“Brain drain" is that giant slurping sound you hear as your most knowledgeable and productive workers head out the door, either to retirement or to a competitor.

Insurers and agencies alike struggle to find and retain talent. In response, they focus heavily on a younger generation of workers. However, as your current, often long-time employees, retire or leave, your organization must take every possible step to retain their knowledge.

In the days before remote work, many agents learned how to manage new lines of business by eavesdropping on their coworkers. When they were stumped about policy language, they could walk to a nearby cubicle and ask a seasoned worker their questions. Claims people could head over to underwriting and ask, “What does this endorsement mean?" An underwriting manager who was updating a coverage form could talk to a seasoned claim manager to ask for their input on wording.

Today, with virtual work, your agency could lose that tribal knowledge—information known within a group of people—unless you take coordinated steps to preserve that information.

Tribal knowledge is a critical tool to organizational success. Consider this errors & omissions claim scenario:

Your insureds face a wave of storm damage from increasingly uncertain and early-season storm activity. As new property claims roll in, you find that a number of your insureds don't have adequate coverage to cover law and ordinance requirements, and total insured values are inadequate on some accounts.

In this situation, how would your agency proceed? Who can your less experienced workers turn to for help reviewing property coverages?

Some organizations can rely on internal technology to bank seasoned employees' knowledge for the years before they retire. Other tools to help with this knowledge transfer include internal wikis, external consulting firms that specialize in documenting institutional knowledge, and mentorship programs to onboard your newer employees.

Insurance organizations can also establish practice communities within their companies. These practice communities can form roundtables to underwrite files and solve coverage dilemmas or tackle operational challenges, such as technology improvements.

Further, many seasoned workers still want to participate in an industry they have contributed to for decades. Have you considered hiring your seasoned retirees as part-timers to mentor and train your staff? Also, buried in project management and agency management issues, today's agency supervisors often have little time for file review and audits. A willing retiree can come back and help.

Insurance evolves with a changing society. As the workplace shifts to a new generation and bids a warm farewell to our veterans, we must change to meet the needs of today's largely virtual workforce. Brain drain is here. As industry leaders, we can take steps to build our workforce resilience to help us succeed in an increasingly challenging marketplace.

Nancy Germond is Big “I" executive director of risk management and education.