organizational (adjective, or-gan-i-za-tion-al, \ ɔːgənaɪˈzeɪʃənəl \) memory (noun, mem-o-ry, \ ˈmeməri \)
Definition: mostly includes unrecorded experiences, secrets, knowledge, skills, and insights that a company’s personnel have acquired throughout the years and that are passed on to newly-hired employees via personal conversations, introductions, training courses, and informal meetings. The existence of organizational memory is crucial for supporting and implementing a company’s philosophy and values. Unless organizational memory has been collected and formed into a database, it is largely destroyed during business downsizing, regular employee layoffs, and disasters.
In a Sentence:
- Lindsey has worked at Google for fifteen years, and she is one of the main carriers of the company’s organizational memory.
- As our manager values organizational memory, he frequently organizes informal meetings between veteran workers and newly-hired personnel.
- I think it’s important to document the most important parts of the organizational memory, as it allows you to remember where you came from as a business and ensure that your company’s development is a consistent, uninterrupted process.
Synonyms and related words: corporate memory, legal memory, organizational development, organizational structure
