What is keeping human resource practitioners awake at night in 2019? HR is a complex and highly underrated function of any organization in the world. Since it is not a revenue generating function, or indeed a consumer facing one at all, HR is often taken for granted. In fact, many small businesses do not hire dedicated HR professionals, choosing to instead tag related work to existing functions within the organization. However, ask any seasoned professional and they will be quick to tell you about the true importance of having a strong HR department. In this article, we aim to explain the challenges that HR practitioners are facing in 2019 and thus their ever-increasing importance to organizations.
Right at the top is employee engagement. The difficulty in determining the success of employee engagement is an immeasurable return on investment for any employee engagement initiatives. Furthermore, there is no rule book or formula for ensuring that employees can be kept happy. One way that HR practitioners can look to improve employee engagement within their organizations is to revamp existing rewards programs. In doing so, a clearer ROI can be formulated thus granting greater recognition of HR efforts.
Secondly, recruitment continues to be a tricky aspect of human resources. Hiring candidates in an increasingly volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous operating environment places tremendous stress on recruitment teams to get hires right. Afterall, it is difficult to ascertain the predicted success of a hire based on a couple of interviews. One area that is gaining traction is the hiring of talent over the age of 45. Such hires bring an underrated level of maturity to an organization and a wealth of experience that can help to give a grounded perspective to the workplace.
Thirdly, on the flip side of recruitment and closely related to employee engagement is employee retention. The age old question of how businesses can stop their top performing or valuable employees from leaving the organization still exists. Human resource individuals bare the burden of designing guidelines and schemes to prevent brain drain from organizations. Increasingly, organizational culture has been found to play a huge part in employee retention. Similar to the age old saying that employees do not leave their jobs but rather they leave their bosses. Culture determines how individuals behave at work and is capable of making a difference in terms of employee satisfaction.
Human Resource continues to be a vital but overlooked function in organizations, be that they are big or small. If you are interested to improve engagement, recruitment and retention, consider hiring external hr consultancy services to give a review of your current practices and to submit recommendations for change. Rather than seeing these services as an extra cost, take it as an investment that you are making into your employees.
