Knowledge does not vanish when you hire. It vanishes when the person who knows is away.
If everyday answers live in one colleague's head, every leave becomes a quiet outage. Another shared folder will not change that.
In many companies the same person knows how to request VPN access, which printer setup works, and what to do when the finance application fails on Friday. Call that person Tomek.
When Tomek is on leave, ordinary questions return as if nobody had answered them before. Three colleagues give three different instructions. A new employee waits two days for a task that takes a few minutes when Tomek is in the office.
Nobody opens an incident ticket for that. Yet the effect is the same: work stops, time is wasted, and the organisation learns the wrong lesson, namely that help means finding the right person.
Why “we will document it later” fails
Teams postpone writing things down until the workload eases. The workload rarely eases. The people with the answers are also the people everyone interrupts. So the answers stay private.
A folder of outdated files is not a cure. If nobody maintains the text, if the steps no longer match the screen, and if employees do not trust the page enough to open it first, you still depend on Tomek.
What repeated questions really cost
The lost minutes matter. The deeper cost is inconsistency. One person explains a password reset one way. Another sends people to another team. A third shares a screenshot from last year. The company does not share one method. It shares folklore.
In a small office folklore is an annoyance. In a larger company it becomes noise, delay and distrust toward the team that “never answers the same way twice”.
What actually helps
Write short answers to the questions that return every week. Keep them current. Write them for someone who asks for the first time. Assign one owner to each page so updates have a responsible person.
Then change the daily habit. When the same question appears again, point to the page before you answer from memory. If the page is wrong, correct the page the same day.
If ordinary work can continue only when your best people are present, you do not have resilient expertise. You have a fragile dependency dressed up as talent.