UK companies are more at risk of missing talent opportunities than organisations in the US and Western Europe due to not managing succession planning on a global basis.
Less than half (47%) of UK-based international companies manage succession planning globally, compared to 69% of organisations based in Western Europe or North America.
This is according to exclusive research by Personnel Today and international HR software company Cezanne, which also found that 27% of UK organisations not conducting succession planning across their global offices would like to do so in the future.
Julie Windsor, Cezanne’s operations director for the UK and Benelux, said: “Succession planning is a huge concern for UK business and the HR profession given the critical role that talent will play for organisations going forward.”
She added that companies would not achieve the same results if succession planning was only managed at a local level and that it should be a group-led process to benefit the whole company.
Internationally, 57% of companies surveyed had a common HR system that covers some or all of the countries they operate in.
The survey also looked at how companies used HR software across their international offices. The most common functions of HR software were found to be managing core HR, performance and compensation.
However, succession and career came top of the systems they were planning to add, followed by HR analytic dashboards and employee self-service.
Windsor commented: “Software provides companies with valuable intelligence about their talent pool, for example by allowing them to quickly see the status of their current management in terms of the level they are at now and their potential in the future, as well as identify possible problem areas in the leadership pipeline.”
Many companies with a formal documented succession-planning process have done so for a substantial amount of time. More than half (53%) have used this process for more than five years, with just 8% implementing this measure within the last year.
Other areas of the survey found that the great majority (84%) of global companies’ HR activities are aligned with business objectives. This could link to the fact that 77% of organisations had HR representation on the board.
The research is based on 200 responses from HR professionals and users of Personnel Today who work in companies with offices in different countries or that plan to expand internationally in the near future.
For more information on the findings, you can read the full report.
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