What Happens if Brian Leaves? The Key Employee Problem.

Brian is great at what he does. Brian is your controller—he manages all of the accounting for your small business. He keeps all of the company’s expenses properly documented, finds all of the tax deductions, manages payroll, pays all the bills, negotiates for better rates on the company’s health plans, and keeps a sharp eye on all of your accounts receivable. He’s an all-star employee.

So what would you do if Brian was in a car accident and couldn’t come to work any longer? What if Brian jumps ship and leaves for greener pastures without giving you any prior notice? How would you get someone to fill his shoes in his absence?

Succession planning for pre-determined vacancies is difficult enough, but getting someone to fill-in with no prior warning is a much more challenging assignment. Realistically, you’re not going to run out and hire someone right away. You’re going to have to make do with handing Brian’s responsibilities over to other employees in your organization—but how on Earth are they ever going to be able to match Brian’s productivity and quality of results?

This is the essence of the key employee problem.

Strategies for Mitigating the Key Employee Problem

The answer is that it’s tough. It’s unlikely that you’re going to get your other employees to create the same level of output that you had when Brian was still active in your organization, so it’s not an entirely solvable problem—but you can mitigate the impact of the loss of a key employee.

Here are a few strategies that you can implement to help mitigate the losses in productivity and output from the departures of key employees:

1. Build a company knowledge base - have a centralized system where you can store, protect and share key documents with other members of your organization. You don’t want to have to dig through Brian’s hard drive just to find all of his financial filings—these should be stored in an ordered, secure system.
2. Don’t reinvent the wheel - before any of your employees leave, have them document how they did their jobs, and have them document those jobs as processes. This is a great way to populate your knowledge base with useful information, but it does require some time investment. Capturing a business process is usually pretty easy, but having your employees capture all of their core business processes can take some time and you have to be willing to let them invest that time into building the company’s knowledge base. The benefits of this step are obvious after Brian leaves—having all of Brian’s routines documented as structured processes enables other employees to pick up where Brian left off, without spending a whole lot of time rediscovering how he did his work.
3. Have a “worst case” succession plan - think of this as preparing a will for a role in your organization. Responsibilities of that role must be filled—it’s pretty unlikely to replace Brian with someone who can hit the ground running. Thus, you should have a plan for what you’d do if any of your key employees left—if Brian, your controller, was unable to work due to a car accident, or if he left on short notice, who would pick up his slack? Perhaps you yourself would take up some of the work with the tax filings, your sales manager might have his team take up some of the accounts payable, you’d handle payroll, and so forth. These worst-case succession plans are meant to be a band-aid on your organization—they’re designed to hold you over until you can get someone else to fill in and get up to speed.

Think of these strategies as human resource disaster planning—they’re designed to help mitigate the damage done by the sudden departure of a key employee. But they can’t eliminate the entire impact of Brian’s departure. On the bright side, the first two strategies—building a knowledge base and documenting business processes—can make it a lot more efficient to train Brian’s permanent replacement.