How does your Association preserve corporate knowledge?

I used to work in Quality and developed work instructions. The one rule we have is "If most everyone died and 100 years from now, a group of people decided to re-open our company, would our documentation hold up?" If someone can't pick up your CC&R's, By-laws, or Article of Incorporation and start the HOA over again... Your HOA has work to do. Considering that Atleast 1 time a year everyone should be doing this.

This is why this documentation exists. It is to keep the corporate knowledge alive and working. It's when you get off-script that things go awry. I found when I became President, the best change I ever did was to get us back to the original documents. That meant bringing a copy to every meeting. It also meant violation letter written referred to exact wording and section of that violation. We also made sure to follow the meeting procedure that was in the Articles of Incorporation and office positions.

Imagine if you did not have those documents on file? If they don't make sense or need improving, then go for it. We changed our documents when situations changed. A good idea is to review if they aren't working for your HOA.

Everyone offers assistance when they drop records off to the new person. Rarely is this offer taken. Corporate knowledge, to me, is more then just records. It's the info you gain from doing the job. Records should show final decisions. Records may or may not provide examples. If there are a lot of records, will most volunteers take the time to look through all of them?

Corporate knowledge, to me, are things like:

Who do I contact and who responds for emergency tree removal.
What contractors are good, fair, or take forever for different things.
List of what has to be done, and when (an Association Calendar).
Where the figures come from for filling out tax forms.
Logins and passwords
Past examples of Request for Proposal (RFPs) or Statements of Work.
Instructions for ordering certain items (checks, deposit slips, etc.)
As a minimum, what should be in issues of the newsletters
How to take minutes (what should and shouldn't be there)

Yes, records can certainly provide some of this info. However, some volunteers might not have done a similar job before or really know how to do this or that but are the only ones who volunteered.

To preserve this type of knowledge and, hopefully, avoid the issue described in the initial post, I created officer manuals.

These binders, one for each office, has printed and electronic (thumb drive) lists of what has to be done and, in separate tabs, examples on how to do it. Some examples have step by step instructions (with pictures).

To me, an individual is more likely to look at a summary page then read the book. Hence my reason for the binders vs. just having a pile of records to hand off.

Thanks to those who have already shared.
I'd like to hear from others on what they do to preserve corporate knowledge (or to put it another way - how do you make it easier for the next volunteer?).

For those who don't have a methodology to preserve corporate knowledge yet, perhaps this thread will give them ideas to start the ball rolling. For those who have a method in place, perhaps this thread will provide ideas on how to improve what they have.

Tim

With the exception anything that is off limits, everything is open to be included in a newsletter with transparency & to educate the entire community.

Some Board member(s) perhaps not plural tend to take ownership & fail to share knowledge & in some cases properly do the job. They prefer to be loners & hold folks down. On the other hand, some members just do not engage or maybe they do not have the desire or ability to learn. They have to be forced fed. No one person should be allowed to do any of this alone, I do not care how good they might be.

So having said that every board member & new member should have a binder with the governing documents, important phone numbers, job descriptions, reserve study & 5 yr out reserve maintenance plan & what fiduciary duty means. NO board member should be functioning on a board without knowledge of a reserve study. Association component responsibility & owner common & limited common element responsibility. Provide community with a maintenance responsibility chart. List of charters for committees & members. Most important they need to know this volunteer work is about protecting property value for all owners and their personal desires have no place in this forum. May have missed a few items.

The reserve study is the single most important guide & knowledge of exactly what maintenance & cost is expected. Next they need to know the property & history of the property. Are there issues unique to the property. How old is the property, how many rentals, delinquent accounts & chronological tracking of those accounts, primary violations unique to the property, collection policies, bidding process, questions unique to specific vendor needs. Can be added to the member binder.

By all means, maintain a maintenance chart & schedule with dates & cost.

Out website has member training & board member orientation training opportunities.

Because documents were limited when I started, I went through old newsletters, 5 years of check disbursements by vendor & minutes.

In the end, read, read, read, ask questions & think out things before acting save an emergency

We do not. Once upon a time there were binders that passed from board to board that outlined standard operating procedures. Over time they became outdated and nobody ever bothered to keep them up to date. They no longer exist so anything we did now would have to be done from scratch.