Succession planning is the best tool to grow your employees and retain your top performers

I’ve spent the last 18 months reading and writing about the latest thinking on HR.

All my reading on HR always links back to the same points: It is going to become difficult to find great employees, and it is going to be even harder to keep them. Succession planning is the most effective workforce modelling module to engage and retain your employees.

If you’re currently using Planning@Work, or any other workforce modelling software, here are the reasons why you need a succession planning module:

The talent crunch is shrinking the candidate pool.

Great employees are becoming harder to find, we are entering a talent crunch where employees will pick and choose where they work. The rate at which the World’s economy is growing means we will have more jobs than people in a couple of years. A job ad will no longer be enough to attract candidates.

You need further pull strategies to bring in the best candidates for your positions. Employee perks, a strong culture, and an obvious succession plan are just some of the strategies you can use to appeal to candidates.

Both graduates and established workers want to know their place in your organisation and how they can grow their careers. Succession planning can show candidates how current employees have moved up in your organisation, as well as their own potential career trajectory.

Place employees in the right position with succession planning.

Being promoted to manager is one of the only succession trajectories for many organisations. It is common for a top performer to be promoted to manager, receive no training in management, and then hold the whole team back with their lack of management skills.

Managing and performing are completely different skill sets. The performance and potential metric in succession planning allows you to develop alternative career paths. Employees aspiring to become managers should not have to play a tenure-based waiting game. Top performers should not be put in charge of teams if they are not comfortable leading.

You can use succession planning to visualise who has the most potential as a leader and who has the best performance. Aspiring leaders can be placed in more leadership-centric roles while top performers can be given more challenging projects with more freedom and budget.

Use succession planning to grow your people in ways they can benefit the organisation. Too many organisations are held back by managers that are great at their jobs, but terrible at managing people. Put the leaders where they will be the most effective, and give your performers room to create value.

Retain your best people with succession planning paths

If you don’t look after your best employees, they’ll become your competition.

Employees no longer want to climb the corporate ladder. They want to grow as people and enjoy new experiences. Succession planning can find opportunities for employees to chase new experiences that both benefit the organisation and grow the employee.

More initiatives must be put in place to retain your best employees. They will be the ones hungriest for new opportunities, and will outgrow stagnant positions faster.

Succession planning displays your best employees so you can check in with them regularly. Talk to them about their role and what can be improved, what extra resources they need, and what challenges they would like to take on in the near future.

Succession planning means your high-potential employees see out the extent of their potential in your organisation. High performance employees will also be able to deliver the most value with a structured succession plan. Make sure your high performers don’t deliver greater value for someone else.

Use succession planning to grow everyone in your organisation

Talk to your employees and discover ways to improve everyone’s performance and potential. Succession planning is an opportunity to find everyone’s strengths.

Strong succession is an opportunity for you to recruit new talent looking to grow and the disengaged performers working for the competition. Grow your employees the way they want to grow, and avoid the headache of a poorly considered promotion.

Call Grant, our org charting and workforce modelling expert at Navigo, for your own consultation on how succession planning can benefit your organisation.

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