Succession Planning – To Have Employees Ready to Fill New Roles

Succession planning is a function in HR management that is very vital for the future of organization. As the organization expands, there would be new roles to fill. As the time passing by, some key employees may go and leave an empty spots to be filled. Succession planning will guarantees that you will have employees ready to fill new roles and empty spots to ensuring company’s continuity.

Succession planning is important and beneficial for employer. A good succession planning will ensure each role; especially key roles in the company will be filled with strong players with enough knowledge and expertise in the correspondence fields. With succession planning, you will have the successor understand and used to the company culture and objective. Unlike recruiting new people, the successor from succession planning will easily adapt to his new role in the company and already have the same vision and mission with the company. In addition, the loyalty level commonly higher if you prepared your staffs from early stage.

Not only for employer, do employees also have many benefits from succession planning. Employees will get the opportunity to develop their career and make a career plan, as they know organization’s plan for employee’s next potential opportunity. Succession planning also allows employees to identify their skills, knowledge, and strength, as they enter the program. With succession planning, the value of employees will be shared within the organization so when opportunity comes, managers knows employee’s skills to take into consideration when choosing player for the empty role.

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Succession planning starts as soon as you recruit new employee. On your recruitment process, you can find superior employees that suitable for development. Then, you can continue with your succession planning process with personal development and preparation for the employees for promotion.

Employee development for succession planning could be done through various practices. It could start with training and development programs both internal and external to improve employee’s skills and knowledge. Then, you can assign the employees to special projects in order to give them the experiences as well as using it as a test for their compatibility. Lateral moves are also useful to give new skills, more experiences, knowledge, and better understanding of the company. Forward, you can give them team leadership roles to show them how leadership is. Comprehensive and continue process is very important to get a good result.

In order to make the succession planning effective, you need several things.

• First, you need to be aware with the trends of employment in your business area. It is very important to know which roles that would give you difficult time to fill it externally. It will help you to decide which roles to be priority on your succession planning.
• Second, you need to identify and understand your employee’s developmental needs. It will help you to create development plan for each key employee you set for succession planning.
• You need to focus to retain your key employees. Be sure your key employees understand that you prepared them for better career. Keep them motivated and engaged in your plan so they will give their best and loyal to the company.