Working organisations are aware of the need for employees also acting as potential successors to those working in key management or other important positions. In order to be ready to successfully fill in these positions, such workers need to be introduced to their new role before the need for a replacement arises. For when a company unexpectedly loses an individual occupying an important position within the management or elsewhere in its structure, a well-trained successor plays a vital role in ensuring an uninterrupted business flow. The aim of this thesis is to study the state of succession planning in Slovene working organisations, its key steps and the criteria for choosing the rights successors, as well as to determine the most suitable key success indicators in the succession planning process. For the purposes of our detailed research, we first used questionnaire about method implementation. There were 69 HR professionals who answered the questionnaire. The results show that 44 % of Slovenian working organizations of those who answered the questionnaire already has implemented the method. Besides, 26 % organizations have it in their human resources plan. After the questionnaire we used the exploratory, qualitative approach consisting of 21 semi-structured interviews with HR professionals from medium- or large-sized Slovene companies who have implemented the method of succession planning. The results show that succession planning is mostly related to talent and high-potential employee management. We established that these working organisations approach the succession planning process in various ways. However, they pay little attention to ways of measuring their success, which presents a significant issue. The greatest challenge seems to be ensuring the transparency of the process and thus successfully managing the successors’ expectations. The primary value of this study lies in its systematic overview of individual fields related to succession planning as well as in outlining the best practices that working organisations can use to improve their staff development and management processes.
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