Use Succession Planning to Retain Your Best Employees

No matter what the economy is like, succession planning is a must for every company.

What’s interesting, however, is, due to the current economy, people are calling it an “employer’s market,” meaning companies don’t have to worry too much about employees leaving. But that’s not really the case.

It might be the case with a company’s “B” and “C” employees, but when it comes to a company’s “A” employees—the ones who are going to take the company to the next level—that’s not the case at all.

A company’s top talent—the “A” employees—will always be looking for career growth opportunities, whether that be at your company or at another company. So employee retention is still very important during a down economy.

If you fall behind, your top talent will go elsewhere.

Using Succession Planning to Retain Employees
A lot of times, companies don’t have a formalized process in place for succession planning. This is a big mistake.

Another mistake companies commonly make—which can also be a liability issue—is basing succession plans on who the boss likes, even if the person doesn’t fit the criteria for moving up within the organization. Favoritism is definitely a mistake.

When you are succession planning, you want to make sure that you make every effort to keep employees informed and be as transparent as possible in your choices and communication.

You also want to make sure you inform the employees who you’re choosing to succeed a higher-up for a couple reasons:

• You want to make sure the employee actually wants to move up to that position.
• You need to groom the chosen employee so he/she can be successful if he/she does move up.

In order to be effective with your succession planning, you need to map out two things:

• Career paths—This requires you to look throughout your organization and make people aware of the growth opportunities that are available. You never know what paths employees might be interested in. The move might not necessarily be vertical, either. Sometimes employees want to move horizontal and learn different parts of the business.
  
  
• Competencies—You need to map out competencies for each position within your company. This means taking a look at what skills a person needs to have in order to accomplish the job, such as professionalism, technical skills, communication skills, leadership skills, etc.

Once you map out both of those things, you need to encourage employees to be proactive about seeking out feedback. Employees need to know where they rank in the different skills needed for succession positions. They need to know what their largest area of opportunity is and what their current weaknesses are. Most importantly, they need to know what they can do to move past these weaknesses.

The next thing you need to do after mapping out the necessary competencies is to provide employees with the tools, training and resources they need to improve their weaknesses and gain the skills they must have to move up in position.

For example, maybe an employee needs to work on listening skills. So keeping this in mind, you need to work backwards to determine what the best resource is. Is it instructor-led training? Is it one-on-one training? Is it a seminar? What about a book?

In some way, shape or form, you need to provide employees with the resources they need to acquire those competencies.

When the economy is bad, employees don’t have the disposable income to go and take formal classes on their own, unless your company offers tuition reimbursement. So offering the resources to them through work is the best way to give them the skills they need for advancement.

You always want to make it personal to the employee and specific to the organization’s needs. Also, an easy way to get started is to offer beginner, intermediate and advanced training options.

The more time and effort you spend “watering the seed,” helping to grow employees and following up with them continually, the better-groomed for succession each employee will be.

No matter what the economy is like, succession planning is a must for every company.