By Yaw Ananga
Preparing for employee transitions
A successful business is made up of several elements working together; each element matters. The adage “It’s about the people” has never been truer. Even in the age of AI, without good people, few businesses can succeed.
Unfortunately, employees are not eternal, and all eventually retire or move on. However, business must go on, and business owners must view that transition as a process that costs more than labor. When an experienced machinist leaves, the business may lose decades of judgment about setups and tolerances, as well as intimate knowledge of tooling, materials, and machine behavior. You may also lose troubleshooting expertise and knowledge of customer preferences. In the average small business, much of this knowledge comes from experience and may never have been formally recorded.
Businesses can minimize the disruption and knowledge loss that happens through retirement by preparing standard operating procedures for key tasks. A standard operating procedure, or SOP, documents the safest and most reliable way to complete an important task.
A useful SOP is not a thick binder written for auditors, but is instead a practical tool supported by visuals like photographs and videos, checklists, and decision guides that employees can use while doing the work.
Owners should make it a habit to identify and document knowledge that could interrupt production, compromise quality, or damage customer relationships if one employee suddenly became unavailable. The goal is not to SOP everything (in the army, there is an SOP for the right way to put on a belt), but to protect the knowledge the business cannot afford to lose.
What depends on one person’s know-how that is not written down anywhere?
To ensure that knowledge is retained in the organization as people retire or resign, a few steps are important:
- Identify anything that depends on just one person: List the machines and customer jobs, the key setups, inspections, and production decisions that only one employee can perform confidently. Pay attention to work that stops whenever that person is absent or requires employees to call them for help.
- Look beyond the official job description: Experienced machinists often know which tools work best, how a particular machine behaves, and which tolerances require extra attention. Furthermore, they know how to recognize problems by sound, vibration, f or tool wear. This judgment may be more valuable than traditional written instructions.
- Rank the risk to the business: Not all gaps pose the same risk, so prioritize undocumented knowledge by its effect on safety, quality, production capacity, or revenue. Start with knowledge whose loss could have the greatest impact, such as shutting down a machine, delaying a major customer order, or causing expensive rework.
What is a practical way to capture that knowledge?
- Document the work where it happens: Observe the machinist performing an actual setup or production run. Capture the sequence through short videos, photographs, annotated setup sheets, tool lists, inspection points, and brief checklists rather than relying entirely on written descriptions. A picture or video is worth a thousand words or more.
- Record judgment and exceptions: Focus more on the potentially disruptive issues than the mundane. Basic instructions explain what to do under normal conditions, but valuable experience often concerns what to do when something goes wrong. Document warning signs, common failure modes, troubleshooting steps, acceptable adjustments, and the cutoff point at which the operator should stop and seek help.
- Test the instructions with another employee: Designate a less experienced machinist to complete the task using the documented process while the expert observes. Questions and mistakes from the less experienced machinist will reveal what the instructions have omitted. Then revise the SOP until another qualified employee can use it successfully without constant guidance. The mindset should be to create an SOP “for dummies.”
How do you get experienced employees to buy into documenting what they do?
When trying to get people to share their knowledge via SOPs, it is vital to signal that the intent is not to replace the expert, because making them feel replaced is the surest way to get the process stonewalled. To preempt that, a few steps are important:
- Explain the purpose honestly: In order to gain buy-in, you need to position documentation as recognition of the employee’s expertise and protection for the company, customers, and remaining team. Emphasize that the goal is to preserve their contribution, reduce emergency interruptions, and ultimately prepare others who lack the experience and skill, not to make the employee disposable.
- Empower the expert with ownership of the process: People like to be acknowledged and elevated. It is prudent to ask the machinist to help determine what should be documented and which methods are correct. Allow the expert to review and approve the final SOP. Most people are more likely to participate when their judgment is respected rather than extracted by someone who does not understand the work.
- Recognize and reward knowledge transfer: To get participants motivated, treat training and documentation as real work, not an additional duty squeezed into breaks or the end of a shift. Provide scheduled time, appropriate recognition, and, where warranted, additional compensation or a knowledge transfer bonus tied to completed and successfully tested procedures.
Conclusion
Retirement is a reality and an inevitability, and when an experienced machinist retires, the company can lose production knowledge, troubleshooting ability, and the practical judgment that took decades to develop. To counter this, develop effective SOPs that are accessible at the point of work and combine written instructions with supporting materials like setup sheets and checklists, visual aids like photographs and videos, and troubleshooting guidance.
Ultimately, capturing knowledge is only the first step in knowledge transfer. The business must also train other employees and require them to perform the work as laid out to confirm the knowledge has been transferred successfully. To get the ball rolling, identify the three jobs most dependent on one employee right now and follow the steps to prepare an instructional SOP.
