Global Companies Are Dropping Knowledge

The mistake for organizations in any industry is to neglect proper talent management. Plenty of blog entries here have explored this self-evident wisdom. But let's again examine the driving dynamics of poor talent management and what the implications of it are.

As they inevitably slash their workforces during an economic recession, organizations that have failed to adopt proper talent management technology inevitability let go of productive and unproductive employees alike. The employees this leaves—those who manage to dodge the layoffs—may or may not possess the kind of legacy knowledge that the organization will need in order to compete once markets come back to life.

Contrast this with the organization that manages its forced attrition effectively because it has in place efficient, robust talent management technology and knows how to use it. Clearly, such an organization is at a marked advantage as it faces the same external reality.

A lack of investment in employees is indeed threatening the ability of many leading industrialized countries to maintain global competitiveness in the post-recession economy. This is according to Knowledge—The New Commodity, an economic study commissioned by Cognisco, provider of technology and services to measure and track employee knowledge and confidence. In comparison, according to the 301 firms surveyed in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s February 2009 Asia Business Outlook Survey, few businesses in emerging Asian markets plan to decrease training budgets.

Keen to help Western industry combat this tendency, Cognisco recently launched the new products Configure, an administrative hub of Cognisco’s knowledge development software; and Reveal, the real-time reporting interface; and upgrades to Run, the platform that delivers and "plays" Cognisco’s appraisal programs and modules to assist the development of individual employee’s knowledge; and Evaluate, a single-module, one-event appraisal solution.

Says Mary J. Clarke, chief executive officer of Cognisco, "We are finding a great interest in what we do" to help organizations determine whom they must let go vs. retain. "The idea is that you cycle your staff so you know exactly what the capability and confidence levels of your workforce are. A large client of ours, for instance, was about to cut its workforce by about one-quarter, and the criterion this organization was going to use was highest paid to least paid. We changed their minds, convincing them to identify their knowledge custodians before conducting mass layoffs."