Maria Granados provides some top tips for retaining the brainpower of social enterprise staff even after they leave
Imagine you work in an inspiring social enterprise (SE) that creates social and economic value as an independent publisher. With ten members, every person is essential for the organisation. One day, you lose the financial director who was an excellent and dedicated worker, but unfortunately, he held specialist knowledge in his head which was not shared with other members of the team. Key processes, contacts and experiences were gone. The SE suffers immensely, and during the following six months of struggling and loosing key clients and suppliers, it only just manages to survive.
This story, which many of us fear becoming a reality for our organisation, shows the importance of identifying and valuing the experience and knowledge that every staff member the organisation has. Knowing what you know and more importantly knowing what you don’t know is an important task, and can determine at some point the future of the organisation.
Encourage an environment of trust, which will encourage people to share their expertise and knowledge
Maria Granados
Social enterprises are surrounded by important knowledge that allows them to operate every day, to support their clients' needs, serve their communities more effectively, define their future plans, and create social, environmental and economic value that makes them unique and crucial change agents for our society. SEs should manage this important resource, but how can they do it?
Managing, creating, cultivating, applying, using and protecting valuable knowledge is a task that involves not only new activities, systems or procedures, but more importantly, it involves people. So, if you want to manage your organisation's knowledge and create value from it, you should focus on creating a strategy for this.
Creating a culture or a working environment where people can collaborate, ask questions, participate in decisions and learn from each other is key. This helps all members develop a shared understanding of the SE.
Continually remind all members of what the SE's mission is, why it is doing this and where it is going. This creates a sense of involvement and contributions among members that encourage knowledge growth.
Encourage an environment of trust, which will encourage people to share their expertise and knowledge. It’s important to allow this trust to emerge and develop by giving people the opportunity to know each other better. Coffee rooms, days out, open space offices, video conferencing more than telephone calls are just a few things that can help.
Provide all members with opportunities to learn new things and receive training internally and externally. This will result in new knowledge being built up for the social enterprise.
Make efforts not to formalise every step and process in the SE. Some things are better shared verbally or by experiencing them informally. This may sound risky but it is the only way that people can really internalise what is needed and come up with better ways of doing things.
These are just some of the methods SEs can adopt to manage knowledge. Having the knowledge you already possess about the community and clients can help to legitimise the social enterprise and show the world, and future clients and funders, all the good you do.
Finally, by knowing what you don’t know you can be prepare for what is coming, plan your future, and provide more value to your clients, communities and the environment.
Dr Maria Granados is a lecturer of business information management and operations at Westminster Business School.
