What happens when the employee who knew everything leaves

The time is now, not the next time someone leaves

You might think the best time to write your procedures is while someone’s on vacation. It’s a good excuse. But let’s be honest. In a small business, nobody has a backup. The person going on vacation in July does double the work before leaving, hands off the bare minimum because showing takes longer than doing, and comes back to double the work again. It’s still the best excuse to test whether the business holds up without that person, but it’s not a quiet time, and I won’t sell it to you as one.

The real answer is that a procedure doesn’t get written in a window. It gets written as you go. Every operation you set up should come with its procedure, and that procedure gets updated when the operation changes. One at a time, continuously.

You start with the one that hurts when the right person isn’t there.

You don’t have to write anything

This is where it almost always gets stuck, and it’s not for lack of goodwill.

The person who knows everything already knows everything. What crushes her isn’t the knowing. It’s having to write, organize, take screenshots, and clean it all up while she’s already doing a job and a half. From the inside, the task looks endless, so she never starts. And I get it.

That’s exactly why it works better with someone from outside. You’re the expert in your trade, not me. You show me, you explain, you work the way you always do. I record, organize, and clean up. You only provide what nobody else has: the knowledge. The rest is my part of the job.

Start with the why, never the how

This is the step everyone skips, and it’s the one that makes the difference between a procedure people follow and a procedure people understand.

Before the steps, you need the context: what this operation is for, what you’re trying to get out of it, what happens if it’s done wrong. Someone who knows what they’re trying to avoid makes the right call in the cases the procedure didn’t plan for. Someone following steps by rote freezes at the first surprise.

A manufacturer once asked me for a procedure for getting their boxes ready to ship. The procedure itself is drop tests, measurements, a form. Put like that, it’s busywork. But once the team understands that the point is for the boxes to arrive solid enough that nobody has to repack them at the other end (and what it costs every time that happens), the tests stop being a chore. The motion is the same. The reason changes everything.

Film where the work happens

There are two kinds of operations: the ones that happen on a screen, and the ones that happen in your hands. Both get documented, just not the same way.

For the screen, it’s simple: we get on a call, the person shares their screen and explains while they work, and we record.

For physical work, there’s a trick I use all the time. The person joins the call twice: once on the computer for the screen, once on the phone in their hand. The phone becomes a mobile camera. They walk around, show the warehouse, the workbench, the box, and flip the camera around to explain. I see what they’re doing, where they’re doing it, and with what.

I don’t need to be there. I just need them to be available.

And I never let them just talk on their own. A monologue gives you a video where everything seems clear. It’s when someone asks questions that the grey areas come out: the “it depends,” the “except when it’s so-and-so,” the “oh right, I forgot.” Those answers are worth more than the rest of the recording.

Then it gets written down

The recording isn’t the procedure. It’s the raw material. Nobody is going to rewatch 40 minutes of video to find one step on a Tuesday morning.

I put the document together while it’s fresh: the steps in order, a screenshot or photo for each step, the exact name of the tool used, and where the information ends up. Precise enough that someone who has never done the operation can do it just by following along.

The video stays. It’s there for tone and for special cases. The document is what you open when you’re working.

A procedure isn’t real until it’s been tested

A document handed over isn’t a procedure. It’s a draft until proven otherwise.

The proof is someone else running the whole operation while the person who knows is still there beside them. Not a read-through, not a skim: the real thing, for real.

That’s always where the rest comes out. The password saved in one person’s browser and nowhere else. The file sitting on a workstation instead of the server. The shortcut that only exists on her computer. The step she forgot to mention because she doesn’t even see it anymore.

We fix all of that on the spot, while there’s still someone to answer. After that, it’s a procedure.

There’s always one person like that

In almost every business I’ve seen, there’s one. Not necessarily the IT person. It’s the one who knows where things are, why it’s done that way, who to call when something’s stuck, and who notices something’s off before anyone else does. She puts in hours nobody counts.

Nobody measures her value until she’s gone. It’s not bad faith. Management is often on the sales side, and what happens on the production side stays invisible as long as it works. There’s a normal friction between the two: you have to deliver today, and documenting doesn’t bring anything in today.

That’s why knowledge transfer is never today’s emergency. Until it is.

It’s a lot smaller than it looks

Here’s what I really want you to take away.

When you’re carrying production on your shoulders and you look at everything that would need documenting, you can’t see the end of it. It looks like a wall. So you don’t start, and not starting when you’re facing a wall makes perfect sense.

Except it isn’t a wall anymore. What used to take weeks now takes hours. What used to be discouraging has become an ordinary task, with a beginning and an end.

And there’s nothing to buy. The method works with what you already have in place: your tools, your ways of doing things. The problem was never missing software. All it took was someone to handle the writing-up, and knowing it could be done.