Preventing alumni brain drain
Taking things for granted rarely works out well
Last week we talked about why it’s better to keep folks in the company after they leave your team, and ways to help make that happen. One thing I mentioned is a pretty obvious benefit: keeping the accumulated knowledge from vanishing along with your experienced team member. But that’s not going to happen automatically if your ex-employee ends up staying with your company in a different role. You need to find ways to make it happen, and keep that information available to your team. So that’s what we’re going to discuss in a bit more depth today.
Out of sight, out of mind
The challenge: once your former employee—hereafter alumna—leaves your team for another role in the company, your relationship will obviously change significantly. You can’t expect to reach out to her and get a response immediately, you won’t necessarily know her current workload, you probably aren’t going to have regular 1:1s with her going forward, and you definitely can’t assign work to her. There are a few major reasons for this, which are probably already apparent to you but are still worth stating explicitly:
Your alumna is learning a new role. While you remember her as a rockstar at Linux troubleshooting, or soothing angry customers, or her ability to Google anything, she’s now focused on learning backend engineering’s code standards, or reviewing her first pull requests, or getting her development environment set up. She’s flexing new muscles and therefore…
She’s not doing support things anymore. Again, obvious when you state it, but we tend to think of people in ways we’re used to. Your alumna was a fantastic support engineer, what do you mean she’s not that anymore? It’s important to make that mental adjustment as quickly as possible so you don’t find yourself caught out when a tricky Windows issue comes in and you’ve forgotten you no longer have a Windows expert on your team.
At the risk of stating the extremely obvious, your alumna no longer reports to you. While she may be willing to help out from time to time (more about this later), her relationship to you and to your team will be more like an external contractor than an employee. If you need her for more than the occasional question, that’s something you’ll need to negotiate with her new manager.
Beyond that, as the header of this section suggests, relationships naturally change and fade when you’re not interacting as regularly. Even though your alumna is still part of your company, she’s moved on from your team. You can’t continue to treat her as a support engineer when she’s busy learning the ropes of another role entirely.
Keeping the fires burning
There are two broad categories of things you can do to keep the relationship, and flow of knowledge, alive between your team and your alumna: formal and informal measures. Let’s look at them in that order.
Formal
As I alluded to above, any ongoing arrangement between your alumna and the support team will have to be mediated through her new leadership. Perhaps this is something you arrange with them when you’re working on the process to have her join that team in the first place, or maybe it’s something arranged post hoc when you realize that you still need some of the expertise that she provides on a regular basis. Whatever you decide, however, will also have to be acceptable to the alumna too: you’re not horse-trading here. Your alumna gets a say, and if she wants a clean break, so be it. There is a whole spectrum of agreements here that might work for you and for your alumna’s new role; here are a few examples:
Ongoing mentorship: For more senior team members, it can make sense to retain them in a mentorship position for other team members. Regular checkins, coaching sessions, and knowledge transfer can help bring some seasoning to more junior team members, and soften the blow of losing an experienced hand on the team.
Training replacement: Especially on smaller teams, it can be a struggle to have the capacity to train up new team members while still keeping on top of the support day-to-day. Your alumna may be able to fill in some of these gaps, doing intensive training with their own replacement while they’re transitioning into a new role and have few responsibilities beyond their own onboarding process.
Designated backup: From time to time your team is going to experience ticket surge periods, where you receive a much higher volume of support issues than usual. Maybe there’s an outage or other support incident, or maybe it’s just a full moon. Whatever the reason, having a formal agreement with your alumna(e) to step in and assist in these moments, or other times when you’re understaffed, can relieve a lot of stress around your team’s capacity planning.
Regular Q&A: When a team member leaves for another role, there is rarely enough time to transfer all of their knowledge before they’re gone. Take advantage of their continued availability by arranging for regular knowledge transfer sessions with the rest of your team. Encourage your team to think about all of the times they’ve reached out to your alumna for assistance, and come prepared to these sessions to pick her brain on those topics. After a few of these, your team should be significantly better prepared to field issues that they might have previously deferred to your alumna.
Subject matter expert (SME): Along the same lines, if your alumna was a master of something that isn’t easy to transfer over a few Q&A sessions, let’s say Terraform, then she might be able to serve as a team SME on that specific topic for a while, or even indefinitely. As long as the specific parameters are clear, she could commit to answering questions, or assisting, with support issues related to Terraform. In the longer term, of course, the goal must be to build this expertise on your team, but this can be a good way to fill the gap until that is achieved.
Show me the money: with her new manager's permission, you may be able to set up a contractor-like arrangement where your alumna does work for your team outside normal business hours. In exchange, she gets additional pay … or equity … or whatever makes the most sense to do.
Informal
Instead of, or in addition to, a formal agreement to keep your alumna connected to your team, it’s worth making an effort to keep personal relationships alive. While none of these are going to guarantee your alumna’s availability to help your team out, the stronger relationship will certainly make it more likely that she’ll want to assist where she can.
Invite your alumna to team meetings: Optionally, of course—she’ll have plenty on her plate with her new job! But if she wants to check in on what the support team is up to, or help keep you current on what her new team is working on, make it as easy as possible with a standing invitation to your regular team meetings.
Invite her to other team events: For example, one of my support teams had a quarterly hackathon where we’d spend the afternoon working on one-off projects. Alumni were always welcome to these events, and if they could swing it with their current workload, they’d sometimes join in to build something new for an afternoon and join in the show-and-tell later.
Keep in touch personally: Just because she’s not your direct report anymore doesn’t mean you can’t keep up a 1:1 with her, though obviously you’ll want to change the frequency. Monthly or even quarterly is probably a better cadence. You can continue a coaching or mentorship relationship if you’re both comfortable with it, and help her adjust to her new role from the sidelines.
Though it’s much better to lose a strong employee to another internal opportunity than to have them leave the company entirely, don’t assume that you’ll be able to keep using them as a resource. That takes work and preparation to achieve, but the rewards can be great. If you can ensure that your alumna is willing and able to assist after she moves on, you’ll put your team in a much stronger position to succeed after her departure.
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