Box 3.5 discusses the concept of knowledge management and intellectual capital, and I think organizations are taking steps to manage and preserve their employees' knowledge and information. They realize that each employee has valuable information regarding their job, tasks, the company, etc. For example, at the company I work for, each employee in our group has a backup which really means that each one of us needs to know how to perform two jobs. This is obviously useful when someone is on vacation, but the other benefit is that when someone suddenly leaves the company there is another employee that still has some of the knowledge. I also know of other organizations that require employees to rotate jobs every 1 or 2 years, this is not possible everywhere but works well in the accounting department, for example. These methods of knowledge transfer are obviously not perfect as it is impossible to capture everything, but it I think it's a very good attempt. Other methods such as having employees document the major procedures, processes, tasks, etc. that they perform is another way to ensure that valuable information is not lost. But I don't think it's possible to "commodify" an employee, as each employee will have some knowledge that will not be transferred and cannot always be replaced.
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While I've never been fired or laid off, I've had experiences of leaving my job unexpectedly and not having much time to train a replacement. In those instances, I tried to document as much of my routine as possible, including both formal procedures and informal information about daily operations (though much of the latter usually ended up being conveyed verbally). There was no way I could possibly convey all the information I knew, but the companies I worked for were very conscious of what one of them called the "Hit By A Bus" scenario - what would happen if one of our team members left us, and their knowledge was completely inaccessible?
On the other side of the coin, companies adapt to knowledge loss all the time. One of my friends left a longtime job rather acrimoniously, determined not to teach anyone anything and to "show those people" how important he really was. After he blogged about this, his sister pointed out in a comment that she's felt that way about many of her jobs, and that a company has never once collapsed in the wake of her leaving. Therefore, he should think less in terms of how his leaving would affect the company and more in terms of whether it was really smart to burn his bridges. Life continues, business continues.
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