What do you do if performance evaluations are not aligning with succession planning in Workforce Management?

It's also important to have a balance , every organisation needs those people who are good at what they do but have reached their ceiling. They should be recognised as key members of the organisation.

Performance evaluations are primarily looking at how a person performed on a role in the past. Whereas for succession planning, the assessment needs to be forward looking. Which means that performance evaluations are only a part of the data required to asses succession decisions. The main data is that on growth potential, skill maturity and behaviours

It is always important to analyze, and reanalyze with a new perspective, the data. Changing the criteria for a candidate is not advisable. Having a category that allows for “personal observation” allows for subjectivity.

I agree insights are critical (esp. as they relate to the actual EX people have with these processes, not just HR/ tech operations), but I also caution about being too tied to improving practices against yesterday’s talent models – as these are often outdated. Today performance is no longer linear (time in / widgets out) and with flexible working and Ai-driven work redesign, we need to update our productivity metrics and performance management practices for a new era. I'd also question what issues you need to solve for with your succession practices - as again traditional replacement planning activities or building succession pools not tied to future of skills might actually reduce, not promote, talent agility.

In my experience most of the KPIs which are given are for current role the employee is playing. Since there is a significant overlap of roles and responsibilities of major IT roles technical and non technical, employees on ground do undertake additional responsibility mostly to get higher ratings in evaluation. If those activities are explicitly explained, curated and embedded within the evaluation process, it would act as a bench mark for succession planning.

One thing I have found helpful in my experience as a HR Manager is to leverage on Line Managers as People Managers. The old practice of placing all of that responsibility on the HR team is no longer sustainable. Line Managers should be empowered to effectively manage Employee Performance in order to ensure alignment with Succession planning. Having the right KPIs and having regular checkins with the employees will go a long way in helping the Line Manager perform appropriately.

Aside training the managers through courses, real life experience via task delegation or stretch assignments helps the manager grow by doing and research has shown that experiential learning is the best form of learning

The most important thing when we are looking for a specific goal is to communicate correctly to the people who supervise the operation. If they understand clearly the goal they will transmit clearly to the agents. They also have the feedback directly from the agents so they understand what is happening and with that information we are able to adjust, improve the goals for our people.

I agree we need to continually support managers to ensure that performance and succession decisions drive actual outcomes (gig opportunities, promotions, skills development, senior leader exposure, training to help people set goals and work more effectively in teams/with tech, etc.). With hybrid and cross-cultural working, coming alongside asynchronous work, the need to effectively manage work on 'outcomes' not input, understand individual work styles and evaluate team working is critical to ensure that performance practices inspire/ engage, as well as seek to improve performance and employability.