Employee Engagement Top Issue - Report

Lack of employee engagement is the top issue currently facing 87 per cent of HR and business leaders, up from 79 per cent last year, according to global professional services firm Deloitte.

The firm’s third annual Global Human Capital Trends 2015: Leading in the New World of Work report found that the majority of organizations are still failing to take action to improve their culture, potentially jeopardising future growth.

The survey was conducted among more than 3,300 human resources and business leaders in 106 countries, and is one of the largest global studies of talent, leadership and HR challenges.

The number of HR and business leaders who cited engagement as being “very important” doubled from 26 per cent last year to 50 per cent this year. 60 per cent of HR and business leaders surveyed said they do not have an adequate program to measure and improve engagement, indicating a lack of preparedness for addressing this issue.

Only 12 per cent of HR and business leaders have a program in place to define and build a strong culture; while only 7 percent rated themselves as excellent at measuring, driving, and improving engagement and retention.

“As demand for talent picks up, the balance of power in business is rapidly shifting from the employer to the employee,” Principal and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Josh Bersin said.

“Moreover, 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.”

Leadership gaps – last year’s report’s most critical issue – continued to be top of mind for HR and business leaders, 86 per cent of whom cited it as a top issue this year. However, the number of respondents who said this was a “very important” issue jumped from 38 per cent last year, to 50 per cent this year.

According to the “Deloitte Business Confidence Report 2014,” only 49 per cent of C-level executives surveyed indicate that they are committed to developing leadership skills at all levels of the organization.

Recognizing the fact that a general lack of skills is likely to impede business growth, 85 per cent of HR and business leaders ranked learning and development as a top issue, compared to 70 per cent last year, making this the third most critical issue in this year’s survey.

Meanwhile, 80 per cent of respondents cited workforce skills as a top issue, up from 75 per cent last year, and 35 per cent rated the lack of skills in HR as a “very important” problem, up from 25 per cent last year.

“There are significant shifts happening in the global workplace that business must actively manage,” Global Human Capital Practice Leader, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, Brett Walsh, said.

“In addition to workers’ changing expectations of employers, skills needed on the job are changing faster than ever. Organizations 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.”

Access the full report here and infographic here.