Creating Equal Promotion Opportunities and Succession Planning

1. The key to ensuring equal promotion opportunities for all your employees, then, is to base employment decisions on objective criteria.  Decisions and evaluations made from the first day of employment can affect an individual’s chances for advancement. So, to create equal opportunities for all employees, you should:
2. Publicize promotional openings so that all employees are aware of advancement opportunities.
3. Train supervisors and managers to make decisions based on performance, skills, and experience.
4. Limit supervisory access to the personnel files of candidates being considered for promotion to performance appraisals, attendance records, recent disciplinary actions, and other performance-related information.
5. Have supervisors identify all employees who have promotion potential so that those candidates can be given full opportunities for training, transfers, or mentoring to gain the skills needed for promotion.
6. Grant reasonable accommodation requests from disabled employees both in the promotion process and in new job.
7. Make training opportunities available to protected-class employees on the same basis as to all other employees.
8. Ensure that all protected-class employees are not placed disproportionately in jobs that provide little or no preparation for higher-level positions.
9. Document the rationale behind promotion decisions and explain the decisions to the affected employees.
10. Allow promotion candidates who have been rejected in the past to be reconsidered after they have received more training or experience.

In addition, you should encourage employees to discuss concerns about  rejections with the human resources department and then give them an appeals process through your complaint resolution procedures.  By following all these steps, you can limit claims of discrimination by showing employees that the promotion process is open to everyone and is fair.