Hit by a Bus: Succession Planning for your Organisation

I drove home late Friday night, and as I was getting out of my car on my busy inner-city street, I was nearly taken out by a bus. Admittedly, I was slightly distracted as I was talking on the phone at the time, however it was still terrifying having a big blue Mercedes bear down on me. Rather than having my life flash before my eyes, being the consummate HR Professional that I am, my first consideration was whether the succession planning I had put in place in our organisation was sufficient to ensure that every client got attended to, and every project was able to be picked up and completed.

Succession planning: most people think about it only when it is all too late. It really is an under-rated process in workplace management, but one of the most important things an organisation can do to ensure operations are continuous beyond the career horizon of your employees. Done well, succession planning can also provide ongoing career structure for employees, showing them how they can develop and grow within your organisation.

Many smaller employers often tell me they simply don't have time for succession planning (and many other HR functions) and it is often considered a luxury that HR departments in large organisations can strategise around. However consider this: In a workplace with 20 employees, the loss of just two employees is a 10% loss to the workforce. Consider the same situation in a workplace like Westpac, which employs 29,000 employees across Australia and New Zealand, a loss of the same proportion of employees (10% of employees is the equivalent of 2,900 staff) would make news.

Consider also that in a small business there are fewer people to fill the gap left by employee turnover, so the capacity to keep the business growing and progressing is much more limited in small businesses.

Succession planning is vitally important for businesses of all sizes. As I said at the beginning: it involves the consideration of how your business will continue to function in the event of unexpected employee turnover - or as I like to refer to it the "hit by a bus" scenario. If your three most key people in your organisation were hit by a bus tomorrow, would your business survive? How would those people who remain cope?

To succession plan in your business, you should also take into consideration the following:

• Do you have sufficient staff numbers to continue to operate if you lost just three key staff?
• Are the employees you have on staff sufficiently qualified and skilled to be able to fill key roles within your organisation? What additional training may be needed in order to ensure all core positions are covered?
• Does your organisation promote multi-skilling to reduce the propensity for the organisation to be caught short should a key employee leave unexpectedly?
  
• Do you have a recruitment strategy that aligns your people, their skills and values, with those required by your organisation structure now, and in five years time?

Here are some tips for succession planning in your organisation (whether you have 5 employees, 50 employees or 5,000+ employees):

• Start by developing an organisational chart for your business. Are all positions in the chart filled? If the answer is "No" you need to consider recruiting to fill those unfilled places. Are there people in your organisational chart covering more than one position? If the answer to this question is "Yes" you have a situation where some jobs are being undertaken as a secondary job by some employees. This usually means insufficient time is being dedicated to that secondary position, and it is not getting done as well as it would if it was the dedicated duty of a single employee. If that position is part of your core business, you really should consider recruiting some more employees to fill the gap.
  
• Your organisation chart will also show you where the career paths are within your organisation. This allows you to developed the skills of current employees and providing them with opportunities to grow with your business.
• You can also consider running a staff survey to find out why employees enjoy working for your business; what areas you can improve on; to ascertain what areas of your organisation interest employees for development purposes; to determine skills shortages; assess the management of people within your organisation, and to identify what motivates your employees.
• Build a training and development plan that aims to ensure you are hiring, retaining and developing the staff you need for not and for the future growth of the business.
• If you don't already have one, develop a recruitment process and strategy that ensures your business is competitive in the current labour market.
• Implement an internal mentoring system that provides employees with a buddy in management as a way for employees to develop some management skills before they are placed into a management role (don't just assume that your employees have inherent skills in financial management, budgets, people management, rostering and reporting).

If you need assistance in building a succession plan for your organisation, one of our consultants can work with you, your management team and your employees to build a plan that provides your organisation with the security that it will continue to operate efficiently even if key employees leave unexpectedly. Click on the link to contact us about your succession planning needs!