WCRC Analysis
Dayforce’s 17th annual Pulse of Talent findings, released on 26 October, put knowledge concentration on the workplace agenda. Among survey respondents, 54% said important knowledge was becoming concentrated among fewer people. Separately, 55% said losing several key employees would cause significant or severe disruption.
These are reported perceptions. Dayforce commissioned the online study with Hanover Research among 6,909 adults working at organisations with more than 100 employees in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Fieldwork ran from 27 July to 14 August 2026. India was not included. The findings should not be presented as an audited failure rate or an estimate for Indian workplaces.
WCRC reads the survey as a reason to examine how work is organised. It does not show which particular employer has an unsafe dependency. That requires looking at what another employee can actually do when the usual expert is away.
Start with an ordinary absence
A useful continuity exercise begins with a routine task and a realistic absence. Can a colleague complete the task using the access and guidance already available? Where do they stop, and why?
Consider a hypothetical supplier exception that one experienced employee normally resolves. A written procedure might explain the standard approval process while saying little about how to recognise that the exception is legitimate. The missing knowledge is a judgement, not simply an instruction someone forgot to upload.
WCRC would record the point of difficulty before prescribing a solution. A missing permission needs an access decision. An unclear rule needs an authorised answer. A judgement that depends on experience may need supervised practice with real examples. Sending all three problems to a documentation project would conceal their differences.
The exercise should be planned and low risk. A colleague learning the task should have a way to ask for help and stop before making an unauthorised decision. Its purpose is to discover dependence without creating a service failure to prove that the dependence exists.
Give knowledge transfer room in the working day
An expert can be asked to train a colleague while still carrying every existing obligation. That arrangement leaves the team relying on spare capacity that may never appear. A credible handover needs an explicit decision about which work will wait or move while the transfer takes place.
Paired work is one practical option. The experienced employee explains the judgement behind a task, the colleague attempts it, and both review the result. A second attempt with less assistance can show what has actually transferred. This is a proposed method, not an intervention tested by WCRC in the Dayforce survey.
Managers should also ask what happens to unusual cases. A handover tested only on the simplest example may give false comfort. Keep a record of the exceptions that still require the original expert, along with a plan for developing another person’s ability to handle them.
Knowledge sharing should give the expert a better working arrangement too. It can reduce interruptions and make planned leave easier to take. Treating it as a reason to diminish the employee’s contribution would undermine the very cooperation the exercise requires.
A folder is evidence of storage
The existence of a shared folder establishes that material has been stored. It does not establish that someone else can use it. WCRC would therefore judge continuity through a completed task, the questions asked during it and the corrections needed afterwards.
Useful documentation can emerge from that review. It is easier to improve instructions when a colleague can point to the precise step that failed. The resulting material should have an owner who can keep it current as the process changes.
The survey’s headline language concerns workforce fragility, but the practical management question is smaller and answerable. Choose a necessary task. Arrange a supported handover. Find out whether it can be completed without the person who normally knows how. A team that can answer that question has more useful evidence than a team that has merely counted its training documents.
Source and research scope
Dayforce, 17th annual Pulse of Talent release and methodology, 26 October 2026. Vendor-sponsored survey; no independent replication is claimed. The management exercises are WCRC analysis. The survey does not establish that AI caused knowledge concentration.