How To Successfully Handover to Your New Exec Team

IN THIS ARTICLE

• WHEN SHOULD YOU START TO HANDOVER?
• HOW TO HANDOVER?
• WHAT TO HANDOVER?

A handover helps to ensure that your Club or Society continues to be successful and means that your new committee does not have to start over from scratch. 

A good committee handover can set the new committee off to a flying start ensuring that:

• Your group develops further, building on the hard work that you’ve put in this year.
• The great things you did for your group continue and the benefits of these are properly explained so they won’t get dropped by the new committee.
• Any mistakes made that year aren’t made again!
• New committee members feel supported.

Lots of new committees come to us because they haven’t been given enough information; If it’s something specific to your group (e.g. where did you order stash from?), then the ASK Team won’t know the answer…so make sure YOU tell the new committee! Try to put yourself in their shoes – What do you wish you knew?

WHEN SHOULD YOU START TO HANDOVER?

As soon as your counterpart is elected for next year, it’s never too early to begin the handover process! There is no rule on how long the ‘handover period’ will be – but we do recommend that it should be anywhere between 2 to 4 weeks, where both the outgoing and incoming committee attend all meetings and activities. That way the new committee members can ‘shadow’ the old ones to see how they do things. You will also need to arrange specific training sessions and meetings between each outgoing and incoming committee position – the SU does provide training for many positions, but we can’t help with the specifics of your group (e.g. do you have a template for meeting minutes, where is your group logo file?).  

HOW TO HANDOVER?

Here are our Handover Top Tips: 

• Meet face to face to discuss your roles, ensuring you have enough time for Q&A - cramming a year into 30 mins not ideal!
• Prepare a handover document - Something the new committee can go back to if they forget anything.
• Put yourself in their shoes - What do you wish you knew?
• If time allows offer the new committee an opportunity to shadow old committee members during your last meetings, socials or events.

WHAT TO HANDOVER?

There is a lot of information that you’ll need to hand over to your new committee. Try to remember that some things might seem obvious to you because you are already experienced in the role! What seems obvious to you may not be for a new committee member, who may not know anything about the Students’ Union or running a society or committee!

The absolute KEY points you must raise during your handover are:

• Introduce all committee roles and responsibilities.
• Compete the re-registration form to tell us your group is continuing to run next year and give us your new committee details.
• Introduce your new committee to the SU's Knowledge Base.
• Contact CIS to add your new exec to the group email address and remove old committee members.
• Ensure the new committee has awareness of your constitution key points and where to find it.
• Show new committee where to find current risk assessments and review these together.
• Share useful contact information (SU, University and other contacts). Make introductions if necessary.
• If the group has any affiliations or sponsorships with external companies, handover any contracts, documentation and contact information
• Complete and share your financial forecast.
• Complete and share your equipment inventory.
• Provide details and passwords for social media accounts, google drives, websites etc.

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