The nightmare: a key person is out of action
Monday morning. Your office manager, who has run the entire order processing for eight years, calls in sick. Not just for a day — the doctor is talking about several weeks. In her head sits the knowledge of how the quote calculation works, which supplier offers which terms, where the important files are and which customers have special arrangements. Suddenly your business faces a serious problem.
This scenario is no exception. It happens every day in Austrian SMEs. In my work with over 40 Carinthian businesses, it was precisely this situation that finally prompted them to engage with digitalisation. The pain of the outage was greater than the comfort of the status quo.
Knowledge silos: the invisible risk
In most SMEs, processes aren't documented but exist as implicit knowledge in the heads of individual employees. That works as long as those people are there. But what if they aren't? Illness, accident, resignation or retirement — there are many reasons why an employee is suddenly, or foreseeably, no longer available.
The problem isn't just the immediate outage. It's the knowledge that leaves with the person: passwords and access credentials only they know. Customer relationships and verbal agreements. Shortcuts and workarounds that keep everyday operations running. Hard-won judgement in calculation and purchasing. The informal networks and contacts.
Do the key-person test: go through every employee and ask yourself — what happens if this person doesn't turn up tomorrow? If the answer is "then we've got a problem", there's a need to act.
Risk assessment: where are your weak points?
Before you take action, you should systematically assess where the greatest risks lie. Go through every business process and ask yourself three questions: how many people can carry out this process? Is the process documented? What happens if it grinds to a halt for a week?
Typical high-risk areas in SMEs:
- Accounting and payroll: often all the knowledge sits with one person, including deadlines, special cases and contacts at the authorities.
- IT administration: passwords, server configurations and licence keys are known only to the person responsible for IT.
- Customer care: long-standing customer relationships and individual arrangements exist only in the account manager's head.
- Purchasing: supplier terms, discount tiers and contacts aren't recorded systematically.
- Specialist knowledge: operating particular machines, recipes or technical procedures that only one employee has mastered.
Digitalisation as insurance: concrete measures
The good news: you don't have to overhaul your whole company straight away. Start with the highest-risk processes and put digital safeguards in place step by step.
Document and digitise processes
Create a digital step-by-step guide for every critical process. It doesn't have to be an elaborate manual — a short video in which the employee explains their process, or a simple checklist, is often enough. What matters is that the documentation is accessible and up to date. Tools such as Notion, Confluence or even a shared Google Doc serve this purpose.
Build a central knowledge base
Collect all passwords in a password manager, all customer data in the CRM, all contracts in a document management system. Make implicit knowledge explicit by storing it in a central, digital place. Every authorised employee has to be able to access it.
Automation as a safeguard
Processes that run automatically are independent of individual people. Automatic invoicing, automatic appointment confirmations, automatic stock notifications — all of it works even when the responsible employee isn't there. Digital workflows are the best insurance against staff absences.
Every day your business runs only because a particular person happens to be present is a day you're taking an unnecessary risk.
Your checklist for safeguarding the business
Immediate measures for greater business continuity:
- Identify your three most critical key people and their exclusive knowledge.
- Introduce a password manager and transfer all access credentials into it.
- Document the five most important processes as step-by-step guides.
- Set up cover arrangements and actively train the stand-ins.
- Fully digitise at least one critical process so it works even without the key person.
Prevention is cheaper than an emergency
The cost of an unplanned outage exceeds the investment in prevention many times over. A day of business standstill costs most SMEs several thousand euros — quite apart from annoyed customers and lost orders. I help you digitalise your business processes so that your operation doesn't depend on individual people. Together we analyse your risks, document your processes and implement digital solutions that make your company resilient. Because the question isn't whether, but when a key employee will be out of action.