The employee who knows everything could be your biggest business risk

The resignation itself is not always the biggest problem. It is what happens afterwards. The owner needs to check something in the accounting system. Nobody else knows how to do it. A supplier calls about an order. The person who normally deals with them has left. A customer wants an update. Nobody is quite sure what was agreed. Then someone asks: “Where did they keep all that information?” This is how a small business can discover that too much of its day to day knowledge was sitting with one employee.

It usually happens without anyone planning it

The employee may not even have been hired to do all those things. They were originally brought in to handle accounts. Then they started helping with suppliers. They learned the stock system because somebody had to. 

They began dealing with a few customers because the owner was busy. A year or two later, everyone knows to ask them. There is nothing unusual about an employee becoming more capable. The problem is that nobody else learns the same things.

What happens when they are away?

You do not have to wait for a resignation to find out whether this is happening in your business. Ask what would happen if the person was off work for two weeks. Could someone else pay the suppliers? Could they process an order? Could they find the customer history?

 Could they access the software they need? Could they explain what needs to happen next? If the answer to most of those questions is no, the business has become dependent on one person. For a small company, that can cause real delays.

Start with the things that cannot wait

There is no need to write a giant company manual. Take the five or ten things that have to happen every week. It could be:

• Processing invoices
• Paying suppliers
• Placing stock orders
• Sending customer quotations
• Processing sales orders
• Running payroll
• Updating the accounting system
• Managing a key customer account

Then ask who else knows how each one works. If the answer is nobody, that is where to start.

Let another employee sit next to them

This does not need to become another project. When the employee processes the next supplier payment, let someone else sit with them. When they deal with an order, show the other person what happens.

 If they use a particular piece of software, let the other employee use it under supervision. It is much easier to learn this while the person who knows the job is still there. It is much harder when they have already left and the business is trying to work it out from old emails.

The employee may be carrying too much

There is also a warning sign for the employee. If everyone goes to the same person whenever something goes wrong, that person may be doing several jobs without the business formally recognising it. 

They might be handling accounts, helping customers, chasing suppliers and fixing problems that technically belong to someone else. The owner may see someone who is dependable. The employee may see a job that keeps getting bigger.  That difference matters. An employee who has become the answer to every problem can eventually decide to look elsewhere.

SMEs cannot afford to lose the basics

A larger company can usually move work between departments when somebody leaves. A small business has fewer people. That makes it more important to know where the business is relying on one person. The answer is not to stop employees from becoming the people who know their jobs well. It is to make sure somebody else can take over when they are not there. Because the worst time to ask “How did they do this?” is the day after they leave.