
According to a report, only 35% of organizations have a formalized succession planning process for the top roles.
Add to that the cost of replacing a failed executive, which is 10 times his or her salary, and you realize that succession planning and development can no longer be overlooked.
In times when we see a lot of unpredictable changes in organizations around the world, you need to be prepared for every situation.
With SAP SuccessFactors Succession and Development, your workforce can start preparing for the same without spending too much money or time.
How does SAP SuccessFactors help in succession management?
Below are seven ways SAP SuccessFactors will help your organization with succession management:
- 1. Assess employee potential

With SAP SuccessFactors, you can uncover hidden talent with its company-wide search functionality that leverages comprehensive profiles of employee talent. This becomes even more accurate with the platform’s assessment tools that determine employee competency and skill levels.
You can also use the nine-box configurable matrix that accurately identifies your organization’s top and bottom performers.
If you want to check whether an employee is suitable for your succession planning initiatives, you can assess employee performance versus potential with their drag-and-drop calibration.
If you find that the performance is low, but they have potential, you can check for any hindering factors affecting their performance.
- 2. Reduce organizational risk
As an HR leader, you need to constantly look out for current and potential talent gaps in your organization that might impact business execution.
Let’s take an example to understand this better. If you’re part of an IT company that takes on multiple projects simultaneously, you may need to juggle employees between projects.
What if you come to know that the number of projects is going to increase in recent months? How will you plan for this?
With a workforce management software like SAP SuccessFactors, you can constantly assess the visibility of your bench strength and the risk and impact of key talent loss so that you don’t face any situations where you have a lot of projects but cannot handle them.

- 3. Ensure talent management and continuity

You can access SAP’s intelligent mentoring programs that automatically match mentors and mentees to foster growth and accelerate development.
This way, you can create a learning culture where employees can constantly upskill themselves and prepare for higher roles in the organization.
This helps you develop and maintain a continuous supply of internal talent that can fill critical roles in different teams.
- 4. Drive better business outcomes
To get ready for any changes, you can use SAP SuccessFactors to instantly nominate internal and external successor candidates for critical roles across the company.
You can even view the succession lineage chart to gain visibility in the “what-if” scenario and understand the domino effect of your succession plans and role changes.
By further subscribing to SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics in cloud HR, you can gain deep insights into the effectiveness of your proposed succession plans and how they will impact other business outcomes.

- 5. Leverage workforce insights

To nominate successor candidates, you need to have data on your talent pool. With SAP’s interactive Succession Org Chart, you can view talent depth across all your departments and branches.
If you are stuck between multiple candidates and don’t know the ideal one for the role, you can use side-by-side comparisons of configurable talent cards and find the best candidates for each role.
- 6. Create meaningful development plans
You can empower employees to explore different career paths, assess readiness for different roles, and address gaps in their skills or potential with the help of targeted development plans. This can be done using the Careers worksheet in SAP.
You can also use the Suggested Roles capability that help you explore role recommendations to find organization positions that fit employees’ skills and interests.
As HR leaders and managers, you can get involved in frequent dialogue about development initiatives and provide employees with the guidance they need to advance in their careers.

- 7. Improve employee engagement

According to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, it was found that if a company invests in employees’ careers, 94% of employees will stay at that company longer.
This points out the important fact that employees don’t just wish for higher compensation packages, but they wish to stay with companies that help them advance in their career paths.
With succession planning and development, you can empower employees to reach their full potential and accelerate their learning. This helps in employee engagement and retention.
Succession planning and development has become a necessity in this changing era of work. With SAP SuccessFactors, you are ready to meet this change and power your workforce to prepare for it.
You can reach out to TalenTeam to learn more about how you can implement SAP SuccessFactors in your organization.