What Happens When Sarah Goes on Holiday?
Updated: Sep 6
Every business has a Sarah.
Sarah knows how everything works.
She knows which spreadsheet needs updating, who to email when something goes wrong, which customer needs handling differently and the little workaround nobody ever documented.
That's great.
Until Sarah goes on holiday.
Suddenly people are asking:
“Does anyone know how Sarah does this?”
Work slows down. Mistakes happen. Customers wait. Someone spends half a day trying to work out a process that Sarah could complete in ten minutes.
This is key-person dependency, and it's surprisingly common.
The problem isn't Sarah.
The problem is that important business knowledge exists in Sarah's head rather than in the business - a Single Point of Failure.
A useful test is simple:
If this person disappeared for four weeks tomorrow, what would stop working?
If the answer is quite a lot, you've found a risk worth looking at.
That doesn't mean writing a 60-page procedure for everything Sarah does.
It means identifying the critical knowledge, documenting the important processes and making sure somebody else could actually follow them.
Because your best employee being indispensable might sound like a compliment.
Operationally, it can be a bloody big risk.
