Apr 28, 2024
I'm serious
Having excellent employees is the dream. These individuals have exceptional skills, dedication, and a strong work ethic. They are a key ingredient in your secret sauce, for both how you get things done day-to-day and how you solve new problems. So what am I talking about - the danger of an excellent employee? Here are a couple of key risks to consider:
Single Point of Failure: One company I worked with had a guy in the stockroom that was a human ERP. He knew where the BoM was wrong and the engineers hadn’t fixed it. He knew which components always needed a few extras issued because techs would drop them. He was fast and efficient and super smart. So what if he wins the lottery tomorrow and retires early? Or a million other more likely things that might take him away? The productivity hit would be massive.
Burnout: These excellent people pursue perfection and take on responsibility beyond their job description. These are awesome qualities, but they can lead to long working hours and chronic stress. The human ERP guy often worked late and over the weekend to get things done to his standards. The toll these things take on a person’s well-being may eventually result in diminished productivity, increased absenteeism, and, ultimately, a loss of talent (see risk #1).
Have you identified these employees? Have you tried to get knowledge transfer going and put some backups in place to reduce burnout and build resiliency of your processes? Have you gotten your excellent employee on board? Since there is, by definition, no one at the company who knows better than your superstar how to get their job done, they often don’t take very easily to someone coming in and trying to put guardrails in place.
Is it a lost cause? Of course not. The first step is identifying the outstanding individuals and which processes rely solely on them to run. Second is to develop a cross-functional team to get the knowledge transfer in place, a couple of others trained, and the upstream and downstream processes cleaned up. You do this by challenging your excellent employee to lead the discussion about how they can do their job even better, and, better yet, how others can do their jobs better too.
If you know you have risk in this area and simply have no bandwidth to deal with it, I can help. Reach out.