Implementing Succession Planning

Succession tools make finding and nominating potential successors easier than ever. It is possible to have a succession plan for only a particular group or the entire employee population.

Various options include:

• Top Tier: The senior level positions in the company, typically the CEO and the two levels below.
• Crucial: Specific roles in the company considered mission-critical to the current and future performance of the organization. These are usually director-level and above. Three categories are often found:
  • Pivotal: Roles in which a slight difference in performance significantly impacts company profitability. It can include strategic leadership roles, plant managers, or technical experts.
  • Critical: Roles necessary to maintaining mission-critical company operations. For example, linemen in a utility company or nurses in a healthcare company.
  • Development: Roles viewed as key for providing employees with the skills to move into pivotal or critical roles.
• Functional Ladders or Pipelines: Used to structure career tracks that link jobs related to an area of professional expertise to build breadth and depth of knowledge.
• High-Potential Based: This approach starts by identifying high-potential employees and then focusing on assigning them to roles and projects that will require those leadership and technical roles in the future.
• Total Population: Involves everyone in the organization. These processes are usually implemented to support a mixture of the following goals:
  • Ensuring employees actively engage in knowledge-sharing and development activities that will allow others to assume their responsibilities should they leave their current position
  • Providing and engaging employees around possible career paths they can pursue within the company
  • Drawing on the entire employee population as a source of possible candidates for internal positions to increase internal promotions and job transfers

The most challenging task of Succession Management is evaluating whether individuals are ready to assume new positions, as it requires predicting if someone can effectively perform a job they have never done before.

Evaluating candidates is usually done through documented facts, subjective ratings, and evaluation of the individual’s commitment toward the organization.

• Documented Facts: Relatively verifiable and well-defined data about candidates, such as previous job experiences, accomplishments, and qualifications, usually measured with online tools.
• Subjective Ratings: Measures things that depend on ratings of performance or estimates of the relatively intangible candidate characteristics such as future potential.
  • Performance Management evaluations: Job performance ratings from Goal Management, Performance Management, or 360 Reviews feedback processes
  • Future potential: A rating generated by the manager‘s estimate of an employee or more complex psychometric tools evaluating attitude and personality
• Commitment Criteria: The risk of losing an employee is estimated by looking at the candidates’ attitudes, career goals, and whether they are approaching retirement age. A candidate’s demonstrated support for the company's mission and goals should also be considered.

Form-based nominations were removed from Succession since it was cumbersome.

Customers who wish to use an approval process for Succession nominations will need to use the Formless nominations method. This method is simpler to implement and has been the preferred choice for several years.

If approvals are not enabled, all nominations take effect immediately and go straight to Approved status. If approvals are enabled, new nominations (as well as removals and readiness changes) will be in a Pending status until a user with the Succession Approval permission makes the change.

This is reflected in the UI of the Succession Org Chart v12 when the Position Card displays the Reject or Approve options. Talent pool nominations can also have an approval process.

The Formless nominations and approvals approach has many advantages, as listed below:

• Allows rapid development of a Succession plan directly on the Succession Org Chart
• Allows individual additions or removals from succession plans
• Supports simultaneous changes to the same succession plan by different users
• Creates a workflow that starts with the nominee instead of the incumbent
• Supports Pool-based nominations and successor ranking within readiness
• Works with Position and Role-Person nomination methods
• Records all new nominations, changes to readiness, and comments within the Nomination History

The Nominations approval process is an optional feature enabled during configuration and can be used for all the nomination methods.

While Succession Planning permissions allow users to nominate a candidate for a position, the Succession Planning Approval process requires another person to approve the nomination.

If a user nominates a successor without the succession approval permission, the nomination will be Pending. Users with the Succession Approval permission will be able to Approve or Reject the successor.

Using this feature, users can Approve or Reject pending nominees who belong to their target population. Talent Pools will be discussed in greater detail later.

Talent Pool owners can be presented with a To-Do item on the Legacy Home page, alerting them to pending nominations that need review. It enables you to go to the talent pool to Approve or Reject pending nominees.

Succession planners can review all changes to any nominations for a particular position.

• Focus on key roles in Succession Planning by identifying top-tier, crucial, developmental, and high-potential roles to ensure business continuity.
• To evaluate candidates effectively, assess their readiness using documented facts, subjective ratings, and commitment criteria to predict future performance.
• Simplify nominations and approvals with formless nominations for flexibility and efficiency. Approvals ensure oversight and control if enabled.
• Leverage nomination history to track nominee changes, readiness updates, and comments to ensure transparency and accountability in succession plans.

Based on the content in this section, please review the list of implementation decisions your company may need to make before implementation begins and discuss them with your stakeholders, project team, and SAP SuccessFactors implementation consultants. In this way, you will be better prepared to begin the implementation.

• What type of succession strategy do you plan on using?
• Which Succession Nomination Method will you choose?
• Will you be planning succession for all positions, or particular positions?
• How will you be evaluating candidates for succession?
• Will you be using an approval process for succession nominations?