Companies embrace the idea of Succession Planning and Talent Management with great enthusiasm, but rarely put the mechanisms and tools in place to effectively follow through on their initiatives. SuccessFactors Research recently conducted a survey of Succession and Talent Management capabilities across the U.K. and Ireland, and found that this is indeed the case. Companies have initiatives in place, but do not back them up with effective processes and support.

For example,  76% of all companies in the survey were found to have some kind of succession plan in place, yet 40% of companies lacked any process or capability to identify future talent. You simply cannot identify successors effectively, if you do not have a regular process in place  to identify talent within your company. Talent reviews should be the starting point, not the end point of the talent management process. Managers should have plenty of tools to help identify talent. 360 reviews, performance reviews, and competency assessments can all be used to make reasonable assumptions about the potential of an individual.

Losing your best talent can be disastrous during these tough economic times – making Succession Planning a top priority for organisations wanting to build growth and be successful. Organisations routinely encounter turnover across a variety of key positions which often results in significant disruptions if no replacement is readily available. You need to know what you have, at all levels in the organisation, before you can start to think about successors.

SuccessFactors is presenting a  webinar focused on effective succession planning in the U.K. and EMEA, Effective Succession Planning: It’s not just for your CEO, on Tuesday, July 22nd, register here. You can learn more about the tools available to managers, and bring your own questions to our team. You can also read more about the state of Succession planning and talent management in the U.K. and Ireland in the related SuccessFactors Research Data Brief.

Not long ago SuccessFactors Research and thought leader Amy Lyman hosted the webinar The Business Benefits of Being a Great Place to Work. People who love their jobs work harder and do better. It follows then that creating a “great place to work” should be a top priority for all businesses. Of course, this is easier said than done, or is it? If managers focus on transparency, honesty, diversity and fairness they are on their way to creating a great place to work. Every business is different, so making the leap from a good place to work to a great place to work will involve different factors for each workplace. Ms. Lyman discusses these factors and how they help businesses excel in the webinar she did with us.

Every year the Great Place to Work Institute’s 100 Best Companies to Work for survey is published in Fortune magazine. In fact, SuccessFactors has twice been ranked highly in the small business category. How do we do it? Well, we are very transparent about what drives our success, and have a blog dedicated to employees telling their success stories here at SuccessFactors – the HappyFactors blog.

The response to our joint webinar with Ms. Lyman was electric, and she received many follow up questions from our guests after the conclusion of the webinar. She was kind enough to answer these questions in detail, which are now available for download – SuccessFactors Research Webinar Extra: Amy Lyman . She tackles some tough questions like, how do you start to build trust when employees have lost their trust in upper management, and can you recommend some processes to uncover what’s working in a company in terms of building a strong culture?

Ms. Lyman will be joining us again August 19^th for a webinar focusing on Europe and EMEA. Just as the challenges are different for every business, they are different in various geographies as well. Check our events page for the registration link, which should be available shortly.