Succession Planning During Economic Downturns

By Leah Groehler, PhD, Karen N. Caruso, PhD, and Amanda Seidler, PhD

How do successful organizations retain and best utilize their top talent during challenging economic conditions? They identify, assess and redeploy their key players providing exceptional developmental experiences and placing these people where they’re needed most.

“The viaPeople Individual Talent Profile captures all of the requisite talent information for each individual in the organization and unlike other software products this criteria can be tailored to the company’s specific needs”
-Leah Groehler, PhD, Vice President, Consulting Services

The current economic conditions have created unprecedented challenges for organizational leaders. While many companies are being forced to make difficult employment-related decisions including reorganizations and hiring freezes, they continue to face pressures from momentum in the global economy, as well as increased customer demands. As a result, organizational leaders are seeking to answer the question – How can we use our valuable, yet scarce resources to continue to achieve our strategic objectives?

The situation described above is becoming an alarming issue for many organizations and the need to quickly assess talent to identify who could assume a different role is paramount in this economy. At viaPeople our client organizations are facing this issue as well as other succession planning challenges as they relate to specific industries. Because each organization is unique in its industry, strategy, structure and culture, its challenges are also unique and subsequently the approach they take to succession planning should be suited to meet their specific needs. We explore a few of these challenges below and discuss how viaPeople has helped our client organizations to leverage technology to more effectively execute their talent strategies.

Organization A: Talent Redeployment

Challenge
•  Broadened positions due to decreased head count and significant shifts in strategic objectives.
•  Difficulty staffing newly created positions from within. Employees being assigned to new positions without any analyses of the position requirements or a thorough assessment of capabilities.
•  Poor staffing decisions, especially at higher organizational levels, were disastrous and threatened to throw the organization off course.

Solution
The viaPeople consultants worked with organizational leaders to create an online Talent Assessment, as well as to develop role requirements for critical positions. The viaPeople Talent Assessment software was employed to analyze the skill sets, business experiences, leadership potential, career aspirations and readiness for promotion of the workforce. The combined data formed a new talent database where organizational leaders could readily search for and view internal talent with specific skills and experience profiles using the viaPeople Succession Planning module. This client also employed the viaPeople Organizational Charting module to perform modeling scenarios in an effort to understand the resulting talent mix in moving leaders to different parts of the organization.

Outcome
The new succession planning system has added structure and significant decision support to ongoing selection, promotion, and redeployment efforts. Managers and the HR team can now search the talent database for specific business experiences, language proficiency and readiness for promotion and then fill vacancies almost immediately. Once these individuals are surfaced in the Succession Planning module, HR and other managers can see all of the talent detail for each person (contained in the Individual Talent Profile). The viaPeople Individual Talent Profile captures all of the requisite talent information for each individual in the organization and unlike other software products this criteria can be tailored to the company’s specific needs. This organization is making more informed placement decisions and can now selectively use external recruitment methods thereby saving a tremendous amount of money on recruiting fees, internal orientation training, and downtime as leaders move up the learning curve.

Search Tool

Organization B: Engaging and Retaining High Performers

Challenge
•  High-performers not being identified or recognized with valuable career development opportunities and incentives.
•  Struggling to find ways to incent and continuously engage the organization’s most valuable resources.
•  Great fear and concern that high-performers will be lost and, when the economy improves, the organization will not be able to successfully emerge from this challenging time.

Solution
The viaPeople consultants created a Top Performer Profile containing all of the behaviors which differentiated top performers from other employees. This profile was based on statistical analyses of behavioral assessment data and operations/sales data. Key positions within the organization were then identified and position requirements were defined to include detailed skills, experiences, developmental paths as well as the behaviors surfaced in the Top Performer Profile. The organization used viaPeople’s Career Pathing and Promotion module to identify employees who met these position requirements and were eligible for promotion and incentives.

Outcome
This organization now uses a very systematic process for identifying those employees who are truly top performers. The objectivity built into the Top Performer Profile enables HR and other business unit leaders to assess their workforce against these criteria and reward those identified. The ability to recognize high performers for their performance and development has kept the workforce engaged during these challenging times and has also provided objectivity in a promotion process that all too often lacks this.

Organization C: Building the Leadership Pipeline

Challenge
•  Significant industry and economic changes creating an unknown future for the marketplace.
•  Need for a focus on developing pools of talent that can be utilized to take on emerging leadership roles and new individual contributor roles – roles that may never have existed before.
•  Training and development efforts under extreme scrutiny and significant budget cut-backs – a tough environment to introduce new tools/processes.

Solution
The viaPeople consultants worked with organizational leaders to outline the capability and skill requirements that would be required in the future. Criteria were then determined for identification into specific talent pools (i.e., high potential, high performing expert). Using the viaPeople Talent Assessment and Succession Planning modules, the organization was able to assess the internal workforce and identify employees for placement into these talent pools which could then “feed” specific roles. The viaPeople consultants then created developmental career paths for each talent pool which emphasized cross-functional organizational exposure (increasing the breadth of experience and maximizing development for all employees). The viaPeople Development Planning module allowed the organization to monitor the development plans, activity and progress of individuals within talent pools to ensure the building of talent throughout the organization.

Outcome
Drawing from specific talent pools, this organization can now fill emerging leadership roles and new individual contributor positions with the right talent. The organization has also been able to maintain a very cost-effective development planning system which enables them to track development progress throughout the company and use this information in its ongoing training strategy. Likewise the various talent populations (i.e., high potential, high performing expert) have a tool which can help them track progress as they move throughout the organization into different roles.

In each of these cases, the viaPeople consultants used a combination of best practice processes as well as technology tools to target the succession-related issues and address key challenges. In particular, technology can provide the organization’s leaders with an easy and comprehensive way to review in-house talent, identify areas of the organization which may have talent “gaps” and redeploy employees to other parts of the company to best utilize their skills and fill the most critical talent “gaps”.

Summary
These economic times call for creative approaches to effectively execute organizational strategy with fewer resources. Due to an increasingly uncertain future, developing bench strength is a key long-term strategy for many organizations. While downturns typically result in cost-cutting, organizations must continue to think creatively and strategically about the way they devote resources to talent. Rather than halt all spending on talent management activities, leaders should use this opportunity to invest in processes and tools that will enable them to more effectively redeploy their workforce. Organizations that are able to effectively implement such talent initiatives will be poised for a stronger return and faster growth once market and economic conditions begin to change.