Employee Management Archives

What is Succession Planning and Why is it Important to Organizations?

Succession planning is a way of ensuring that your business stays on track by analyzing the backbone of your venture i.e. your employees. Some of the many benefits of succession planning is that it lets ambitious, less-experienced internal candidates know their hard work and skills have been noticed and appreciated enough to be considered for advancement.

It can be an incredible retention tool and motivator for junior managers and subject matter experts who want to advance their careers into management.

In this article we will talk about the meaning of succession management, its benefits and the process of formulating an effective succession management plan.

What is Succession Planning?

Succession planning is a strategy for passing on leadership roles—often the ownership of a company—to an employee or group of employees. Also known as “replacement planning,” it ensures that businesses continue to run smoothly after a company’s most important people move on to new opportunities, retire, or pass away.

Succession planning involves cross-training employees so that they develop skills, company knowledge, and a holistic understanding of the company.

Why is it Important to Organizations?

The purpose of succession planning is to make sure a company always has the right leaders in place should a change happen quickly. By failing to create an orderly plan for succession, your company may not get a second chance if it doesn’t adapt immediately after a key player leaves the company or passes away.

After all, you can’t anticipate when a serious illness, accident, disaster or pandemic will strike, but you can prepare for what will need to be addressed should one happen.

The Benefits of Succession Planning

Disaster-proofs your business

You buy insurance to protect the company from hurricanes, floods and fires. You install security systems to defend the company from theft. And you back up data to an off-site location to safeguard your business’s proprietary information.

Many business owners get so busy with the day-to-day operations of their company that they fail to make succession planning a priority. These leaders may think they’re too young to be hit with a serious illness. Or they forget that a key player (or several) could be lured away by another company that needs their skills and is willing to pay top dollar for them. Any of these scenarios can leave a business uniquely vulnerable.

Creates structure for training and development

Some of the employee’s professional development may come in the form of coaching, mentoring, job shadowing or a gradual increase in more advanced responsibilities. Other positions may even require the candidate to go back to school to get additional education or professional certification.

By tapping potential successors early, you give employees time to acquire the skills and experience they’ll need to perform well in their senior roles. You also let employees know that you’re willing to invest in their growth as well as the company’s.

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Keeps extra eyes on a job

Once your top prospects are being groomed, your company has a chance to reap perhaps its best tool to grow and thrive. This happens when a junior manager is sitting and talking with their senior leader about why they’re doing things a particular way.

The simple process of explaining the status quo helps reveal weakness in processes and procedures, uncovered sales opportunities and opportunities for positive change. This natural process allows your company to keep an extra set of eyes on its senior roles and encourages questioning of the corporate norms that may have become dated or inefficient.

In this way, succession planning results in future-proofing your company. Conversely, when retiring employees leave, they can act as a sounding board for questions and concerns, troubleshoot customer problems and more. This helps to smooth the transition.

Maintains brand identity

You frequently hear news of CEOs who come into a company from the outside with great promise, only to fail in a short time. Sadly, such disastrous hires often damage the company’s reputation and long-term growth along with them.

This usually happens because the outsider CEO doesn’t understand the fundamental values and mission of their new company because they haven’t “grown up” in it, so to speak. Wanting to put their own stamp on the business, or failing to grasp customer needs, they move the organization away from its core brand.

The benefits of succession planning is that it helps your company avoid this. By identifying and grooming an internal successor, your company ensures it will be led by someone who shares its values and deeply understands the company’s brand promise, its customers and its employees because they’ve lived it themselves.

Helps the company plan for the long-term

Change happens fast. When your company knows where it’s going, your team can plan for the future. If you position succession as part of your company’s overall growth plans, you create a path for retiring employees to hand off their years of hard-earned knowledge and transition important working relationships before they leave.

The objective of a succession plan is to help your company grow with intent as you identify and build plans for vulnerabilities in other areas of the business. Other benefits to succession planning may include providing help in ascertaining which areas require innovation, setting realistic goals for growth and planning for future talent needs that may result from that growth.

How To Develop A Succession Plan?

Review Plans & Identify Key Positions

It is mandatory to review the strategic plans and objectives of your organization. The first step in succession planning is to identify current or future key positions or groups in the organization. At this stage identifying key positions thoughtfully should be your only focus rather than candidates.

Listing The Competencies

All positions require a particular set of skills, abilities, and knowledge. Therefore, find and list the employees who are perfectly suitable for the corresponding job role. One way to list the competencies is to review relevant merit criteria and job description for the associated position and interview current and former job incumbents.

Identifying Potential Candidates

This step of succession planning is similar to that of general job recruitment practice. But the succession planning process goes one step ahead by helping candidates who show great interest in developing the requisite skills for the particular position. Helping and mentoring these candidates prior to the formal recruitment process that begins once, a position becomes vacant.

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Development Plans

Once you’ve found the relevant candidates suitable for the role, based on their potential for success and interest in a key position, the organization should ensure that these employees have access to development opportunities and learning tools.

Implementing The Process

The final step is to implement and evaluate the process. You have to plan the activities and inputs you have to make to get the desired outputs. Every step in this process has to be evaluated to measure the success and progress of the plan. It is essential to monitor the efficiency and effectiveness of the succession plan once it has been established.

Conclusion

Succession planning is a receptive decision by an organization to nurture and promote the continuous development of employees, and to make sure that the key positions in the organization maintain some measure of stability, thus enabling an organization to achieve desired business objectives.

Succession management is all about knowing the goals of the organization and its employees and improving the capacity to address emerging issues that will affect the business in the long run.

How Upskilling Your Team Benefits Your Organization?

Smart organizations can alleviate some of their basic financial pains by investing in tenured employees to retain them in the organization. Stellar employees, the ones with great morale and high productivity, can be hard to come by and organizations understand the benefits of finding ways to retain these individuals. To create a better workforce companies are exploring the question – How upskilling your team benefits your organization?

There are numerous successful companies that invest in the process known as upskilling to help retain current employees and brush up their skills for the greater benefit of the organisation.

What is Upskilling?

Upskilling is the process of teaching current employees new skills. This enables the employees to move into bigger and better jobs in the organization.

Investing in upskilling employees pays off in the long run, as the company saves money on hiring new associates and boosts the morale of tenured employees at the same time.

How Does Upskilling Benefit Your Organisation?

It may seem like a good idea to train your people and help them move up the corporate ladder, but it’s more than a noble concept.

There are specific benefits you will reap from upskilling the workforce:

Employee Retention

Employees who are challenged to develop and grow are often the happiest ones at an organization. If your company works to retain tenured employees, it will prove that you are making a solid investment in the people, which is sure to boost morale and productivity. Employees who are challenged to grow outside of their roles tend to get excited about what might be around the corner for them.

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Customer Satisfaction

If you have happy employees, you are far more likely to have happy customers. Content employees are typically more invested in the company, they promote the corporate brand within the organization and to your customers. Typically, happy customers tend to be loyal customers as well.

Save on the process of rehiring

It is expensive to lose and replace tenured associates. You are losing the investment you made in the current individual, not just because of any talent development you paid for, but also because when that individual leaves, they take all their knowledge and experience with them.

Now you have to pay not only to advertise the new role, for the recruitment process, the time it takes to interview candidates, any hiring bonuses that new individuals may require and also the time it will take the new individual to ramp up into the new position. Simply losing one employee can be a hit on the bottom line.

Upskilling Strategies

In order to create robust upskilling in your organization, you will need to devise a strategic plan. Having a strategy will help you to get buy-in from leadership within the organization and also from the employees themselves.

Personal Development Plans

Encourage associates to build a Personal Development Plan that includes competencies that they want to improve upon and skills they want to gain. Empowering your employees to come up with their own plan is key to the success of the upskilling training program. Employees can identify new skills and competencies that resonate with them as opposed to being told what they need to learn.

Allocate Time During the Workday

Once your employees create their individual development plan, allow time during the workday for employees to upskill. Perhaps you have an employee who wants to take a communications course. Allow them to leave early to attend class or provide time and a quiet space to take the class online.

Job-Specific Upskilling/Credentialing Programs

Offer your employees job-specific training to enhance their current skills. For example, you may have specialty software used by only a small sector of your organization. Consider offering upskilling training on the software to employees in the company who may be interested in learning more about it. You may also consider offering credentialing programs, meaning training that results in a professional certificate.

For example, you may have instructional designers on your team who would benefit by enrolling in an intensive E-Learning Certificate program.

You may be looking at the expense of upskilling training and decide it isn’t worth the investment. But it doesn’t have to cause a tremendous financial setback. You can upskill employees on a shoestring budget if you get creative. There are many ways to reskill corporate learners using a classroom setting, online learning content, or using your current employees to assist in creating upskilling training.

How to Implement Upskilling Training?

Classroom Training

Trainers can conduct upskilling classes in a classroom setting, allowing employees to learn new skills or enhance current ones. For example, companies may detect downward trends in production and leverage the training department to upskill employees in a group setting, thus correcting bad habits and enhancing production.

Trainers can present new ideas, allow participants to brainstorm and share ideas, utilize training software and bring trainees up to speed quickly.

Virtual Classroom Training

Companies with a global workforce may not have the luxury of classroom training if employees are dispersed in various locations. If your company has numerous locations, consider investing in a Learning and Talent Development platform to function as a virtual classroom solution.

Investing in virtual classroom programs allows you to upskill employees regardless of their location. Employees simply log in to the platform at the designated time and the facilitator can cover an abundance of upskilling training topics.

Microlearning

Another effective way of upskilling employees is to create web-based micro-learning units, short web-based training modules that cover a topic in 5-10 minutes.

For example, an organization may notice a decrease in customer satisfaction surveys. The training team could be leveraged to create a soft skills micro-learning program that covers how to positively interact with customers. Employees could enhance their skills during short workday breaks by taking the micro-learning units that interest them.

Mentors / Subject Matter Experts

Utilize some of your best employees in a mentorship or SME program. Offer your top producers an opportunity to develop their own leadership skills by mentoring others or acting as SMEs in training. Experts are extremely useful in all kinds of training programs, as they can answer questions and explain difficult processes from a practical perspective.

You can also utilize SMEs to assist with building E-Learning content for full micro-learning programs. Your training team will have a peace of mind, knowing that their content is up-to-date and accurate, if they collaborate with SMEs during the development process.

Conclusion

Upskilling has an abundance of advantages, from improving employee motivation to saving the company money. And it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Begin by assessing gaps in your current employees’ knowledge.

So to finally answer the question – How upskilling your team benefits your organization?

It empowers your employees to develop their own career development path and ultimately offer their skills and expertise to help the company achieve its goals. Take the time to invest in upskilling employees so that they stay with you and help your organization to grow and thrive.

5 Ways To Overcome Challenges Of Remote Work

Remote work is not easy and managing employees remotely is even more difficult. However, in the current situation where gathering employees at the office might add to the danger of getting infected, Remote Work stands to be the most convenient and practical option for a venture to stay active.

What is Remote Work?

Remote work refers to the work environment outside the office or job location. Few companies have operated via remote work for a considerable time period over the past few years. This concept evolved with the growing IT companies’ digital revolution in the market. However, it has not been a very prominent work discourse in the mainstream corporate industry.

Why Has Remote Work Become Important?

Remote work has become the need of the hour during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 being a global health hazard has far-reaching effects even on the economy.

To implement social distancing, companies are following three types of work modes viz., total shutdown, remote working, and employees of essential services working on-site with extreme care. Most companies and businesses to continue their operations have given their employees the option to work from home.

In order to sustain the business from huge losses and cover-up for the losses that have been incurred, due to the long lock-down period, Remote Work has become the new normal for a lot of corporate enterprises.

Challenges Faced

Remote work has become an essential part of the business continuity plan for companies globally. This has also emerged as a challenge for companies having a lack of policies or protocols for managing their employees.

Here are a few issues that employees have to deal with while implementing Remote Work discourse –

Lack of supervision

Proper supervision ensures work quality and consistent workflow. Most managers complain that due to a lack of proper supervision often there is a loss of work. Without supervision, even employees struggle in maintaining the quality of work without guidance. Even tracking working hours is a challenge among teams.

Lack of information

Employees often complain about a lack of information regarding a project from their manager. This causes a lot of time to be wasted in to-and-fro communication to get the necessary information. The absence of information might hamper the quality of the project as well as employee performance.

Lack of attention

While working at home the attention is naturally divided among household activities unlike the focused environment at the office.

How to Overcome the Challenges Faced due to Remote Working?

Remote work is not easy and managing employees remotely is even more difficult. But following the 5 key measures, one may ensure productive remote work among employees.

Daily check-ins

Companies may use office management systems to have remote work clock-in. Also, teams should do a daily stand-up for the task assigned and its completion. This will ensure the focus of employees toward the measurable goals assigned.

Better communication tools to manage remote work

Lack of proper communication can lead to a state of confusion and chaos. This confusion can hamper the overall working of the enterprise. While managing through remote work organizations should have decent tools for written as well as video communication among teams for the smooth functioning of operations. This also inculcates clarity in conversation and gives an enhanced understanding of the work plan and team goals.

Better project management tools

To ensure zero redundancy in the work project management tool is of utmost importance in remote work. This gives a clear picture of the task assigned, its status, and billables to a client. The project management system comes with numerous handy tools for work tracking, report analysis, and client information.

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Transparent work-flow

This is key for any organization for smooth operations that all policies, payroll, etc are openly shared across the teams. There is ERP system software that looks after automated maintenance of employees’ data, leaves management, and generation of payroll.

Build a happy work environment

The team must regularly talk apart from work as well to build a rapport and function like a family. Birthday celebrations and Work anniversaries should be group celebrations to involve everyone socially.

Arrange Easy access

It is important that you arrange for a medium to allow easy access to important information for all your employees. Cloud-based ERP software is the best means to build an easy and secure interface that can be accessed by all authorized employees with the required security credentials.

Conclusion

Employees must not feel neglected while working from home. Invest in the correct automation solution to derive maximum employee engagement on business avenues. Juntrax’s cloud-based platform facilitates managing and engaging remote employees working in multiple offices across the world.

Use Juntrax to remove the pain away from employee management, project management, timesheets, leaves, and payroll processing. Let us help you find more time for your core business activities by taking care of tasks that can be automated through our secured platform.