The potential life span of an organization is larger than an individual. People don’t remain static at one company. They move. They leave one job and go to another company. The movement may be due to changes in their life stages, relocating to another city or country, family circumstances, health reasons, career priorities or any other reason. When an employee leaves a company, it creates a gap. If the employee is responsible for some highly critical function of the company, her departure may threaten to disrupt the regular operations of the company. Safeguarding against such possibilities must be given proper thought and attention. Every company has to accept the inevitability of employee movement and must equip itself so that it can continue its operations seamlessly without any significant disruption. For this purpose, succession planning for every important function or role in the company must be put in place.
- Duplication of critical human resources is the best way to mitigate risk and ensure smooth operational continuity.
- We must identify all the critical functions within the company, which can’t be left dependent on a single individual.
- Every employee engaged in such critical functions in the company must have a backup in another employee. That person must be prepared in such a way that she can fill up the gap created by the outgoing employee easily and immediately.
- We must make the creation of backup for every important employee compulsory. HR department must ensure that there is always a backup available for every critical function.
- We may have to spare resources and allow time for such backup creation.
- Also, to minimize the risk of losing knowledge, information and experience gathered by the outgoing employee, we must make our systems and processes such that they are less dependent on individuals. The processes must be designed in such a way that all the important product, account, customer, vendors, market etc. related information gets automatically stored in a system which is always accessible to the company under all circumstances.
The business owners and leaders must also ensure the smooth transition of ownership and control of the company to the next in command and must prepare the ground well in advance. The company must not be left leaderless in any unexpected situations. More details about leadership succession planning in family owned businesses are described in the chapter on Family Business Management.
(Expert advice to GROW your business wherever you are, whenever you want.
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