As Network Plus Services has grown, succession planning has become an increasingly important way to support business continuity and develop talent from within.
With a workforce approaching 7,000 people across direct employees, subcontractors, and self-employed workers, Network Plus operates from regional depots and satellite sites across the United Kingdom, with more than 90 locations nationwide.
Louise Lawton, Head of Learning and Development, shares how Network Plus has evolved its succession planning approach from spreadsheets and fragmented talent conversations into a more structured, visible, and real-time talent process.
Developing talent from within has long been a priority at Network Plus. The organization has consistently found greater success promoting internally than hiring externally.
"We have a lot of success when we promote internally within that function as opposed to external hire," Louise explains.
As the business grew, however, supporting that approach became more challenging. Several acquisitions in 2021 accelerated the organization's growth and reinforced the importance of having a clearer view of talent across the business. Network Plus Services needed a better way to understand where talent existed and how employees could grow into future opportunities.
At the time, succession planning was managed through Excel. Like many organizations beginning to formalize the process, spreadsheets created a place to capture information, but they became increasingly difficult to maintain as the business grew.
"The process was quite clunky," Louise recalls.
Capturing information, keeping it current, and rolling it up from company-wide views down to individual contracts made it difficult to build a consistent picture of talent across the organization.
Growth also changed the way people shared knowledge. What had once been a smaller organization where people naturally knew one another's strengths, experience, and potential had become a much larger business. Informal conversations were no longer enough. Leaders needed a more consistent, organization-wide view of talent.
So, the focus began to shift. Preparing for future vacancies remained important, but succession planning also became a way to identify, understand, and develop the talent already within the business.
To support that shift, Network Plus leveraged SuccessionHR to move succession planning out of spreadsheets and into a more centralized, visible system.
For Louise, one of the biggest benefits has been the ability to support real-time conversations about talent. When HR or managers are meeting with someone, they can access the system during the conversation, add notes, and update information while the discussion is still fresh.
"It means that we're able to have those conversations much more easily, but we're not losing the data," Louise says. "We're capturing all of the value from that discussion in the system."
Capturing information in real time has also changed the quality of succession planning conversations. Leaders now have a stronger foundation for making talent decisions.
"It's enabled us to look at our talent population and succession planning in a much more holistic way," Louise explains. Network Plus now holds quarterly people boards where leaders come together to review talent using shared information rather than isolated spreadsheets. Leaders can look beyond their own teams to identify talent across the wider business and have more informed discussions about development and future opportunities.
The shift has also made succession planning more transparent.
"People understand that it’s a priority... even if they're not directly involved in the process, they understand the intention behind it and why it's there," Louise explains.
Rather than information living in disconnected spreadsheets or informal conversations, succession planning has become an ongoing process that captures talent insights as they happen — giving leaders a clearer, shared view of people across the organization.
Every succession planning journey comes with a learning curve. For Louise, one of the biggest takeaways has been learning to trust both the process and the people involved in it.
"I think what we've learned is to trust the process," she says. "Trust that people want to be involved."
As more leaders became involved in succession planning, the conversations became richer, talent became more visible across the business, and succession planning became less of an HR initiative and more of an organizational effort.
Network Plus Services' succession planning journey reflects a challenge many growing organizations face.
As businesses expand, visibility into talent naturally becomes harder to maintain. Leaders may know the people within their own teams, but without an organization-wide view of talent, potential can remain hidden elsewhere in the business.
A structured approach to succession planning has helped Network Plus replace fragmented knowledge with shared understanding. Rather than relying on spreadsheets or isolated conversations, leaders can now identify talent more consistently, support development more intentionally, and continue growing talent from within.
“It’s easy to say someone is doing a great job,” says John Branham, VP of Talent and Communications. “It’s much harder to really ask whether they’re prepared for what the role will require next.”
