Introduction

ISO 30414 highlights guidelines on the following core human capital reporting (HCR) areas:

— compliance and ethics;
— costs;
— diversity;
— leadership;
— organizational culture;
— organizational health, safety and well-being;
— productivity;
— recruitment, mobility and turnover;
— skills and capabilities;
— succession planning;
— workforce availability.

This document focuses on evaluating succession planning as a critical factor in supporting organizational resilience and sustainability from a people perspective. It can be described as a core human resources and talent management activity and a key part of a successful workforce planning strategy. ISO 30414:2018, 4.7.11, considers succession planning as an essential tool for sustainable workforce strategic planning.

Succession planning can be described as a process for identifying and developing current employees with the potential to fill critical positions in the organization for the future. Succession planning can be critical to organizational sustainability and creates an effective framework for recognizing, developing and retaining a diverse top leadership and management talent pool. It is important to note that strategic succession planning is not only about the talent the organization needs right now, but a journey to map out and create the talent, knowledge, skills and competency capabilities required for the future of an organization. This is usually aligned with future growth plans and business goals as well as improving people initiatives (such as valuing diversity and inclusion).

Organizations often invest significant sums to develop and retain staff. A sustainable strategy is therefore imperative to carefully manage key risks associated the workforce, such as key exits (through natural attrition, such as retirement and voluntary and involuntary exits) in a planned and coordinated way, connecting all human resources talent and development areas (including diversity and inclusion), creating what can be described as a talent contingency plan that doesn’t leave the organization exposed to operational failure, service or key client loss. As with all metrics, they should be analysed in a context of organizational priorities, strategic objectives and other human resources data, reviewing the ecosystem of people information to make informed talent-planning decisions.

For all these reasons, investors, analysts and all types of employees will benefit from greater transparency about the time spent in succession planning.

The metrics within the succession planning cluster, as documented in ISO 30414:2018, 4.7.11, are as follows:

a) succession effectiveness rate;
b) successor coverage rate;
c) succession readiness rate:
1. 1) succession depth rate: ready now;
2. 2) succession depth rate: ready in 1-to-3 years;
3. 3) succession depth rate: ready in 4-to-5 years.

This document describes the following components for each of the identified metrics:

— general;
— purpose;
— formula;
— how to use (internal use and external use);
— contextual factors;
— predictive factors.

There are additional metrics in this document to aid the user in understanding the extensive range of metrics available and to increase their choices in providing as comprehensive a picture of their succession planning measures of success as possible. Please note, these metrics are part of an ecosystem of measures (and data) in the human resources function, such as turnover and retention and culture, found in the ISO 30000 family of standards and technical specifications, that can be used to create a fuller narrative of the organizational contextual situation.

PD ISO/TS 30433:2021

Human resource management. Succession planning metrics cluster

Current, Under Review

Published:

31 May 2021