For HR and managers
The handover already exists
It is not a document somebody produces in their final week, when they are already half gone. It is the record that was written while the work was happening — and it is the only version that was ever going to be complete. SecondBrain 365, an AI agent inside your Microsoft 365, sits in the team's meetings and threads and writes decisions, contacts and exceptions into a knowledge base as they come up.
See how SecondBrain 365 supports HR and managers when someone joins — and when someone leaves.
What leaves with people, and what never arrives
A leaving colleague writes two pages in their last week. The person arriving reads them in March and asks a colleague everything else — and that colleague explains it from memory, which is where it lived all along.
42%
of institutional knowledge is unique to the person holding it — acquired for their role and shared with no colleague.
Panopto/YouGov 2018 — n=1,001 US employees at 200+ staff companies
1 in 3
Italian firms report that some staff lacked the skills their job required — two thirds among large companies.
Istat, Formazione nelle imprese 2020 — official statistics, census for 250+ employees
1 in 8 — teams say institutional knowledge simply disappears when someone leaves. Seventeen per cent at organisations with 1,000+ engineers. refactoring.fm, State of Product Development 2026 — n=340
You will find bigger numbers than these on other pages — the cost of a departure, the percentage of undocumented processes. We looked for the studies behind them and could not find any that hold up.
What this does not do
Nobody can write down everything a person knows
Twenty years of research on knowledge transfer say the same thing: writing things down works for explicit knowledge — what was decided, how something is done, why a rule exists. Judgement and instinct do not transfer in a document, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something.
What does transfer
- The decision, and the reason it was taken that way
- How the process actually runs, not how the manual says
- Who the counterpart is at the supplier, and what was agreed with them
- The exception that keeps coming back, and what is done about it
What does not
- Knowing which customer will escalate before they do
- The feel for when an estimate is optimistic
- Relationships, and the credit someone has built
- Judgement — which is most of what you are actually paying for
The honest version of the promise: what leaves with a person becomes smaller. It does not become nothing, and a product that claims it does has not read the research.
A concrete case
The colleague who leaves in three weeks
The usual way — Three weeks' notice, a handover document written between exit interviews, and a list of what they remembered to mention on a Thursday afternoon.
What actually matters — The supplier who needs chasing on the 20th, the client who escalates to the board, the workaround for the export that nobody ever wrote down.
If the agent was there — Most of it is already recorded, because it came up in meetings and threads over two years. The handover session becomes a review of what exists, not an attempt to remember it all.
Handover — supplier management
Transcribed · 26 Sep
Rossi invoices late every quarter — chase them around the 20th.
For the Milan contract, talk to Elena, not the account manager.
The export breaks if a code has a space: strip them before upload.
The framework renews in March, notice is 90 days.
Pick a record to see where it came from.
Four things that were only in one person's head, now with a date and the session they were said in. The rest of that session was spent on the things a document cannot hold.
And the person arriving
The same record, read from the other side. Not a welcome pack: the actual decisions, with dates, that explain why things are the way they are.
They can ask instead of interrupting
The knowledge base lives in SharePoint, so Copilot answers from it — and a new colleague can ask the question they are slightly embarrassed to ask a person.
Context, not just process
Not only how something is done, but why it ended up being done that way — which is the part that stops a newcomer from proposing a change that was already tried.
Less time on the buddy
The colleague assigned to help them keeps their own job, because half of what gets asked is already written.
No wiki for them to read yet? The same record can be its first content — see a company wiki that has content on day one.
What goes in, what comes out
⚠️ Nothing about the person: this is about the work they do, not about them. Performance, contracts and anything personal stay where they are.
In
- The team's meetings, over the months and years
- The threads where the exceptions get handled
- Handover sessions, when they happen
- Procedures and documents the team already keeps
Out
- How the work is really done, in the team's own words
- Decisions with their date and their reason
- The contacts that matter, and what was agreed with them
- The recurring exceptions and their workarounds
FAQ
Questions HR and managers ask
No, and the design makes it hard to be. The agent only sees what someone deliberately shares with it — a meeting it was invited to, a thread it was added to — and what it writes is about the work, not about who did it well or badly. There is no activity tracking, no productivity score and no record of who said less in a meeting. If it helps, think of the output as team documentation that happens to have dates, not as a file on anybody.
You can, and it is better than nothing — a handover session with the agent present produces a far more complete record than a document written alone. But three weeks is three weeks: the value is in having recorded things while the work was happening, over months. Starting at the resignation is salvage; starting before is the point.
Some are, at first. Two things help in practice: it is visible — a named participant, not a silent recording — and it only joins what people invite it to, so a conversation that should stay a conversation simply does not include it. Teams that use it tend to settle into inviting it to the meetings where decisions get made and leaving it out of the rest.
Part of it, and we would rather say that plainly. Explicit knowledge — decisions, processes, contacts, exceptions — transfers well in writing. Judgement, relationships and the sense of when something is about to go wrong do not, and the research on knowledge transfer is consistent about it. What changes is that the handover conversation is spent on those, instead of on reconstructing what could have been written down all along.
In your own Microsoft 365 tenant, in the team's SharePoint site, under the permissions that site already has. You choose who is in the workspace, and someone outside it cannot read the knowledge base or contribute to it.
Need it for something else?
Same agent, same mechanism. What changes is the rules you write in the context file.
Project management
Stop chasing people for updates: the agent asks, and the plan stays current
Product management
Why the product is the way it is — written down while you decide it
HR
The answer your team already wrote, found by the next person who asks
IT service desk
Forward the reply you just sent. That is the whole documentation step
ISO audit
Evidence recorded as it happens, not reconstructed the month before
RFP & bids
The tender's deadlines pulled out of the pack, and the chasing done for you