Deloitte Survey: Organizations face looming crisis in motivation, engagement and retention of employees

The number of HR and business leaders who cited engagement as being “very important” doubled in the past year reaching 50%. Sixty percent 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 % of HR and business leaders have a program in place to define and build a strong culture; while only 7% rated themselves as excellent at measuring, driving, and improving engagement and retention.

Global challenges, local concerns. Romanian entrepreneurs still have the time to adapt their organizations’ strategies

The challenges organizations face globally will soon be on the priority agenda of the Romanian employers as a result of the alignment to the development strategies set up at group level within multinational companies. This approach will also be undertaken by local entrepreneurs who will need to adapt their HR strategies to the same direction in order to remain competitive.

“To our view, Romanian businesses have enough time to prepare in order to navigate the new paradigm towards which Western employers evolve, in which the balance of power in business is rapidly shifting from the employer to the employee,” said Raluca Bontaș, Director Global Employer Services Deloitte Romania. “In this new world of work, organizations need to re-imagine the way they manage people, to think more flexible working relationships, to adjust the remuneration and come up with new, out-of-the-box ideas to engage employees in the business. Moreover, as workers are becoming more mobile, contingent and autonomous, and as a result, harder to manage and engage, employers need to embed these elements in the process of building their organizational culture,” added Bontaș.

Leadership, learning, and skills gap take center stage

Leadership gaps – last year’s most critical issue – continued to be top of mind for HR and business leaders, 86% 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% last year, to 50% this year.

Recognizing the fact that a general lack of skills is likely to impede business growth, 85% of HR and business leaders ranked learning and development as a top issue, compared to 70% last year, making this the third most critical issue in this year’s survey. Meanwhile, 80% of respondents cited workforce skills as a top issue (up from 75% last year), and 35% rated the lack of skills in HR as a “very important” problem, up from 25% last year.

“Businesses must carefully manage all the changes required at the workplace and this won’t be an easy task from a legal perspective,” said Florentina Munteanu, Associate Partner Reff & Associates, the law firm representing Deloitte Legal in Romania. “Romanian labor legal environment is behind the changes that are happening in the day-to-day business and there is a continuous struggle to find innovative ways of interpreting the law in order to allow implementation of policies that would help in dealing with the critical aspects of the work that the employees are currently requiring. Among others, international mobility and flexible work schedule, including work from home, are subjects which still raise conceptual as well as practical challenges.”

In her turn, Doina Patrubani, Consulting Director Deloitte Romania believes that the priority agenda of the local business environment has to accommodate the following strategic topics:

• Business and HR leaders will have to launch a complex process of re-designing, re-defining and re-invigorating the human capital and talents management functions
• Achieving new HR abilities is key to companies and needs to be approached at top level
• More than ever, the role of the HR is essential in any company
• The role of the HR leader has to be redefined in the new context and positioned strategically to a high degree of authority and decision power.
  

An integrated approach to the human capital challenges: Deloitte Romania launches the People Advisory Services initiative

The conclusions of the survey have been presented during today’s launch by Deloitte Romania of the People Advisory Services (PAS), a business initiative that combines adjacent competencies for human resources. PAS reunites human capital services, legal and tax advisory. The initiative came as a result of the clients’ need to have access to an integrated platform meant to answer the complex issues of today’s business environment. Managing human capital involves multidisciplinary teams in which human capital consultants, tax specialists and lawyers specialized in employment law combine and Deloitte People Advisory Services team is well placed to offer clients this holistic approach.

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For more information related to Deloitte People Advisory Services:

Raluca Bontas - Director Global Employer Services
Doina Patrubani - Consulting Director
Florentina Munteanu - Associate Partner Reff & Associates – Deloitte Legal