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Growing businesses need talented, motivated people to thrive. Many organizations have a formal succession planning process in place where company workforce managers proactively and formally seek to develop top talent, so that they can fill senior leadership and high-value technical positions from within.
Succession planning isn’t exactly a data analytics activity – but data analytics can give human resources managers insights they can use to make sure top performers don’t go unnoticed and areas most in need of top talent are properly identified.
How Does Succession Planning Work?
In general, succession planning works like this:
1. Management determines which leadership and high-value technical positions may need to be filled in the future – and where extra depth may be needed for really important, high-growth jobs.
2. HR reviews employee performance data to identify which employees have high potential.
3. Senior leadership makes sure their high-potential employees are given the training and job experience they need to grow into more senior roles.
4. When key jobs open, HR makes sure the high-value employees are slated to fill the top jobs.
What Tools are Typically Available to Help Manage Succession Planning?
Most HR management software will include screens and reports to help you track and manage position requisitions, headcounts and employee-performance data.
For some companies, this might be more than enough to get you through it. Other companies with more complicated workforce management needs might wish to invest in software designed to help manage employee ratings, talent development and position fulfillment.
Several great packages are available in the marketplace, and can be paired with help from a consulting firm that specializes in providing expert succession planning and workforce management advice.
How Can Data Analytics Help?
To plan the way that high value people will move through your workforce, you have to know where those people are, what they can do and where you need them to go. Traditional reporting and workforce management techniques are a great start – but by using data analytics you can do more, including:
Find Great Talent Hidden Under Bad Middle Managers
So, you’ve got an evaluation system in place – and you get reports every quarter that show you which employees are rated highly and which are rated poorly. The trouble is, you know not all of your managers good – and you know you’ve placed some bright young employees in their departments to make up for their management deficiencies, and you have a hunch that those smart kids might be getting bad evaluations from managers that don’t quite “get it.”
Using data analytics techniques, organizations can build tools that can help spot when certain managers or departments consistently rate employees poorly when those same employees seem to do well in other areas — especially when those ratings seem to be given to people of a certain gender, age or race. Then HR can intervene early to make sure top talent doesn’t get frustrated and quit prematurely.
See which Positions, Skills and Geographies to Worry About
The trouble with traditional bench depth reports is that they require a manager to know precisely which questions they’re asking. Need to know the average time in grade for a COBOL programmer, the number you have on-hand and the number you’ll need next year?
No trouble. But are those COBOL programmers all in the right cities? Do they have the right soft skills? What about other positions? Other cities?
With a few basic data analytics – driven changes, bench depth analysis can help managers know precisely where their biggest staffing risks lie. Data analytics routines can look at every possible combination of job, role, skill, position, geography and anything else you can dream up and look for portions of your organization where the average tenure of your employees is dangerously high – and help you figure out where to focus your training and recruiting dollars.
DataClear is a Baton Rouge-based data analytics consulting firm. Contact Us for a free 30-minute consultation and discover how your company can profit from data-driven decision making using tools that won’t break your budget.