What If Key Employees Leave Your Business? Things You Need To Do
Very few businesses can claim to be prepared for the loss of key employees
. An unexpected or unplanned event would often cause disruptions to businesses.
When an employee who has worked with you for over a period of time leaves your business, it is quite a gut wrenching experience. The parting of ways may have been on good terms with a period of handover, but it does not change the fact that so much information is walking out the door with your former employee.
There is more coming
While laboring through a period of being understaffed and overworked you are then faced with the task of recruiting a new employee to fill the vacant position. Hopefully, the new employee will come up to speed and pick up where the former employee left off during the probation and training period.
The problem is: What exactly was it that the former employee really did? They always seemed to be busy and on the rare occasion that they were absent due to illness, there were those problems that arose that were only truly resolved when they returned and took control and cleaned things up.
Find a better way
To minimize the impact of situations like this on our business, there is quite a lot that can be done, which is good news. There are some required steps in order to complete this part of your business development and you need to give it a little effort.
There is an established path that you can follow to get your business in order and the benefits to you and your employees are much farther reaching than just minimizing the impact of key employees leaving you.
The following is by no means a definitive list of what is required. But it does give you some idea of the steps required.
A flexible and forward thinking Organization Chart that defines the positions you require in your business is what you need to create.
Determining the responsibilities for the positions in the business is also a must.
In the business, you need to assign employees to relevant positions.
Critical to your business are some key information and these need to be documented and made available to your employees.
Work with your employees to define what it is they do, how they do it and most importantly how it could be done better.
Record, optimize then implement the business systems you have identified.
Assign the business systems to the relevant positions and monitor their use.
By consistently following these steps for all positions in your business you will insulate yourself from some of the problems that occur when key employees leave your business.