Jo Guy, CEO, AJ Recruitment
Jo Guy, CEO of social care recruitment specialists AJ Recruitment, talks about the importance of succession planning to long term business growth.
Workforce gaps are holding many care businesses back from achieving their growth ambitions. Having a robust succession plan in place is critical to continued, long term growth. Without one, you risk having a disengaged workforce, people not performing in their roles, and a business that is chasing its tail. It’s exhausting. Here, I’ll look at why employee engagement and succession planning go hand in hand and share tips for implementing both in your organisation.
Keep them keen
Research shows that engaged employees are more productive; take pride in their work; demonstrate loyalty; are fantastic ambassadors for your organisation and go the extra mile for colleagues and customers. You can also expect to see improved retention levels, lower absence rates, and fewer conflicts and grievances.
For your team to be – and stay – engaged, there are three key ingredients:
- Scope to grow: people need to see that there are opportunities to develop and support in place for them to do so. Do you invest in your team – and in your managers – to make sure they are supporting people to be their best at every level in your organisation?
- The bigger picture: in an engaged workforce everyone understands how they contribute to the wider vision. Does your business purpose align with theirs? Most organisations talk about what they do and how they do it, but not many talk about why they do it. And it’s the ‘why’ that attracts people to your organisation – and keeps them there.
- Feeling valued: to do their best work, people need to feel valued and cared for at work. How much time do you invest in understanding what people need to feel valued, and making sure it is happening across the organisation?
With the solid foundation of an engaged workforce, you will have a much better chance of retaining talent. The next step is to check you have the right people for where your business is now, and a plan to make sure you will have the people in place in future to help take your organisation where you want it to be.
Getting started
Successful succession planning hinges on having a clear plan of where you see your organisation going over the next few years, and understanding the infrastructure you will need to get there.
Once you have identified the structure, you need to identify the critical positions in the business. This is not about the people you have in those roles currently; it is purely looking at the roles that need to be filled to make sure the organisation can run smoothly and meet performance objectives.
Key considerations for every role include how critical and influential the role is to achieving your goals; the experience needed to perform the role; whether the individual needs company-specific knowledge to successfully perform in that position; and the length of the learning process associated with it.
From there, layer in the people who are currently performing those roles in the organisation. This will help you see what you’ve got covered and identify any gaps. Then you can think about whether company-specific knowledge is required to perform those “gap” roles or whether external knowledge could be brought in – either as cover in the short term or for the longer term.
Identify your flight risks
On paper it might look as though you’ve got every role covered, but there will always be a risk of people leaving. Against each role, I recommend mapping out the likelihood of people leaving in the next 12 to 18 months. This will show your “flight risks” and give you the opportunity to think about whether there is someone in the organisation ready to step into that role, or whether someone could be ready within 6, 12, or 18 months. This can inform the development plans for those people and enable you to identify career progression opportunities for others in the organisation – a key driver for engagement.
Taking the time to look ahead now and investing in engagement and people development across your organisation will pay dividends in the longer term, alleviating retention headaches and unlocking future business growth.
Jo Guy is CEO at social care recruitment firm AJ Recruitment.
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