Creating a Process for Effective Succession Planning

Succession planning establishes a process that recruits employees, develops their skills and abilities and prepares them for advancement, all while retaining them to ensure a return on the organization’s training investment.

In the past, succession planning typically targeted only key leadership positions. In today’s organizations, it is important to include key positions in a variety of job categories. Succession planning can also help develop a diverse workforce, by enabling decision makers to look at the future make-up of the organization as a whole.

Succession planning involves:

• Understanding the organization’s long-term goals and objectives
• Identifying positions that are critical to the enterprise
• Identifying and developing successors for critical positions
• Determining workforce trends and predictions of command (and how it changed) for key departments and senior personnel

Succession Planning with OrgPlus

One of the most challenging aspects of establishing a succession planning program is designing a streamlined workflow for managers to evaluate their potential successors and review this information with HR. OrgPlus solves this problem by providing managers with the information they need to assess their successors, and tools to share and collaborate with HR and others in the organization. You will not need to continually update basic employee information, the OrgPlus auto scheduler will keep data from your Systems of Record(s) up to data as frequently as you would like.

OrgPlus conditional formatting can be configured to highlight employees who are close to retirement and display successors, if they have been identified. Other relevant data, such as successor readiness, key competencies required for succession, successor tenure and education level, as well as previous roles in the organization can also be displayed.

Conditional formatting of data will draw attention to at-risk departments and will help focus HR professionals’ efforts in assuring that the organization has an actionable and up-to-date succession plan for key personnel. An advanced search function allows users to find successors for key positions based on competency level, readiness factors and educational background.

OrgPlus also allows users to add employee information, create ad-hoc calculations, correct and update successor information and model different succession scenarios using the intuitive drag-and-drop interface and powerful conditional formatting functionality. OrgPlus makes it easy to share information with relevant stakeholders through robust publishing to PowerPoint, Excel, PDF or your corporate Intranet.