2019 Deloitte Albania Human Capital Trends

The 2019 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Albania report, not surprisingly, reveal employee experience as the top trend, considering our empirical knowledge on the approach to people management and increasing demand for Human Capital Services by Albanian businesses. By importance, Leadership and Learning appear as second and third trends. This results reflects new challenges happening in the labor market. New types of arrangements and job profiles are emerging, which could not have been perceived in the past, the so-called “alternative work”. Nowadays in Albania, as in other countries, regardless of the level of sophistication and integration with global markets; freelancers, gig workers (paid for tasks), contactors, remote workers and entrepreneurs are becoming a reality. Market shortages in skilled employees and new requirements for capabilities, high turnover rates and the emerging of the Millennials generation as one of the most important active workforce segments, pose new challenges for the existing leadership mindset and work organization for Albanian businesses.

Employee experience is a matter of individual beliefs and perceptions on work itself, learning, development and growth opportunities, on supportive behaviors of the management as well as perceived work environment. Three main aspects compose employee experience: growth and development, pay and benefits and time management (work-life balance). A better employee experience translates into higher employee engagement, higher retention rate, reduction of recruitment costs, preservation of business know how and expertise and as a consequence, higher human capital productivity. To achieve this, organization need to empathize with employees, by surveying and interviewing them through “People Survey” and “Upward Feedback”, understand their working style by conducting “Business Chemistry” etc.

According to the results, managing quality and people, followed by driving strategy and allocating resources are ranked at the top first roles of the refreshed leaders. Traditional traits of leaders are still important. However, in order for them to play such a role, they need to upskill themselves. Those skills are the abilities to manage humans & machines and the ability to lead in complex and ambiguous situations. Leaders must recognize that they have the responsibility to help employees to adapt their skills, by providing them with learning tools and experiences that will enable them to adapt to changes in the market, which are affecting leaders themselves

Learning and development  is ranked as the top most urgent trend (62.07 percent) that needs to be addressed. With the technology advancement, existing jobs are changing and new jobs are expected to be invented. To address these disruptive developments, will require reskilling and upskilling of employees in innovative ways and by leveraging advanced tools providing access to all employees to learning in an individualized way. Organizations need to identify ahead, which are the most important new skills they will need in order to succeed. They should design and communicate the required skills for each employee, considering their individual actual and future role and provide them with the necessary tools to learn and develop. To do so, organizations need to consolidate the Learning and Development function by positioning it as a dedicated strategic function within the organization, with a well-defined leading role in this domain.

All this trends, reflects also the survey results on HR function. 52.38 percent of the respondents are planning to increase investments in HR function at only 1-5 percent rate for the next 12-18 months. More than 14.29 percent report that in their plans for this period, the increase of investments in HR is more than 5 percent. Around 19 percent plan to continue to invest in HR on the same level as in the previous year. For building a learning organization and for better engagement and development of employees, requires an empowerment of HR function in the role of trusted advisor and strategic partner.