Succession Planning

What are leadership and most critical roles in your organization? While leadership roles (based on position in hierarchy) might be easier to identify, you will need some guidelines to identify most critical roles. Some possible guidelines are:

·        Roles critical to current and/or future (next 2-3 years) success of your company.

·        Roles which require specialist knowledge/skills and for which the candidate pool is limited.

·        Roles that have a high demand-supply inequity and hence face high risk of attrition/continuous churn.

So is there a need to have a ‘succession pipe’ for your ‘leadership’ and ‘critical’ roles? I will contend yes.

That requires your leadership team to have an established succession planning process.

What are the important elements of a succession planning process? These include:

·        Role Identification.

·        Employee/candidate Identification.

·        Leadership buy-in and involvement.

 

I have already elaborated on ‘role identification’ piece. Let me know delve a bit more into other 2 pieces.

When thinking of candidates for succession pipe, think both internal and external. You might want to invest more in ‘internal candidates’ but it is important for you to have identified an ‘external pipe’ and have a possible sourcing strategy around it. There are a few other employee specific items that I have talked later about.

Leadership team needs to think about ‘organization’, beyond and above their own functional/team boundaries. There is a need for a ‘One Talent’ view for organization. This is easier said than practiced.

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It is very important to ensure alignment between succession planning, career management (including individual development). 

Succession planning focusses on talent needs of organization. Think about what is it in it for an identified employee? Employee’s career aspirations surely need to be factored in.

It’s important not to assume what an employees’ career aspirations are. A structured periodic process around having dialogues with employees on their career aspirations is needed.

Think period wise (e.g. – employee ready in xx months, aa years) and capture what are development needs and development experiences employee needs to go through.  You need to invest in development of your talent.

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Lastly, be patient and intentional!

A succession planning process doesn’t yield results overnight. Nor does it yield results without sustained efforts from leaders, managers, and employees.

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Sourav

 

Quality Goal Setting

Performance year has started. As a manager, you need to go about setting goals for your team members.

You think ‘what all are goes into a quality goal setting process? Who are stakeholders and what are their roles?’

A quality goal setting process should ensure alignment of individual, team, and organization goals, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic/Relevant, and Time Bound) goals, and ownership of goals from employee.

It is important for stakeholders to understand their roles in order to ensure these objectives are achieved.

·        Manager – ensures linkage between organization and team/individual goals; plays a large role in ensuring conditions that enables employees to own their goals; ensures balance in workload across team members; and ensures synchronicity between work of different team members.

·        Employees- play a role in charting out milestone based execution plans for goals, identifying additional individual goals that further team’s work, and understanding how they need to support each other to achieve team’s goals.

What are the conditions that ensure ownership of goals from employees?  A feeling of ‘these are my goals’ might help here. Such a feeling will be an outcome of active participation in entire goal setting process.

So managers also have to ensure platforms that enable active participation of employees in goal setting process – both at a team level and at an individual level.

 

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Sourav

 

Compensation and Benefits

How much should you pay an employee? In what forms should you pay him/her?

In this post I will talk about a few key compensation and benefits related terms, viz- internal parity, external parity, salary surveys, non-financial rewards, variable pay, total rewards.

Traditionally C&B has been considered to consist of 3 components- pay, financial benefits, and non- financial benefits.

Pay is salary you pay to an employee. In pay, think about:

1) What's ratio of fixed to variable pay you want to pay an employee. Startups/smaller companies might prefer a higher proportion of variable pay. But do also note that fixed pay needs to be at least competitive with market. Else you might face employee attrition and face difficulty in attracting candidates to join your company.

2) What should be different pay components? Usually these are influenced by country specific legislation and market practices.

3) You need to have a periodic (usually annual) salary survey exercise in place. This will enable you to ensure salary you are paying for different jobs is competitive with market (external parity). Choose your comparator companies carefully. They usually will consist of competitors in your industry, companies you have attrites to, and companies you usually attract employees from.

4) You have to ensure there is adequate differentiation in compensation between roles of different complexities/values inside organization. This is called internal parity. For this you will first need to conduct a job evaluation exercise. There are a number of job evaluation models available in market.

Financial Benefits are monetizable components, besides pay, that you provide to employees, eg - life/medical insurance covers, bill supported reimbursements (e.g .- continuing education/child care),

Non-financial benefits are non monetizable component, rather benefits that employee can avail of, e.g.- housing, car facility, & sports facility.

How can you bring all of these components together?

Think of what is rewards strategy of your organization? This will encompass pay, benefits (financial and non-financial), and linkage of performance and rewards.

Think total rewards - entire gamut of rewards you are providing your employees.

Think how your total reward strategy links to and adds value to your business and employee value propositions.

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Sourav

Why do we need a performance management system?

This month I continue with my series of articles, aimed at grassroots organizations, on need for and basic structures of different HR processes.

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Two common terms used in organizations are 'Performance based cultures' and 'Performance management system'.

What do these terms mean? How are they relevant for your organization? Does your organization need an 'off the shelf' or a 'customized' solution?

I will draw an analogy with a business planning exercise, where we decide firm’s objectives and lay out periodic milestones.

Similarly, a performance management system ensures such an objective and milestone setting exercise at team and individual level.

Outcomes of business planning exercise are cascaded down to performance management system. Objective setting is an important but not only key component of a performance management system. Periodic reviews and linkage to rewards are other two key components.

If you refer to motivation theories you will find that these 3 components cover 4 important individual motivation aspects:

1) We need 'goal clarity'

2) We need periodic feedback

3) We need to feel differentiated

4) We need money to sustain our hygiene needs.

What kind of a performance management system does your organization need? What are choices you want to make for each of 4 motivational aspects mentioned above?

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Sourav

Onboarding

Is it an employee’s responsibility to onboard himself/herself on to the role or is the company’s responsibility to ensure that an employee onboards to a role?

 

I will contend both. But I do think that organization has a role to play in ensuring the employee is set up for success.

 

First, both external and internal hires have a need for onboarding.

 

Second, an onboarding plan needs to have defined objectives and a structure.

 

Objectives of onboarding primarily are a) establishing relationships with key stakeholders in/outside organization, b) understanding organization eco-system, c) learning the nuts and bolts to do the job independently, and d) starting to contribute in the role (with quick feedback loops) that in turn leads to increased confidence.

 

How do you want to go about building a structure around these 3 pronged objectives?

First, set a time limit for plan– a fortnight/1 month/2 months.

Second, create a week wise plan with defined objectives.

Third, have a review/check-in mechanism in place with employee’s manager.

 

Finally, a plan is only as good as its execution. So ensure that onboarding plan is executed well.

 

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Sourav

Ability

So you have figured out job specifications. Next step is to figure what is trainable and what do you hire for.

 

So how exactly do you figure out what is trainable and what is not?

 

I had touched upon this aspect in a previous post titled ‘Ideal Job Specification’.

 

Most capabilities are trainable given adequate time, effort, and cost.   Capability of a person is defined in terms of Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities.

 

Knowledge is easiest to pick up and possibly easiest to forget.

 

Skill is more difficult to pick up and more difficult to forget (e.g. – do you forget how to cycle or swim even if you have not cycled or swam for a long time).

 

Ability is most difficult to pick up and most difficult to lose/forget.

 

If you are have a constrained recruitment budget, then you might want to hire a candidate with high ability – who can make up for gaps in knowledge and skills with a focussed onboarding program.

 

So when ‘cost-constrained’, think ability!

 

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Sourav

 

Is it time you need an extra Headcount?

Before you start hiring, you need to a) know that you have a vacancy, and b) figure out how many vacancies you have.

So how do you get to know about these?

Look at following statements. Are any one of these true for you/your organization?

·        Geographical Scope: Your organization is venturing into new geographic areas

·        Customer Scope: Your customer base is increasing rapidly and you will need extra manpower to cater to increased customer base.

·        Scope of Skills: The changing nature of the industry/company requires that you hire for new skills.

These 3 will be usual levers that will feed into your company’s need for extra manpower.

 

Which of these are true for you?

 

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Sourav