Talent management is the process of managing a person’s journey within your company, end-to-end. It is not just about recruiting and onboarding, it is about the experience that person has while working with you and how well you facilitate their development.
Part of seeing the employee journey through to the end is planning for their eventual departure. Succession planning is essential to developing other people in your company. When someone moves on, you want to ensure you do not have a large skills gap and investing in people and their own future is good practice.
Two of our previous blogs have covered recruiting and onboarding. If you have not read those, I suggest reading them first as they will take you through providing your hire with the best start possible.
What is talent management and succession planning?
Good talent management ensures you have the right people in the right roles with the right skills. It helps to promote tenure and increases employee engagement by providing a framework to better manage your staff. Good solutions will retain data on your employees throughout their journey with you, from hiring to moving on. Succession planning focuses on preparing for vacant positions where you may need to upskill a current employee or hire new talent.
Why must you have strategies in place for talent management and succession planning?
- It provides visibility over the skills you need internally and where you might source these.
- Make data-backed decisions about which people are the right fit for specific roles.
- Prepare for employee turnover by planning the next steps for filling vacant positions.
- Improve business performance by fostering an environment where people can pursue their career goals.
- Reduce the risk of losing top talent to external opportunities – or even competitors.
Let’s say that one of your staff needs to step down for a few months due to something in their personal life. You now have a vacant position to fill and must decide between hiring or skilling up an internal person. If you have a talent management system that supports your succession plan, you can review the existing talent within your organisation, identify suitable candidates, and decide whether to move someone into a new role or hire fresh with little disruption to the business.
So, how does a good HCM solution support the employee journey?
1. Deliver a better employee experience (EX)
People given the opportunity to leverage their strengths at work have an engagement rate six times higher than their counterparts.
Part of elevating EX is targeting each person’s strengths and nurturing their skills. Talent management software provides you with data on your staff, their strengths and weaknesses, the training they have completed, and suggests what might be best for them to do next.
Another element of improving EX is fostering good communication and collaboration between managers and employees. Talent management software provides a central location for people to access their records from any device so that you can provide people with accurate and up-to-date information about their job status and performance.
When you improve EX through communication and development, you support the success of your people, which contributes to the organisation’s overall success.
2. Develop your employees
Talent management software creates avenues for supporting staff development. It allows you to track employee development goals, identify training needs, and assess skills. Additionally, talent management software makes it easy to create custom learning paths for employees and coordinate development resources.
Talent management software identifies people that have demonstrated the potential to grow into new roles. You can leverage this data to create and manage training programs to monitor their success.
For example, you leverage talent management software to identify employees with leadership potential. After identifying these employees, you create a leadership development program so they can grow into new roles. As a result, you have promoted internal employees and kept your talent pool strong.
3. Retain top talent
As discussed above, development is one way to reduce employee turnover and increase workforce stability. While development is undoubtedly one critical method, it is not the only way to retain top talent.
Company culture is a great contributor to whether or not you retain your top-performing employees. When people go to work, they want to feel valued. Strong company culture can provide people with this fulfilment and increase their chances of staying with the business for a long time.
Talent management software helps to create and maintain a strong company culture. The software allows managers to see which employees are the most engaged and why. It also provides a way to give employees feedback and support their journey with processes for rewards and compensation.
You will find that you struggle to retain people if the apps they leverage at work waste their time rather than save it. When people need to leverage technology that frustrates them, EX declines. Talent management software provides one platform that supports HR processes and enables smooth communication with staff.
4. Succession planning
Succession planning ensures you have a plan for replacing people when they leave or retire. This includes identifying potential successors and developing a plan for transferring knowledge and responsibilities to them. Succession planning can help an organisation maintain continuity and stability during times of transition.
Succession planning ensures that an organisation has a pipeline of qualified candidates to replace key employees when they leave or retire. Talent management software supports succession planning by helping organisations track employee skills and identify potential successors.
For example, talent management software provides the tools you need for succession planning of leadership roles. You can leverage talent management to identify employees with potential, train them, and then move them into a leadership role when someone else moves on.
How Tambla supports talent management and succession planning
Are you looking to improve retention and better manage turnover in your company?
Tambla’s experts can deploy a talent management solution that enables you to optimise talent management and succession planning. We focus on ensuring you can keep you business moving, no matter your talent requirements. Visit our page on SAP HXM workforce solutions for more.
