The looming pandemic of capital flight AKA brain drain.
According to the google dictionary, brain drain is defined as the emigration of highly skilled or qualified people from a country. If that sounds familiar it really is, we sure have had a colleague or a friend or a family friend who left the country to set up shop in Europe, the US, Canada, or Australia. And many articles have been written about skilled employees leaving the country, just do a quick google search and see for yourself. Lest we forget South Africa is an emerging economy and in this age of the knowledge economy, where knowledge and information have become factors of production, South Africa more than anything needs to retain the skilled workforce in order to grow its economy and remain competitive on the global scale, as globalization and the shifting demographics are reshaping competitive grounds.
This article will endeavor more on the impact of capital flight and how we can all work together or at least reduce its devastating impacts, from employees in both the private sector through to the public sector and also for businesses both in the private and public sector.
In a nutshell, on a year-on-year basis, we have employees with a wealth of intellectual capital due to long-term industry experience leaving the country in search of “greener pastures”. This might seem like the norm in this age of globalization, however, the consequences can be dire affecting you and me as this leaves organizations with a qualified workforce but not necessarily skilled as they do not have the necessary experience. And to make matters worse there becomes a leadership vacuum at the top as the more experienced employees are not there to guide and mentor the younger employees especially if there are no systems in place to transfer critical knowledge and skills from the more experienced employees to the newer and less experienced employees. This cycle then leads to loss of productivity, low morale, opportunity cost and general poor organizational performance, and organizational innovativeness, and yes this can happen in both the private and public sector too.
If this might seem quite obvious and fairly easy to troubleshoot, why then are organizations not proactive in their approach and put all hands on deck to avoid loss of knowledge within the organizations. A number of reasons can be listed however just to mention a few, some organizations do not understand or better yet see the value of knowledge sharing within the company mainly because the benefits are not immediate but take years in most cases to be visible. Some organizations might not even have the tools in place to have a well-structured knowledge-sharing system. Complacency can also be a big one where employees do not question why things are done in a certain way or worse when the response to those who question becomes “well that’s how it’s always been done” without any scientific backing whatsoever which in turn leads to an innovation lag. And lastly, the costs might not always be feasible to implement such plans. So, in the end, such issues are just put aside in the darkest corner of memory where they will cause no harm and will soon be forgotten.
Of course, there is always light at the end of a tunnel, there are a few things both organizations and employees can implement to reduce the long term effects of brain drain, one of my personal favorite being fostering an informal knowledge sharing culture within the organization, such as collaborative knowledge sharing where juniors can interact and communicate with their seniors, therefore, enhancing learning and creativity. Not only will this help the younger employees learn faster but it will also help the senior employees to have a better understanding of their work since you actually learn more by teaching others. This same approach also helps foster healthy interpersonal relationships between employees. Innovative techniques should not be frowned upon especially from the younger employees who might have ideas to improve current systems. Another approach can be to have more diverse teams in terms of experience. According to the Harvard business review allowing cross-generational teams to work together helps both groups perform better as they are less competitive with each other as opposed to within the same experience group. And generally in as much as we are professionals a culture of learning should be tolerated both upstream (from younger to older employees) and downstream (from older to younger employees)
Okay, that’s it for today. Let me get back to coding. Have a great week and thanks for spending your time to read this.
