Why your company is more vulnerable than you think when all the connections between your people live in one person's head.
When the HR manager leaves and takes six years of context with her
Eva is the HR manager at a company of 120 employees across 4 locations. She's been there six years. She knows everyone.
And she's thorough. She documents. There are folders with official files, formal improvement plans, performance reviews, absence records. Eva is not a sloppy HR manager - quite the opposite.
But alongside those official files, something else lives. Something far richer than anything in any folder.
Eva knows which team lead struggles with delegation. She knows which employee at the Ghent office has been waiting two years for a growth opportunity, and that it's sensitive because he's been passed over three times. She knows that one project manager and a sales lead haven't been able to stand each other for months, and why - it traces back to a conflict from 2023 that never fully got resolved. She knows that Jeroen in marketing filed an informal complaint about his manager a year and a half ago and that she promised to keep an eye on it.
None of that lives in an official file. Not because Eva is negligent - because it doesn't belong anywhere. It's not formal. It's the connections, the context, the intuitive fabric that builds up when you work with people for six years.
It works. Until it doesn't.
A couple of weeks' notice
Eva gets an offer she can't refuse. She hands in her resignation. A couple of weeks', months at best of notice.
Her successor, Claire, starts on the first of the month. She's good. Experienced. Motivated.
She gets access to all the folders. All the official files. All the formal processes. Eva has done her job perfectly.
And yet Claire starts with a blank screen.
What can and can't be handed over
What Eva can hand over during her notice time:
The official files and active formal processes
An introduction with each location manager
Access to systems and folders
A quick briefing on "people to keep an eye on"
What Eva can't hand over:
Why she made certain decisions
The history behind sensitive relationships between colleagues
Which informal commitments she made and to whom
The hundreds of small observations from six years of coffee chats and 1:1s
The intuitive sense of which team dynamics are playing out where
The why behind every piece of information that is documented
That's what Eva takes with her. Not because she documented badly. Because there's no place - nowhere in the system - where that kind of knowledge belongs.
The six months of silence
Claire's first six months are rough. Not because she can't do the job. But because she keeps ending up in situations where she's missing context.
An employee walks into her office: "I've already discussed this twice with Eva. She said she'd do something about it." Claire can find an official file, but not the story behind it. The employee doesn't feel heard, even though Claire is doing her best.
A location manager asks: "What's the status of Jeroen's situation?" Claire can find the formal complaint, but not Eva's assessment of where things stand, what's already been tried, or what the next step should be.
During a conversation with a team lead, Claire accidentally discovers that there's a long-running conflict between two senior employees that has already escalated three times. She can't find anything. Not because Eva didn't know - she knew it perfectly - but because the kind of conflict that gets resolved in informal conversations rarely ends up in an official file.
And the worst part: some things never surface at all. Commitments made in confidence, promises that should have been remembered, context that could have been the difference between a good and a bad decision - gone. Not because anyone was negligent. Because there was no place where it could live.
The bill
Cost item | Estimate |
|---|---|
6 months of reduced effectiveness of new HR manager | €15,000 – €25,000 |
Decisions made on incomplete information | Unquantifiable |
Employees who feel unheard | Trust damage |
Lost context on ongoing situations | Unquantifiable |
Directly measurable: €15.000-€25.000. Indirectly: likely a multiple of that.
But the real loss lives somewhere else: in the trust that erodes when an employee has to repeat what he's already said three times. In the decisions that would have been different with better context. In the dawning realisation that your organisation is more vulnerable than you thought.
The real problem
The problem isn't that Eva left. People leave. That's life.
The problem also isn't that Eva didn't document well. She documented everything she could document within the systems she had.
The problem is that those systems aren't built for the kind of knowledge an HR manager actually builds up. Official files work well for formal processes. But the vast majority of what an experienced HR professional knows - the context, the connections, the history, the informal commitments - doesn't fit into a standard HR file. So it keeps living where it's always lived: in the head of one person.
That's not people management. That's people gambling.
And the stakes are high: six years' worth of context about the people who make your company what it is.
The test
Ask yourself this: if your HR manager handed in her notice tomorrow, what percentage of what she knows about your people - not just what she's documented, but what she has in her head - could she actually hand over to her successor?
If the answer is less than 50%, you have a problem. Not with your HR manager. With your system.
Because the real capital of a people function isn't the person who holds the role. It's the knowledge that builds up over time. And that knowledge shouldn't live in one head - it should live somewhere your organisation can't lose it.
The best HR managers already document. They deserve a system that fits the nature of the work they actually do.
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