What are the major priorities for HR professionals?

What’s top of the list in terms of Human Capital trends in Australia?

According to Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report, it was fostering a better employee experience which was a significant priority for 85% of Australian HR professionals.

The 2017 report surveyed more than 10,000 businesses around the world on their HR practice, and it also found that the employee experience was ranked as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ by 79% of businesses globally.

Deloitte are currently collecting responses for the 2018 Global Human Capital Trends Survey and employee experience is again expected to be one of the major priorities, according to Juliet Bourke, Partner and HC expert at Deloitte.

Bourke said that another interesting result from the 2017 survey was that Australia was well ahead of the global average in term of nominating diversity and inclusion as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ – 77% Australia vs 69% global.

She added that in the 2018 survey, AI, robotics, and cognitive computing might be more on the radar of HR professionals than in previous years.

Indeed, in the last survey it was ranked as an ‘important’ or ‘very important’ by only 36% of Australian respondents and 40% of global respondents.

“We are starting to see organisations ask the big questions around what the shape of the workforce is going to look like and how to augment it with different technologies,” Bourke told HRD.

“I think in the last survey people knew it was there, but they were not thinking carefully about what it actually means, so I would expect it would be higher on the radar in terms of importance.”

Bourke added that a major benefit of the survey is that it enables HR professionals to have a view on how Australia sits relative to the rest of the world.

“I think Australia is in an interesting place because we often make an assumption that something is bigger and better elsewhere, but that isn’t always the case,” she said.

The previous survey also found that there is a significant danger that Australian companies are not moving fast enough to adapt to the needs of the workforce of the future.

In addition to embracing and understanding the speed of change, the report nominated other tips for companies seeking to prepare for the future, including:

• making talent mobility a core value and build in processes that support fluidity
• forming an organisational performance group to study how high-performing teams actually work
• examining new communications tools (such as Workplace, Slack and Basecamp) and
• adopting continuous, feedback-based performance management that allows for goals to be reset regularly.