HR is becoming more strategic for business as companies need to retain staff to be competitive—yet while 75% of human resources departments say talent retention falls within their remit, a surprising quarter of those—who said it ranked in their top three priorities—do not track staff turnover. More worrying still the report also highlights that the 24% of organisations that recognise ‘talent retention’ as a priority cannot quantify the extent of staff turnover they suffer.
The findings form part of a wide-ranging survey HR Barometer conducted by consultancy firm, Michael Page, which looked into a whole host of responsibilities that HR now has to take on. Unsurprisingly, the results point to an increasingly strategic role for human resources, commenting, “HR is becoming key to business growth and needs to continue its evolution towards being an operational and strategic business partner”—but it seems that HR departments and businesses need to address this new reality in practice.
With talent retention becoming a key concern for business leaders, it is surprising that the report finds many HR departments are not equipped to address staff turnover through employee engagement. In fact, those who placed ‘employee retention’ as a key priority were less likely to have the measures in place to prevent talent leaving.
For example, amongst those who emphasised ‘employee retention’ as a priority, 13% had mentoring programmes as opposed to 20% of those who did not emphasise this priority. It is a trend that stretches across initiatives such as ‘coaching’, ‘networking’ and ‘flexible working’ which all showed fewer of those focused on ‘employee retention’ having such measures.
This is not the only area of weakness—the survey also found that HR needs to reassess its diversity and inclusion policies as 67% of those surveyed stated that they did not have a HR function or team responsible for this area. While this was a feature in 55% of the biggest companies surveyed, as a total of all surveyed, only 5% of organisations had a HR function or team solely focused on diversity.
Having policies tailored to diversity no doubt make a company attractive to work for and to remain at—which makes it all the more surprising that the report notes that 44% organisations who consider this a priority have not deployed measures specifically targeted at women—this is compared with 37% of the survey overall. With more women entering the workforce and having to balance their responsibilities between home and the office, this is considered by the report as an area for improvement as much for talent retention as it is for talent acquisition.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
