According to the survey „Trends and Challenges in HR 2018” conducted by Valoria in collaboration with BusinessMark, 79% of companies say that the most important strategic challenge in HR is to maintain a high level of employee engagement. On the second place is the retention of the high-potential and the highly-performing employees (61%), and on the third place is the creation of an organizational culture that gives a competitive advantage to the company (54%).
The strategic HR challenge that Romanian companies say are best prepared for is the management of organizational re-design processes for better adaptation to market changes (69%). The same percentage goes to accessing and a more extensive integration of the services offered by „contingent human resources” (freelancers, part timers, but also the use of technology and robots, etc.). Only a percentage point away is maintaining a high level of employee involvement (68%).
„The ability of companies to stay innovative and competitive is based on the availability of skills of skilled people, correlated with the rapid evolution of the market. For the third consecutive year, we have gathered data from the top management and HR specialists of Romanian companies just to capture the trends in the field of human resources. The third edition of the survey ‘Trends and challenges in HR’ helps organizations understand where they are now and what are the new rules of the game for the near future in terms of strategic challenges, but also the use of new technologies in HR, process automation or job digitization of HR only from this reference study”, says Constantin Măgdălina, Expert Trends and Emerging Technologies, co-author of the research.
Challenges to HR practices
At the level of HR practices, the top five challenges of the year 2018 are the finding of employees with more and more specialized skills (68%), which was top ranking last year, on the same level to the retention of the employees (68%). On the eighth place in 2017, and the third place in 2018, is aligning HR practices with organization management and business strategy (42%), and the next generation of leaders of the organization is ranked fourth (37%). Maintaining competitive compensation packages (37%) is down from the fifth to the fourth place.
Among the key resources available and that can be used by companies to respond successfully to the current HR challenges is the solid support from the top management for the HR function (65%). The strong HR skills of the staff in the HR department (47%) comes in the second place, whilst the transparent collaboration between HR and management for strategy alignment (41%) rises from the sixth place to the third one.
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