A time will definitely come for some employees to move on and quit the stage due to various irrepressible factors. But the job won’t have to stop. Or do we wait until that happens before we can plan?

Succession planning ensures that employees who will fill potential openings are on standby or available to take up the roles created by disengaging employees. This helps the chain of duties and averts a disruption in productivity.

It is good to grow successors from the group of available and already recruited employees in the company who would be developed to fill each key role within the company. This ensures that every key role has a prepared employee readily available to take over at any point, especially at emergencies. Here are major factors that make succession planning effective.

Succession planning is a continuous process

Succession planning is to ensure that you are not caught unawares or your company experiences no vacuum in leadership or any other role. That makes the process a continuous practice. Factors like resignation or retirement of staff and the expansion of the company’s activities or organizational structure should not lead to vacant roles.

It must support employee development

Developmental needs of your employees have to be at your grasp and clearly understood. While making a succession plan, you may consider hiring experts in the designated fields to improve the speed at which your employees need to develop. Insist on the idea of exposing the employees to every facet of the job by deploying them to different departments at various intervals. They will easily understudy their superiors while at it and will need no introduction to the job when they eventually mount the saddle.

It must consider employees’ future plan

As part of your support for development, you must ensure that the employees are conversant with their career progression path and the roles they are being groomed. Consider having private talks or one-on-one meeting with the employees to understand if they are actually interested in the future you are busy planning for them. An honest conversation is a primary requirement here.

Find out if the employees are equally interested in moving to another position. You’d be surprised to learn that the employee already has the skills required to handle a role in another department.

It must have a list of potential successors

While making succession plan it is good to list employees that have proven to be potential successors by their commitment to duty and proof of having been strong players and great potentials. Having this list is a crucial part of succession planning that helps to identify who is available for potential promotion or reassignment when there is a need for an employee to fill a key role.

Succession planning is one of the effective tools for employee retention. While it helps them to develop and to have new challenges, they easily understand the company’s long-term goals and plan for them. Making succession plan could help companies discover new potentials among their employees through special task delegations and role experimenting.

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