
- To identify the most valuable knowledge, ask yourself a few questions:
- Who are your top performers and subject matter experts?
- What do these employees know that others don’t?
- How does your organization or team handle tasks when these employees are out sick, on vacation, or otherwise unavailable?
- What information do top employees know that others ask about most?
- How is this information saved, if at all?
In other words, if your most valuable employees put in their notices tomorrow, you need to make sure you know exactly what knowledge would be leaving with them. Then, you need to create a process to preserve it.
What is Knowledge Transfer?
What is a knowledge transfer plan?
Businesses use knowledge transfer plans when someone leaves the company to fill the gaps in knowledge that might exist after the employee’s departure. Companies typically activate a knowledge transfer plan to align with the departing employee’s timeline. This ensures the team remains cohesive and knowledgeable once they leave.
What is a transfer of knowledge?
A transfer of knowledge ensures that everyone who needs access can effectively view the key info contained in the plan. These plans cover both explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is industry-standard or official knowledge that explains practices.
Does a knowledge transfer plan create a skills gap?
For example, a business with knowledge transfer plans in place might find it easier to downsize departments. This can mean that an employee’s departure from the company won’t create a skills gap because the employee’s peers took the time to learn information about the position in order to find another person to best fill the position.
Is there a universal knowledge transfer plan?
Since every company is different, a universal knowledge transfer plan doesn’t exist. But using a basic knowledge transfer plan template as a starting point is a great idea. You can customize it to create an effective strategy that works for your business. We’ve whipped up a knowledge transfer template you can use to get started:
