Companies must navigate the choppy waters of employee engagement, a great challenge affecting human resource (HR) management in most organisations, and position themselves to attract and retain the workers they will need on this journey.
Lack of employee engagement affects over 87% of HR managers compared to last year’s 79% according to Deloitte’s third annual “Global Human Capital Trends 2015: Leading in the New World of Work” report released in March. The survey was conducted among over 3,300 HR and business leaders in 106 countries. The number of HR and business leaders who cited engagement as being “very important” doubled from last year’s 26% to 50% this year.
60% of HR and business leaders surveyed said they do not have an adequate programme to measure and improve engagement, indicating a lack of preparedness for addressing this issue. Only 12% of HR and business leaders have a programme in place to define and build a strong culture; while only 7% rated themselves as excellent at measuring, driving, and improving engagement and retention.
“Workers are becoming more mobile, contingent and autonomous, and as a result, harder to manage and engage. In this new world of work, organizations need to re-imagine the way they manage people and come up with new, out-of-the-box ideas to make themselves relevant,” said Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte. Leadership gaps was the top issue in the minds of HR and business leaders, 86% of whom cited it as a critical issue in 2015. However, the number of respondents who said this was a “very important” issue increased from 38% last year to 50% this year.
According to the “Deloitte Business Confidence Report 2014,” only 49% of C-level executives (Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Operations Officers (COOs), and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs)) surveyed indicate that they are committed to developing leadership skills at all levels of the organization.
85% of HR and business leaders ranked learning and development as a top issue, compared to 70% last year, making this the third most critical issue in this year’s survey. On the other hand, 80% of respondents cited workforce skills as a top issue compared to 75% last year, and 35% rated the lack of skills in HR as a “very important” problem, up from 25% last year.
“Organisations are quickly falling behind on developing the right skills across all levels. There’s an urgent need for organizations to re-evaluate their learning programs and treat leadership development as a long term investment, rather than a discretionary training spend item when times are favorable,” said Brett Walsh, global human capital practice leader, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited.
The report further cites tremendous efforts by organisations to decrease workplace stress, simplify business processes, and reduce complexity. 66% of respondents believe their employees are “overwhelmed” by today’s work environment; and 74% cite workplace complexity as a significant problem. More than 50% of the surveyed organizations have some type of simplification program, while 25% have no plans to implement such. “Simplification is a new theme emerging from this research,” said Bersin.
“Engaging and supporting employees today requires fresh design thinking about how work gets done.” The field of technology was also seen as important and inevitable in terms of rethinking the design of work and the capabilities their employees need to succeed. 58% of leaders indicate that redesigning work with computing as talent is an important trend. However, only 5% of executives surveyed say they have a strong understanding of what computing will do to their workforce.
The Deloitte report reveals that analytics is one of the areas where organisations face a significant capability gap. 75% of respondents cited talent analytics as an important issue, but just 8% believe their organization is “strong” in this area. “Leading organisations are already using talent analytics to understand what motivates employees and what makes them stay or leave. These insights help drive increased returns from talent investments, with huge consequences for the business as a whole.” said Jason Geller, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and national managing director of the U.S. human capital practice.
Deloitte research shows that it will take several years for businesses to develop and absorb talent analytics technology. “The sooner HR teams start working on building this capability, the better positioned they will be to address future talent issues,” concluded Geller.
