Talent Management

The Benefits of Succession Planning Software

Dillon C.

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When it comes to business, a good plan is a must to know what roles are needed in your team, the skills needed to fill those gaps and how to train employees to fill that role. This is called succession planning, and it will help your company plan to succeed.

First, let’s review the succession planning process:

1. Identify important positions in your company and the necessary capabilities to perform in the role.
2. Assess employees by evaluating their job performance and team dynamics. Identify existing capabilities and skills.
3. Identify which employees can fill the needed position. Put them on your company’s career pathways. Pathways should allow employees to know what skills to obtain, milestones to hit, promotion order and more.
4. Using resources like P2P monitoring and performance tracking software, begin developing employees through training to prepare for higher positions. Assess post-training capabilities.
5. Evaluate and repeat the cycle as many times as needed to fill all gaps in your company and have backups.

While it seems easy enough to do, this process can vitally affect a company’s strategy and growth. There are many benefits for both employees and the company to having a formalized succession plan in place and software to track it.

Succession Planning Benefits for the Company

Any moment that a key leadership position is empty can lead to severe losses for the company. Imagine the effect it would have if one of your project managers suddenly quits. What if you don’t have someone available to take his or her place? Who will make the decisions and answer questions the team has?

Losing an employee in any position is bad news. Extra responsibilities will have to be split between other employees in the company until someone can be trained for the role.

You may even have to start hiring someone from the outside to fill the position. This brings a set of new challenges, such as finding the best candidate, retraining a new hire from the ground up, getting them adapted to company culture and teaching them how the company works.

A proper succession plan allows the company to be prepared so that the loss of key employees do not hurt the company. Having a software that manages succession plans will allow you to visually see at-risk positions and options to fill those positions if the need should arise. You can avoid confusion and avoid cost and hassle from recruiting outside.

Succession Planning Benefits for Employees

When employees don’t feel valued and aren’t reaching their full potential, chances are they won’t be staying around for the long-term. Especially in the current generation, employees are constantly looking for growth opportunities and ways to improve themselves.

As the company, your role is to help improve and train them to the best of your (and their) ability. If you aren’t making full use of your employees, you’ll see a drop in productivity and overall progress. Not only that, the company probably won’t want to keep someone who isn’t contributing to your business around for very long.

Employees want to know what their future will be like with the company. Software with a clearly defined career pathway will allow them to clearly see what the positions and opportunities are available to them, what the requirements are, and what skills they need to develop.

Instead of just doing the same job every day, employees have increased motivation to work hard. Employees know their managers see their potential and are willing to work with them to grow within the company. They stay and work harder because they feel more valued and respected as a human being.

Other Benefits

Succession planning allows important positions within the company to be filled by people with experience working for the company. Current employees will have familiarity with the company culture and procedure and have built trust through training and interaction. Done right, succession planning will keep the outside hiring mostly contained to entry jobs where employees can start on their own career pathway into the company.

Employees will leave for unavoidable reasons, such as retirement. Through succession planning, you can take these situations into account and have them train the next in line to take their place. Their replacement will be able to benefit from their expertise as much as possible before they leave, making the transition smooth. No unanswered questions and all of the processes and procedures will be handed off.

One option for succession planning software is Prosky’s Pathways, which allows you to better implement internal hiring by featuring a customizable succession plan set by you. The platform allows candidates to see exactly what growth opportunities are available and when positions open.

Having a succession plan in place will not only help your company grow and improve, it will also help prepare your business for any bumps that might happen along the way.

Photo courtesy of Pexels user rawpixel.com.

Dillon C.

Director of Curriculum, ProSky
Data Analyst and Entrepreneur

Dillon Chen graduated from the University of Utah in 2014. Since graduation, he has worked in startup companies filling various roles including iPhone Programming, Project Management, Accounting, and Human Resources. Is currently the Director of Curriculum at ProSky. In his ...