While succession planning matters, it focuses on expected and permanent successorship. What will you do if your CEO is hospitalized with angina, your chief architect demands a summer-long leave of absence, or a bout of flu takes down your entire custodial staff?

Replacement planning is the process of arranging temporary coverage for key internal responsibilities. Having a plan in place before an emergency arises is critical to business continuity. If you’re among the 40% of companies that aren’t prepared for the emergency succession of the CEO, read on.

You can't plan an emergency, so you should plan for one. Don't delay. www.toothpastefordinner.com

In some cases, replacing an important function on a temporary basis is relatively straightforward. Often, an experienced administrative assistant can manage most of the workload, while the absentee’s staff and colleagues fill in the gaps. For entry-level positions, chances are a temp agency can find someone on short notice.

Balancing the costs and benefits of naming temporary successors can be challenging. It’s important to consult widely, and consider maintaining confidentiality, in order to ensure office politics don’t become a distraction. Here’s a simple plan to help you get started:

1. Get a Commitment from Management.

Because this can be a fairly large project, with significant operational repercussions, it’s important that management commits to it. Cite the high costs of vacancies and of training new staff. If that doesn’t work, you might be able to appeal to a stubborn manager’s ego. Sell replacement planning by noting the importance of effective managers, stressing how helpless the company would be without them.

2. Determine scope.

What positions are you looking at? What length of time? A wide scope is great, but you need to be realistic with your time and resources, or you’re going to have trouble completing the project on schedule and on budget.

3. Let managers do the leg work.

Managers know their jobs, and those of their employees. They have a thorough understanding of their individual employees’ competencies. So let them plan replacements. Give them guidance and offer tons of assistance, but don’t needlessly step on toes. If selling the project wasn’t easy, implementing it definitely won’t be. Try to arrange for some informal group meetings, so that peer influence and competition can encourage progress.

4. Finalize and Act.

Once everything is planned, make it happen. Get approval from whoever you need to. Inform whoever needs to know. Then work to make sure that your replacements are ready to hit the ground running, if and when they’re called on.

5. Review.

Replacement planning is an ongoing process. Jimmy probably can’t fill in for Marsha if Jimmy left the company six months ago. Identify gaps, successes, and failures, and then start the process again. This is something you should consider doing on an annual basis.

HR sometimes struggles to get a seat at the table. If your replacement planning program gives you a role in filling everyone else’s seats, it should be much easier to pull up a chair for yourself.

If your CEO resigned tomorrow, would you be able to replace her?

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

Source: Rothwell, W. J. (2011). “Replacement planning: a starting point for succession planning and talent management.” International Journal of Training and Development 15(1). 87–99.

Safety is a priority at any workplace. Most jurisdictions have “Right to know” laws. In many places, the law even reaches into employees’ personal lives, requiring interventions and information sharing in cases of domestic violence.

Generally though, you don’t need to keep tabs on your staff 24/7. One exception is in Canada’s far north, deep in polar bear country, where safety takes on a whole new dimension.

The world’s largest terrestrial carnivore can be over 5 feet tall, 10 feet long, and weigh more than a ton. Fierce maternal instincts, limited access to food, and loss of habitat make any encounter with a polar bear extremely dangerous.

For the workers and residents of the north, simply taking out the trash is a risky process.

Hungry polar bears are known to venture into towns and industrial developments in search of food. For them, scavenged garbage is both delicious and nutritious. The walking meat that carries it can be rather appealing, too.

Biologists, soil researchers, and oil workers throughout the north are warned not to go outside alone. Like diplomats and reporters in war zones, they should always have an armed escort. They’re commonly trained in the use of firearms.

In polar bear country, training and tracking employee skills (shameless plug: TribeHR is a great way to track employee skills) aren’t just about obeying laws and supporting organizational development. They’re a life-and-death necessity.

Offices aren’t perfect.

Neither is working outdoors, in isolation, in extreme weather, or in swarms of mosquitoes. Management needs to be aware of all health and safety threats to their human resources. Some places, though, have much more severe risks than others.

So next time someone disappears to the golf course, or takes off early at the end of the day, take a step back for perspective. Instead of stressing about why they left or what should be done, just be glad you don’t have to worry about whether or not they got eaten by a bear.

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

That’s why I’m so excited about Google Insights. The service takes advantage of Google’s massive popularity to track the things people are searching. Halloween? Gets a ton of searches every year in October. Obama? Very popular in 2008. Vancouver? February of 2010.

Tracking when people are interested in things can help you manage human resources more effectively. If you know that “my job sucks” tends to peak early in the summer, and “quit my job” peaks in August, you can step up employee engagement and retention practices for those months—or get ready to start a fresh round of hiring.

Consider this: “Job” and “hiring” dip every year in December. People are probably more concerned about their families and their holidays than their careers. That means it’s probably not a great month for you to look for new staff.

Google Insights results for "job."

“Lost job” saw a dramatic increase at the beginning of the great recession, but has almost completely recovered since then.

Google Insights results for "lost job."

“Bonus” peaks every year in December. So don’t forget about it. You might even want to try giving one at a different time of year, just to give people a pleasant surprise.

Google Insights results for "bonus."

“Cheese” also peaks in December. Just some food for thought.

Google Insights results for "cheese."

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

In 1998, Mau published his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, outlining best practices in design and creativity. If these aren’t already informing your day-to-day work in human resources, they should start. A sample:

2. Forget about good.

Good is conservative, and good is safe. But bad is what leads to greatness. Leadership—within an organization or in an entire industry—means accepting and promoting failure, because it’s the only way to get better.

15. Ask stupid questions.

Try asking them in an interview. Ask them at lunchtime, or over coffee. Questions are simply a way to start a dialogue. Stupid questions can start great conversations. Kids ask stupider questions than anybody, and as Mau puts it: “imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.”

33. Take field trips.

Across the world or across the office. There’s a lot going on outside of your safety bubble. You can learn from it and improve on it, to everyone’s benefit.

43. Power to the people.

Empower yourself, and empower the people around you. The best work happens when people feel free.

Read them all at Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, and let us know what you think.

We have set aside Sunday’s as the day to sit down and drill away at each one. Over the next few weeks you should see a few things changing:

• Speed improvements: if you have a lot of data things really slow down. The current target is the people tab as it is the slowest to load but we will be trying to shave a second or two off of all the screen load times.
• Log in and account creation: dropping a load of employees into a HR system needs to be as easy as possible, we don’t think it is as simple as it could be.
• Payment gateway: we are evaluating different options to using Paypal.
• User Experience: the design genius at TribeHR is hard at work on a much improved experience now that we have settled on the features. This might take the longest to deploy, current goal is to have it ready for January 2011.

There are some other big things being planned but we will leave those as a surprise

1. light weight,
2. easy to use,
3. and help you get employee information out of a spreadsheet onto something more portable.

It is important to us that we do that but that was focused more on the how. As we have spoken with people and started to get some feedback I think we have been a bit verbose with our vision (or at least it feels that way) so here it is in three simple points.

TribeHR’s main goals are to help you:

1. Evaluate the skills and experience you have in your organization.
2. Identify and develop the talent within your organization.
3. Create a knowledge base of best practices for items one and two above that can backed be up with examples.

We see an opportunity in the apparent divide in the management style that is commonplace and the people that are newer to the workplace. TribeHR is a part of a toolset and it will need to work with other tools in the future (we love APIs). Startups and small businesses are the ones that we believe experiment most with different management techniques and are more flexible which is why we have targeted them first.

What TribeHR isn’t: a tool that will use the Human Resources Buzz word dictionary. We want to make HR more friendly and focus less on terminology and more on the functionality that will have the highest return in order to achieve the goals we set.

I think this makes a bit more sense for us with regards to setting some goals and as we work towards version 1. There are some exciting possibilities that I can’t wait to realize!