How Hard Would It Be To Document Your Job?

Efficient management relies on well-understood and well-documented processes, but the reality in many workplaces is that crucial tasks are often only fully understood by a single employee. If you were to quit your job tomorrow, how many processes would have to be documented so that someone else could take over your role?

Office picture from Shutterstock

I started musing on this issue after a comment from Lifehacker reader pprime on one of our killer interview questions posts last week. For many bosses, pprime suggested, the likely response if a key employee announced they were leaving would be this:

Thanks for all your hard work; can you document all that tricky stuff you do so we can replace you?

Harsh but accurate, I suspect. Sometimes we don’t document processes because we want to feel indispensable; sometimes it’s simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day.

How much of what you do at work isn’t properly documented and would disappear if you left? Tell us in the comments.


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