Managing Brain Drain for a Global Professional Services Firm

Situation

Our client, a large global professional services firm, was facing a number of issues related to company “brain drain.” In certain roles, there was substantial employee turn-over and in others there were long-tenured employees who were retiring taking valuable expertise with them. These were compounded by the fact that few processes were defined and documented and there was little accountability to adhering to standard methods.

Action

Some of our key activities included:

• Developing and facilitating a rapid design session with a cross- functional, multi-divisional team to map out an end-to-end process and methods and procedures
• Within this session we defined multiple work & project scenarios so we could develop methods and procedures against various situations they encounter
• Completed a comprehensive analysis and harvest with over 10 separate roles with the organization through 1:1’s, group sessions and job observation - to map their key processes, roles/responsibilities, accountabilities and decision parameters
• Conducted an impact and feasibility session with leadership to highlight pain points in the processes, determine impact to organization and prioritizing which ones to focus on
• Developed recommendations for how processes could be improved to better meet their objectives
• Created multiple communities of practices where employees, on a monthly basis, rotated responsibility for sharing knowledge and tips with their colleagues
• Developed a structure and framework for a knowledge repository for their company

Results

Cross-functional collaboration has improved dramatically within the organization measured by a customized survey that was developed for the initiative. Also, the partners of the firm report observing significantly improved productivity due to having deliverables and knowledge easily accessible at everyone’s fingertips.