7 Lessons for Putting an Effective GEPP Process in Place

In summary

Most GEPP agreements follow the same path: a lot of work at the start, a well-built final document, then an implementation that runs out of steam a few months later.

An effective GEPP process starts from company strategy before the framework, is built with the field rather than for it, and treats the agreement as a real HR lever rather than a simple legal obligation.

Communication, knowledge transmission and real manager involvement often matter more than the quality of the framework itself.

Without a tool to aggregate and query ground-level data, even the best mapping stays hard to use at company scale.

Most GEPP agreements follow the same path: a lot of work at the start, meetings, negotiations, a fairly well-built final document. Then, a few months later, an implementation that runs out of steam. It's not necessarily for lack of willingness. But between the initial intention and the reality on the ground, there's often a gap: managers with little availability, frameworks that are too heavy, insufficient tools, communication that fades away once the agreement is signed.

What follows isn't a perfect method. It's the field experience of 2 practitioners.

1. Start with strategy, not the framework

The classic instinct is to start with a skills framework. You want to be thorough, precise, exhaustive. On paper, that's logical. In practice, this is often where the problems begin: months of work to produce very rich documentation that no one really consults.

The real question isn't "what skills do we have today?" It's rather: "where is the company heading, and what skills will it need to get there?" Which roles will evolve? Which ones risk disappearing? What skills will need developing in 2 or 3 years?

It's only from that point that the mapping starts to make sense. It needs to connect 5 elements: company strategy, how roles are evolving, current skills, future skills, and training and mobility needs. If any one of these links is missing, the process stays incomplete.

In the case of the research centre mentioned during the round table, this logic proved decisive. The organisation had to support a major shift towards new scientific fields. GEPP served as a guiding thread to progressively reorient skills over 15 years, without losing overall coherence.

2. Build the mapping with the field, not for it

A mapping designed purely behind closed doors by HR has little chance of reflecting the reality of the roles. And a mapping that doesn't reflect reality isn't much use.

Roles aren't described in job descriptions alone. Managers and employees know very well which skills are actually being used, which ones are becoming obsolete, which ones are already missing. You have to go and ask the right questions: what's changed in your role? What's becoming harder? Which skills are rare?

This ground-level work makes it possible to distinguish stable roles, roles in transformation, fragile roles and critical roles. It gives a far more accurate picture of reality than any purely top-down work. And along the way, it creates a first level of ownership: teams don't discover the process once it's finished, they take part in it from the start.

3. Use the agreement as a real HR lever

A well-negotiated GEPP agreement isn't just there to fulfil a legal obligation. It gives HR a formal framework to act on, and that's often what's missing to make progress on subjects operational teams see as secondary.

In highly business-driven environments, managers naturally prioritise their commercial goals. HR questions come second. But once the agreement is signed by management and employee representatives, the nature of the subject changes. It's no longer just one HR initiative among others, it's a collective commitment.

Training manager at a digital services company

The agreement doesn't do everything. But it gives legitimacy to roll out pathways, organise mobility, and structure knowledge transmission. And in this kind of process, legitimacy counts for a great deal.

4. Communicate far more than you think necessary

A GEPP that isn't visible doesn't stay alive. This point is often underestimated. Once the agreement is signed, people tend to think the hard part is done. In reality, this is often where the real work begins.

Internal communication can take very simple forms: practical fact sheets, employee testimonials, short videos, contributions to team meetings, dedicated slots during onboarding. The goal is always the same: show that GEPP isn't a legal document, but a subject that touches real career paths.

Communication towards leadership takes a different register. The HR directors who manage to position themselves strategically are the ones who've learned to speak the language of numbers. An employee isn't a cost line in the payroll: they're a contribution to value, to revenue, to performance and to business continuity. When HR shows the impact of its actions in these terms, it often changes status in leadership's eyes.

5. Concretely organise knowledge transmission

GEPP is often presented as a way to anticipate departures and secure critical skills. But these goals stay theoretical if nothing is put in place to actually transmit knowledge.

You need concrete arrangements: mentoring, communities of internal trainers, short peer-to-peer formats, dedicated time to document practices, often close to an AFEST logic. One large digital services company built a community of around 150 employees able to pass on their knowledge in specific areas of expertise. Not professional trainers: people recognised on the ground, who help other employees progress.

This kind of arrangement serves several purposes at once. It secures critical skills. It gives value to experienced employees. And it gradually installs a learning culture that goes beyond formal training.

6. Give managers real reasons to get involved

It's often said that managers are essential to a GEPP process. That's true. But asking them to "get more involved" isn't enough. They need to understand concretely how the subject helps them: better anticipating weak points in their team, avoiding skill losses, preparing for mobility, protecting their operations.

The agreement can help here too. But the real lever remains the relationship between local HR and managers, that pairing that regularly works together on individual situations and feeds an aggregated view up to the overall level. It's within this link that day-to-day skills management actually happens.

Training manager at a digital services company

That's not an easy goal. But organisations that get close to it usually have a noticeably more alive GEPP than others.

7. Plan the tools from the outset

This is the most underestimated point, and often the most costly to discover late.

A skills mapping can be very well done. But if it can't be used, it loses much of its value. Knowledge of skills often exists at the local level: managers know who can do what, local HR knows their populations. The problem is that this knowledge stays scattered. It doesn't always get passed up. It doesn't always get consolidated. And HR leadership often ends up with no overall view to spot cross-cutting weak points or anticipate needs at company scale.

You need to be able to move from an individual reading to a reading by skill, by role, by career track or by risk level. That shift requires a tool. Not necessarily a very heavy system, but something that lets you aggregate, visualise and query the data at different levels of granularity. This is precisely what platforms like Daylindo were designed to do: connect what happens on the ground with a broader view, without losing operational detail.

"At ground level, at management level, skills knowledge and management happen. But the broader, macro view, the one that lets you break down silos and work with a company-wide view, we have less of that. That's really our difficulty today." HR director at a research centre

After 15 years working on skills, one of the main obstacles remains the difficulty of making use of all the richness that's been accumulated. Better to plan for this from the outset than to discover it afterwards.

What Daylindo brings to these 7 lessons

Several of these lessons, the link between strategy and framework, the mapping built with the field, knowledge transmission, management at different levels of granularity, all need the same foundation: reliable ground-level skills data that can be used beyond the local level. That's the role the Daylindo platform plays: it connects what managers and local HR already know about the ground to an aggregated view that's traceable and holds up as evidence, without requiring a heavy system to maintain.

Evidence from companies that have structured their GEPP process on this basis directly matches the findings in this article. To go further on concretely starting this kind of process, our article on how to start a GEPP process covers the first steps in detail, and our GEPP dashboard article goes deeper into which metrics to track once the process is underway.

What these 7 practices have in common

None of them is particularly complex to understand. What makes them hard to sustain is that they require consistency: over time, in communication, in the involvement of everyone concerned.

A GEPP that actually works isn't a project with a start and an end. It's a process that gradually seeps into operational metrics, into managers' conversations, into employees' ambitions. That's what makes the difference between an agreement gathering dust in a drawer and a tool that genuinely changes how an organisation prepares for its future.

FAQ

What should you start a GEPP process with: the framework or the strategy?

With the strategy. Starting directly from the framework often produces very rich documentation that's rarely consulted. The mapping starts to make sense once it's connected to company strategy and how roles are evolving.

Why does a skills mapping built by HR alone often fail?

Because it has little chance of reflecting the reality of the roles. Managers and employees know which skills are actually being used, obsolete or missing; ground-level work remains essential.

Does a negotiated GEPP agreement only serve to fulfil a legal obligation?

No. Used well, it gives HR a formal framework and legitimacy to roll out pathways, organise mobility and structure knowledge transmission, well beyond mere compliance.

How do you concretely organise knowledge transmission in a GEPP process?

With simple, regular arrangements: mentoring, communities of internal trainers, short peer-to-peer formats, dedicated time to document practices, often close to an AFEST logic.

Why do managers get involved so little in a GEPP process, even when asked to?Because "get more involved" stays abstract. They invest when they concretely understand how the process helps them: anticipating weak points in their team, preparing for mobility, protecting their operations.

Why isn't a good skills mapping enough without a dedicated tool?

Because knowledge of skills often stays scattered at the local level. Without a tool to aggregate and query it at different levels, HR leadership lacks the overall view needed to spot cross-cutting weak points.