Everything depends on one employee
Find responsibilities, relationships and knowledge held by one person.
01 · What is usually happening?
One person knows the suppliers, the machine settings or the customer terms. When they are on leave, work slows. If they leave, it stops.
This is not a people problem. It is what happens when good people carry work that was never written down.
The question people usually ask“How do we keep them?”
The more useful question“What do they know that nobody else does, and how do we share it?”
02 · Common causes
- 01Work learnt on the job and never written down
- 02One person handles key supplier or customer relationships
- 03No backup for critical tasks
- 04Passwords and files kept personally
- 05No time set aside for handover
03 · What to check now0 of 6 checked
04 · What good looks like
- 01Critical tasks listed for each key person.
- 02A named backup for each task.
- 03Routines written as short checklists.
- 04Relationships shared with a second contact.
- 05Handover practised during leave.
05 · Where this connects
This rarely stays in one department
What it can lead to: Work stops when that person is away.
Start from a problem
Work flows left to right, top to bottomKEYMost important for manufacturing
These support every part of the business
Problem
One employee knows everything
Usually connected to
How it spreads
- One person
- Their tasks
- Every team that waits for them
What it can lead to: Work stops when that person is on leave.
lamplamp can keep a written record of what that person does and remind others.
Related guidesHow to stop the owner becoming the company helpdesk
08 · lamp
lamp could keep this moving
lamp is not available yet. These are things it is being built to do.
- lamp could keep a record of recurring tasks and decisions.
- lamp could remind backups of routine work.
- lamp could collect open work into a handover list.
Does your business handle this differently?Tell us what we have missed: a cause, a check, or a better way of handling it.
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