Episode 3 Tip #1 The Blind Side

Succession planning is crucial for businesses to ensure a smooth transition when key employees leave. It reduces the risk of disruption and boosts employee morale by providing opportunities for growth. It also improves decision-making and increases productivity by having qualified employees ready to fill key roles. Creating a robust succession plan involves identifying key positions, assessing current employees' skills, developing their potential, and creating a succession plan for each key position. This process saves costs on recruitment and training. Overall, succession planning is beneficial for businesses in multiple ways. I'm your host, Laura Perez-Ehrhardt. Welcome to CoachingOz to this podcast, a part of the ECS Network. This is our mini-byte series. Tip number one is around designing a substantial succession plan and equipping management to better identify leadership potential beyond high performance. Succession planning is a method for identifying and developing a plan for replacing key employees. It's important for businesses of all sizes to have a robust succession plan in place. Why? Because it can help safeguard a smooth transition when employees make an exit. Reality is, life happens and we can't predict when there might be an unexpected change and companies need to prepare to respond to them. Since we're walking into spring season, maybe it's time to do some house cleaning and dust off and update your succession plan. Or maybe those of you who are listening and are looking to create a succession plan for the first time. There are many benefits to succession planning. So let's unpack this together. So it starts with reducing risk of disruption. When a key employee leaves or retires, it can disrupt the business if there's no plan to replace them. A succession plan can help to ensure that there's a smooth transition and that the business continues to operate without disruption or minimal disruption. Let's talk about increased employee morale. Who doesn't want to create a healthy and energetic environment? Employees are more likely to be motivated and engaged when they know that there's opportunity for advancement and growth in the organization. And a good plan can help to create a culture of opportunity and growth, which can lead to increased employee morale. And the bonus here, you're seen as the employer of choice. How great is that? Next is improving the decision-making process. So when a business has a good plan in place, it can make better decisions about the future of the company. Additionally, to ensure the business thrives, the company needs to be deliberate and create a robust pool of qualified candidates to choose from and will be well-equipped to make decisions based on those long-term needs of the company, including short-term if unforeseen circumstances arise. And also, a good plan in place can help to increase productivity by ensuring there are always qualified employees available to fill those key roles. This can help reduce the amount of time and resources that are spent on recruiting and training new employees. So just to give my listeners some perspective here, according to a recent study by Training Magazine, companies spent over $92.3 billion in 2020 and 2021 on training alone. This includes new hires and current employees who require continued education. And then also, the cost alone for hiring an employee is arguably one of the most expensive parts of running a business. And recruiting new employees is not cheap. According to the Society for Human Resources Management, otherwise known as SHRM, the average cost per hire is roughly around $4,700. That might seem kind of or sound kind of low to you, but it can be three, four, maybe even five times higher if it's an executive or senior level. So there are so many different ways to create a really good, robust succession plan. The best approach will vary depending on the size and complexity of the business. However, there are some key steps that all businesses should take when creating a succession plan. And I've carved out about four of them. So the first one is to identify key positions in the business. There are those positions that are essential to the success of the company. And they should be filled by qualified employees who have the potential to lead the business in the future. This is usually an executive or senior level position. And this level requires professionals who have the qualifications, the experience, and a successful track record to lead at this high level. Number two, once you've identified the key positions, you need to assess the skills and experience of your current employees. This will help you to identify which employees are ready to be promoted to key positions and which employees need additional training or development. Once those additional elements are in, you need to consider how much time it'll take to train them. How are you going to measure how the stakeholders are improving and developing? And additionally, how the individuals are implementing what they're learning into their current job. Number three, if you're identifying employees who are not yet ready for promotion, you need to craft a plan for developing their skills and experience. This could involve providing them with additional training, mentoring, or job shadowing. And number four, once you've identified the key positions and designed a plan for developing employees, you need to create a succession plan for each key position. This plan should identify the potential successors for each role, including the steps that are needed to be taken to prepare them for future promotion. So remember, succession planning is an important process for any business. By taking the time to create a solid plan, you can help to ensure a smooth transition when a key employee retires or transitions out of the company. This also makes dollars and cents to increase employee morale, improve decision making, and increase productivity. Thank you.