Avoiding institutional amnesia: How to safeguard knowledge and processes before employees exit 

Nearly every professional on the planet has at one point or another been guilty of overestimating what exists outside of brains and inboxes. We reassure ourselves that someone somewhere knows how the crisis comms matrix works, or where the CEO’s favorite town hall anecdote lives, or what precisely we meant by “Q2 pivot plan – FINAL_FINAL” — until that someone isn’t here anymore, and suddenly we’re frantically reverse-engineering strategies from a Slack graveyard and a half-baked Google Doc. 

When someone leaves an organization, these missing pieces become a logistics problem, a credibility problem, a culture problem and, at worst, a chaos grenade lobbed into the heart of your organization. 

So how do you defuse it? We talked to two comms aces to find out. 

Building the habit 

For Nponano Maikori, director of internal communications at Glassdoor, the answer starts with consistency. “My teams have always relied on a combination of shared drives, structured templates and recap documents to capture how we work and why decisions are made,” she said. Documentation must become a reflex. “After key initiatives, like an organizational restructure, crisis communications or company-wide event, we take time to document what was done, how it landed and what we’d change next time.” 

That “what we’d change” bit is especially important. Good documentation preserves the wins and keeps your team from repeating past blunders, while still giving them room to evolve. “You should aim to review and update core documentation, like messaging guides, content calendars and planning tools at least once a quarter, if not sooner, should something significantly change,” Maikori said. 

But this only works if you acknowledge a fundamental truth: Comms is “part science, part soul.” (Maikori’s words again, and I may ask her to embroider them on a pillow for me.)  

Strategy lives in frameworks, sure — but also in hallway chats, gut instincts and shared glances that say, ‘this is going off the rails.’ Codifying the what is only half the job. Codifying the how and who(m) is where most teams fumble. 

Maintaining competencies 

Archana Kumar, external communications manager at power generation development and operations company Invenergy, knows this all too well. She hammered home the importance of building redundancies around key skills and processes. “Another big thing for me is making sure a specific skill set or access to programs is not only given to one person,” she said. “One person can be the subject matter expert, but it’s extremely helpful if they teach at least one other person the basics.” 

This cross-training mindset becomes critical during transitions. When a senior leader gives notice, Kumar doesn’t waste time. “My priority is to gain access to their documents and spend time with them to soak up their knowledge,” she said. “Sitting in on their meetings and having them create a transition plan or document so they can pass on knowledge to multiple people is also valuable.” You have to build for exits long before someone hands in their badge. 

But that’s not to say you need to drown in process. Kumar advocates for clarity over bloat: “It’s best to keep it simple and utilize the tools already in place.” So consider where you store information (Does your team spend more time in Google Drive or SharePoint?) to ensure that it’s readily discoverable, and ensure your naming conventions, file structure or intranet page layouts make it easy to search for.  

Even better, Kumar makes space for the human side of transfers. “There is so much value in talking to others about what you’re working on during a team meeting or one-on-one.” Make space for documentation to prompt dialogue rather than replacing it. 

In case of emergency 

Still, even the best-laid plans can be derailed by the realities of sudden turnover.  

Maikori recalls a situation where her team leader was fired abruptly with no succession or narrative plan in place. “It was extremely difficult to build a communications plan that didn’t inadvertently create more confusion or mistrust,” she said. “We had to move fast to reassure employees, manage internal speculation and rebuild a sense of direction without having access to the context that typically informs strategy.”  

What she learned was that “scenario planning, proactive documentation and having trusted relationships across HR, legal and leadership” can spare you a lot of scrambling. 

Kumar had a similar experience during a reorg. A colleague left with no time to hand off work. “For the next few months, we kept hearing ‘X was the person who always did that’ or ‘only X knew how to do that.’”  

This scenario leaves you with the digital equivalent of rummaging through someone’s desk drawers after they’ve moved out. “Even setting aside 30 minutes once a month can make a huge difference.” 

And that’s the crux of it: We are not too busy to protect the knowledge that makes us functional because that will only create more work in the future with a heap of stress on top. 

If a colleague jumping overboard would set your team adrift, it’s time to untangle your rigging and build some lifeboats. 

To recap, not because we think you weren’t paying attention, but because your future replacement might be: 

• “Communication is part science, part soul.” Codify what you can, but accept that instinct, culture and relationships are part of the architecture. 

• Document post-mortems as much as you document plans. Capture what happened and how it landed. 

• Onboarding tools, especially those with templates, matrices and voice examples, make new hires faster, smarter and less reliant on tribal knowledge. 

• “One person can be the subject matter expert, but… teach at least one other person the basics.” No one should be the single point of failure. 

• If someone announces they’re leaving, don’t let them go quietly. Sit in their meetings, collect their docs, and demand a transition doc that makes sense to more than just them. 

• Spend 30 minutes a month making sure your files, strategies and access levels don’t rely on memory and goodwill.