How To Minimize The Impact Of Employees Leaving Your Long-term Project
People leave your company all the time - don't let your project be effected by it.
✨ Get inspired with the Stoic Value Notes: Your weekly guide to project & business management frameworks, Stoic wisdom and value investing insights. ✨
In ERP-projects that span 4+ years, the people helping to analyse the requirements and to implement the new system, will probably not be the same people who work with it. That’s a given.
It is not unusual nowadays for companies to have employee attrition rates of 15-20%. 20% means a complete staff turnover every 5 years.
The good news:
There are measures you can take as a project manager to dampen the impact on the success of your endeavour of people leaving the company (and your project).
The bad news: With every employee leaving the company, especially in key project roles, heaps of knowhow disappear. 😭
Knowhow about processes, about the organisation and how it functions. About the project, the tools and even about the problem the organisation faced in the past and might be doomed to repeat.
Bottom line:
People leave companies all the time.
The reasons are manyfold and range from personal to operational issues.
Generally speaking, there are four different types of employee attrition:
Voluntary: Employees choose to leave on their own accord.
Involuntary: When the company lets employees go.
Internal: Employees move internally.
Demographic-specific: Specific groups (i.e. age, gender, ethnicity) leave the company.
Some of them you can influence. Therefore, it’s especially important to have an open and transparent conversation with management about what people leaving will mean for the success of key projects - such as the introduction of a new ERP-system.
However, you will never be fully in control of the decision people take - obviously.
Still, you can minimize the impact their quitting has on your project.
Here’s how to address it:
Have a system to efficiently on-board new project members
The following five actions will ensure a smooth transition:
1 - Document your project
The main challenge to address is the loss of knowledge.
Recording what’s happening in the project is not something you do once, and then it’s done. It’s an ongoing effort to document information, and not just for the sake of on-boarding new people to the project. But to enable the flow of information and because no one in your project knows everything. 😅
That's why you should document the
decisions taken,
project organisation,
roles and responsibilities,
meeting and reporting schedules,
best practices that are being used,
project status reports and roadmap,
accesses to tools and communication channels,
documentation management systems, structure and rules,
project charter including the objectives, scope, key stakeholder, risk management (contingency planning) and deliverables.
Probably easiest is a dedicated slide deck where all this information can be stored and visualized, but also updated.
Including links to any useful resources (such as trainings and manuals) will also speed up the process and help a new project member to self-study more efficiently.
2 - Ensure access to and time with key stakeholders
Making sure new project team members have access to existing key project members and important stakeholders (e.g. sponsors) is crucial for a quick onboarding.
I usually structure these 1on1s as follows:
Mutual expectations (work products / role)
Current state / questions
Admin (availability / working methods / accessibility / deputy)
Feedback about previous approach
These 30-60 minute intro meetings will allow the new joiner not only to learn about the project organisation and the expectations of key stakeholders.
But it gives both sides a much-needed space to build a personal connection.
3 - Involve the new joiner in key meetings
Involvement (even temporarily) in steering board and core team/PMO meetings will speed up the process of getting to know the project organisation, approach and current challenges for anyone new to the project.
4 - Organise a hand-over (if possible)
As long as the project member leaving the team is still available to transfer as much of the knowhow and all the tasks to the new joiner, organising a proper hand-over is a no-brainer.
If that is not possible, make sure you allocate all the tasks among the project team before handing them back to the project member who will fill the vacant spot.
5 - Check-ins during onboarding
Either you as the project manager or in large projects, the project leader/officer, should regularly check in with the new team member to further assist with the onboarding and to clarify questions.
This is a great opportunity to strengthen the personal connection and make sure expectations and work standards are adhered to.
Also, by asking for feedback on the onboarding itself, you might be able to improve the process going forward.
And that’s it.
I hope the points mentioned above will help mitigate the negative impact people leaving your project might have.
If you think this could be helpful to someone you know, consider sharing this article with them.
Happy project managing.
PS: Have you ever found yourself in the situation that people were leaving your project team? How did you approach the brain-drain?
