Attrition Sucks – Knowledge Away From Utilities: Sustaining Institutional Knowledge – Designing from an End-User Perspective

Attrition in the context of a workforce is defined as a reduction in the number of employees. Typically, attrition occurs when someone resigns, retires, or leaves their position and a replacement does not fill the vacant role. While attrition is a common human resource issue, the United States and other industrialized nations are in the early stages of an age-related demographic change that is increasingly sucking the workforce life out of organizations. The high percentage of pension-eligible employees in the utility industry’s workforce will lead to accelerated levels of attrition in the coming years. The mass exodus of baby-boomers from the workforce population has already created a loss of institutional knowledge that is making it difficult for utilities to continue maintaining compliant operations. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that on average, 40 percent of the staff of the nation’s water and wastewater utilities are eligible to retire in the next five years (Umphres et al. 2006). Methods for retaining and managing institutional knowledge vary greatly, but the trend toward electronic – primarily web browser-compatible information systems – is now commonplace. CDM Smith has been a pioneer in implementing Operation and Maintenance Information Systems (OMIS) for the purpose of establishing baseline utility information for managed knowledge retention. We will review various approaches to knowledge retention and highlight the system that the City of Glendale, California implemented to proactively deal with attrition amongst their staff.