Sustainability at RECO: Our Guidelines for the Long Term Preservation of Knowledge and Working Capacity in SMEs

For RECO, sustainability is not primarily about compensation or symbolism. It is about the long term preservation of knowledge, working capacity and organizational stability in small and medium sized companies. Our guidelines therefore center on the question of how companies can remain capable of acting in times of retirement waves, skills shortages and generational change.

At the heart of it is how a company handles implicit knowledge. For us, knowledge belongs to the company, not only to the person who happens to carry it in their head. Our first guideline therefore reads: critical company knowledge should stay preserved, accessible and open to further development. That is exactly what RECO is built for. By documenting meetings and work communication in a structured way, companies secure their experiential knowledge before it walks out the door with a retirement or a job change.

The second guideline is about the social side. Many handovers fail not for lack of competence, but for lack of transparency. So we make knowledge broadly accessible and break the dependency on individual heads. New employees ramp up faster, find what already exists on their own, and speak up earlier. And when someone drops out, a customer relationship or half a process does not immediately go down with them.

Third, it is about learning capacity. Decisions, mistakes and experience emerge in everyday communication, not in a separate training room. Our third guideline therefore reads: learning belongs in daily work. RECO is meant to turn ongoing collaboration into continuous development, software supported and without extra overhead.

Another important principle is responsible AI use. We deliberately develop RECO as a supporting system and not as a replacement for human collaboration. Our technology should create orientation, secure knowledge and make communication more transparent, without controlling or disempowering employees. Especially in the SME segment, we see trust as a central prerequisite for sustainable digitalization.

These guidelines are not meant to stay on paper. That is why we engage early with impact planning and measurement, with a focus on organizational and social impact.

Among the metrics that we want to capture over the long term are: the amount of documented and structurally accessible company knowledge, time savings in knowledge search and onboarding of new employees, reduction of knowledge loss during role or generational changes, improvement of handover processes within companies, intensity of use of documented knowledge in everyday work, number of recognized and reused organizational learnings, improvement of internal communication and documentation processes

We also want to see how structured knowledge documentation affects employee satisfaction, organizational stability and retention. Sustainability, for us, is not only an ecological category. It is a company's ability to preserve and keep developing knowledge, people and structures over the years.

We also try to live these principles internally. As a young company, we work in a strongly knowledge based way, document decisions transparently and deliberately create cross functional understanding between product, sales and strategy. In doing so, we want to avoid that knowledge emerges in isolation or is lost, exactly that problem that we also want to solve for our customers.

In the long run, we see RECO as a contribution to a more sustainable European business landscape. SMEs and family businesses in particular carry an enormous share of the economic and social stability of Europe. If we succeed in securing their knowledge across generations and involving employees more strongly in learning and communication processes, this creates, in our view, sustainable impact with long term societal effect.