Gartner Identifies Top 3 Priorities For HR Leaders in 2019
Analyst house, Gartner Inc., says this year, HR leaders’ top three key initiatives will be building critical skills and competencies, strengthening the current and future leadership bench and improving employee experience. Gartner recently surveyed 843 HR leaders globally — at the enterprise, business-unit and subfunction levels — and these three initiatives clearly emerged as priorities.
The survey showed that:
- Building critical skills and competencies is a priority for 85 percent of heads of learning and development.
- Seventy-eight percent of talent management leaders are prioritizing building the leadership bench.
- More than half of all HR leaders agree that improving employee experience is a priority.
“Given the realities of today’s tight labor market, the focus on developing and retaining top talent is critical,” said Brian Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s HR practice. “Our most recent Global Talent Monitor report found that only 53 percent of workers worldwide have a high or somewhat high intent to stay in their current positions, compared with 60 percent of workers in 1Q18.”
To deliver against these initiatives, HR professionals and experts must develop a strategy that focuses on the following key levers of improvement, according to Gartner’s press release.
- Developing “Connector Managers.” Ineffective managers are the single biggest problem in the workplace today — 48 percent of HR leaders say their organization’s managers are not effectively developing employees. “Connector Managers” are the most likely to improve employee performance by fostering meaningful connections among employees, teams and the organization to develop an employee’s specific capabilities.
- Demand-driven succession management. Among HR leaders, 47 percent said their organization struggles to develop effective leaders and 45 percent said their succession management processes didn’t yield the right leaders at the right time. Traditional succession planning assesses current roles and gaps in leadership supply. By switching to demand-driven planning, HR leaders can assess leadership needs that will enable the organization to achieve strategic goals, not just fill potential future vacancies in current roles. Additionally, talent management software can help present them with a comprehensive view of current staff skills as well as how they might be maximized. A clear employee succession plan will assist with engaging employees effectively using existing HR processes.
- Employee experience. Employees want the ease of their personal life, fueled by digital technologies that enable seamless, effortless experiences, to be duplicated at work. To start delivering on this requires a change in focus for HR from just asking what employees want to listening to what they need and determining what they really value.
Maximizing performance within teams and departments is a primary goal of every organization. Talent management software offers an effective way to get the most out of your top talent and staff as well as available recruits. For instance, training and development modules within effectively selected talent management software can assist in analyzing workforce skills, identifying gaps and ensuring that all programs have an optimal effect.
“The businesses that are successful today and, in the future, will be those that win when it comes to talent,” said Sari Wilde, managing vice president of Gartner’s HR practice. “This means helping employees build critical skills and developing employees into leaders, which is especially critical given that less than two-thirds of managers think their employees are able to keep pace with future skill needs.”
Read the press release from Gartner.
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