While many HR professionals and their employers are preparing for an aging workforce by identifying future personnel needs, a deeper problem remains: the transfer of institutional knowledge. While traditional training methods of cross-training, shadowing, PowerPoint slide decks, and user manuals are certainly preferable to an ostrichlike approach, the adoption of technology to support a dramatically shifting workforce is the more effective solution to retaining and transferring the knowledge base critical to your employees’ success. The Assetas mobile-friendly software solution provides a platform for process improvement and decision making. Our no-code workflow automation and easy to build forms that you can tailor to your organization’s unique needs, capturing that critical information and institution knowledge that can take years of experience to attain in a traditional setting.

Institutional knowledge can enable entrant employees to make decisions more effectively by leveraging the past. Without a knowledge base, business decisions may lack a foundation of tacit experience or evidential support. By preserving data, documents, and records plus codifying insights, experiences, and perceptions from seasoned employees, your company will establish a collective knowledge base. Technology platforms are an efficient means to store and organize large amounts of data and know-how.

Workflow automation, or the automation of pre-established processes based on business rules, can replace outdated manual and paper-based processes that are at risk when key employees change over. A cloud-based workflow automation solution aggregates critical process knowledge in a centralized location that is accessible across your organization. By implementing automated workflows, your organization will reap the added benefits of process standardization across business units and improved efficiency. If upcoming audits and meeting regulatory requirements are a concern, automating workflows can assist in achieving company-wide compliance. If your organization is relying on the institutional knowledge of industry veterans with decades of experience to drive compliance obligations, identify safety issues, and navigate complex processes, then your organization may be faced with critical gaps in knowledge when these employees leave or retire. Translating that deep knowledge into cloud-based checklists, forms, and inspections can preserve that knowledge, while further standardizing business processes and eliminating the need for paper-based forms. Checklists, forms, and inspections are simple to configure in Assetas, and have the added functionality of capturing photos, triggering tasks and emails, and informing the reporting of key business metrics, among other benefits.

We recognize the significant effort and investment that companies make when it comes to planning for workforce turnover, employee training programs, and strategizing around business processes. Embracing workflow automation and cloud-based forms can help your organization optimize the return on investment into preserving critical business knowledge.