Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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cess that requires technology to manage. Your managers must build development and mentoring into their everyday work. Tis requires setting goals, establishing regular check-ins, and evaluating progress. Both the organization and the employee must be involved, and everyone must be aware that things change — including strategy and business conditions. Both the process and the people involved must be fexible enough to adapt. Your organization can reduce its risk by involving more people in the process (talent pooling). Can't-miss high-potentials sometimes fzzle. Someone who nearly washes out one year can later become a top performer. Casting a wider net reduces the risk and builds the unforeseen into the process. Meanwhile, employees need the freedom to investigate chances to grow internally and to opt into a career path. Here are key elements to succession planning: Career development plans identify the ambitions and goals of your employees. Ideally, helping employees make progress toward their career goals will help to retain them. But career planning is also important in grooming identifed successors to make sure they're ready to step into their next role, if necessary. And identifed successors should be closely involved in the analysis of existing production processes and alternative solutions. Other talent initiatives provide important information when it comes to succession planning. For example, knowing the common qualifcations and competencies of each role — knowledge, behavior and skills — is essential for identifying and developing successors. How does succession connect to other aspects of talent management? >> Career development provides potential successors with development today to prepare them for the future. >> Performance management provides insight into who your top performers are. >> Learning addresses gaps in employees' knowledge and skills. >> Recruiting identifes a common set of competencies needed to recognize and hire the right candidates by seamlessly looking at both internal and external candidates to fnd the best ft. >> Collaboration tools help managers work together to evaluate and mentor successors. Tese tools also help employees to connect with colleagues who can help them learn and grow. >> Workforce planning helps plan for future talent needs in addition to addressing current succession scenarios. >> Workforce analytics connect talent data to business outcomes to illuminate talent gaps and development needs. >> Talent profles engage employees by helping them create rich profles that describe skills, hobbies, awards and interests to paint a complete picture of themselves. >> Core HR connects talent information to employees' other master data to provide a single source of truth. Managers must build development and mentoring into their everyday work. 1 2 Succession-management technology allows you to get away from spreadsheets and have the application do the heavy lifing for you. Features include: >> Predictive modeling: Use "what-if " scenarios to predict what may happen when employees leave or transition to another role. You can also simulate the domino efect of what happens when your succession plan is put into action. >> Decision support: Because all employee information is integrated into a single system and you have comprehensive talent profles, you can make complete side-by-side comparisons when it's time to make important decisions. >> Calibration: It helps you to easily identify top performers and ensure objective, accurate ratings of talent across groups and departments. Because top perform- 3 ers are estimated to be up to three times more productive than other employees, identifying those employees will give you a huge boost toward achieving your business goals. >> Charts: Dynamic, easy-to-read organizational charts provide visual summaries that show existing and potential leadership gaps. Tese help identify your bench strength and provide a dynamic view into a wealth of knowledge about your employees. You can quickly assess employee risk of loss and impact of loss, zero in on critical roles, and see whether a successor has been identifed. >> Search: With a company-wide search that leverages employee talent profles, you can fnd talent across departments and geographies, based on comprehensive search criteria that include departments, skills, competencies, location, languages spoken, job codes, impact of the loss in the current position and education. >> Reporting: By extending succession planning throughout the company, managers can get constant access to upto-date information about employees who are succession candidates, including snapshots of an employee's background, expertise, performance, and career aspirations. CONCLUSION When it comes to retention, leadership matters: 62 percent of surveyed employees who plan to stay with their current organizations report high levels of trust in corporate leadership. A succession management program tied to development can give your organization the opportunity to exhibit leadership, earn trust, and engage your employees. You can also avoid disasters with succession management. Your company can get the right people in place, because you're using predictive modeling and accessing calibrated performance data when making talent decisions. No more surprises, just preparation. —Excerpted from a 10-page SuccessFactors whitepaper titled "Identifying, Developing and Retaining Talent for Critical Roles." For more info: www.successfactors.com Elearning! August / September 2013 39