How an $800MM Nasdaq med-tech company leveraged Sugarwork to stop the retirement brain drain
Sugarwork recently worked with an $800MM Nasdaq-listed med-tech company with about 750 employees, of which one third — the engineering and R&D department — were college-educated in engineering or related fields, and the other two thirds were highly skilled blue collar workers.
The Challenge
Retaining niche tacit knowledge held by hard-to-find employees
As its blue-collar workforce began to retire, fewer younger workers were interested in learning the skills the company needed, such as plastic molding. Adopting a structured approach to retaining this specialized knowledge in-house became a priority, as the organization looked to de-risk a situation in which relatively few people held knowledge critical to the success of the business.
Collaborating with Sugarwork for tactical knowledge transfer
The company chose to partner with Sugarwork to ensure they retained the valuable tacit knowledge held by their blue collar workforce, but quickly widened the scope across other departments. Sugarwork was leveraged across engineering, manufacturing operations, and talent development, providing employees with a prescribed way to capture and transfer knowledge.
Further, Sugarwork provided management with visibility into the status of the process. This was beneficial because knowledge transfer is a task that is important but not urgent, and is frequently pushed back when emergencies crop up. The fact that management put a focus on knowledge transfer with Sugarwork, and had visibility into the process, meant that it was treated as a priority through the organization.
“Before Sugarwork, I could communicate to HR the need to capture knowledge, but it’s hard to understand how thorough the initiative is. Sugarwork changed this by making it easy for me to understand the depth of knowledge we were capturing and where we were in the process,” said David Battat, former CEO.
Leveraging Sugarwork to connect strategy and talent
From a management perspective, there was an extra challenge around talent. In this highly-skilled and regulated industry, finding the right hires takes time, and onboarding them can take up to a year. One or two key people leaving the company can result in it losing the race to file a patent, which means that months or years of investment and future potential profits are lost.
Having the right skills on hand to execute on strategy is critical. But that is easier said than done.
“I’ve gone into meetings and said ‘I think we should do X’, and received enthusiastic responses. However, the reality can look very different when you dive down several layers deeper and ask ‘Do our people possess the right skills? Should we invest millions in this specialized equipment just yet? What if this key person leaves?’” said David Battat.
That’s where Sugarwork outputs which provide insights into the skills across the organization were invaluable in terms of providing a tool for the management team to quickly and accurately understand what their internal capabilities were.
“With Sugarwork, all of a sudden I had this map of where we were, and it was very clear to me that some of the products we wanted to pursue were not possible unless we added a lot of talent. Given the precious time and investment it takes to find and onboard skilled talent, this was hugely valuable,” said Battat.
The Result
Retaining tacit knowledge from skilled employees, and aligning strategy with talent
Sugarwork delivered two key outcomes to the company:
It ensured the organization was able to retain tacit knowledge from hard-to-find employees across a range of departments, in a structured and efficient manner that gave management insights into the process and depth of knowledge captured.
It enabled the management team to align strategy closely with talent management, ensuring they could really execute on their plans, while reducing the risk of being late to file patents.
“When you get to the strategy level, you really need to draw the connection between growth and talent, and what you can execute on is what matters for growth. Sugarwork was valuable for us in terms of knowledge transfer, but also in terms of executing our strategy, by making sure we had the right talent,” said Battat.
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