The Asia Pacific region is seeing growing traction when it comes to workforce planning, and it has one expert calling on New Zealand businesses to invest more into talent strategies or lose out on talent.
According to the latest
The World of Work research, commissioned by recruitment & HR services specialist Randstad, despite a growing concern about attracting workers there has been an increase on focus on workforce planning or leadership development.
Results showed that only 79% of businesses say they only plan their workforce a year or less in advance, while over half (58%) of businesses admitting to devoting 10% or less of their planning time to workforce strategies and 77% don’t use the latest developments in workforce analytics to source and retain employees.
Paul Robinson, New Zealand Director of Randstad, stated that if Kiwi businesses wanted to remain an “attractive proposition” here and throughout the region they need to be more serious about workforce planning, talent analytics and invest in strengthening their employer brand.
“Business leaders can see the talent acquisition challenges on the horizon, so those wishing to stand out from local and international competition will start placing a greater focus on workforce planning and analytics sooner rather than later,” he explained.
“Reluctance to invest time in workforce planning strategies may hinder the ability to attract talented employees to fill pipelines for critical roles and leadership in the future.”
Within the Asia Pacific region many organisations are putting a considerable amount of their planning time towards workforce strategies, and Robinson warns this could draw talented individuals away from New Zealand. To reduce the risk of being left behind he states businesses here need to but in the same effort.
“We can no longer just view other New Zealand companies as our competition. Organisations need to pay attention to developments taking place overseas and understand how these may draw talent away from New Zealand operations,” he added.
Randstad offer the following 10 talent strategy tips for 2014 to help drive future business success. They are:
- Plan ahead: Better talent mapping and workforce planning is essential to secure a diverse, high performing, creative, adaptive and productive workforce, particularly to feed the leadership pipeline.
- Align workforce & business strategies: Aligning attraction, retention and employee development strategies with overall business strategy makes it easier to plan your workforce while motivating employees to achieve their goals.
- Cultivate new leaders: Invest in a pipeline of leaders to drive high performance and growth. The aim is to develop creative and adaptive professionals with wide-ranging experience who are confident with risk and uncertainty, whilst also sourcing visionary, authentic leaders who are comfortable managing through uncertainty.
- Boost productivity: Tackling New Zealand’s productivity challenge means getting every employee working together to achieve better outcomes – focus on strategies to boost the performance and productivity of your workforce.
- Increase employee engagement: Essential to boosting productivity and performance is the need to strengthen employee engagement and collaboration of your people. Invest in career development and training to facilitate this.
- Improve & innovate: To remain relevant and engaging to the customers of today and tomorrow, continue to adapt, improve and innovate your products, services and the way in which you work.
- Keep up-to-date: Having access to the latest technology will help to drive continuous business efficiency, innovation and a high performance workforce. It will also boost engagement, both internally and externally to your business.
- Up-skill & outsource: Build up expertise in specific areas of your business, or outsource to the experts. Outsourcing key elements of your talent strategy to specialists in talent sourcing, recruitment, development, HR and talent management is an effective way to access hard-to-find skills, boost the quality and potential within your workforce, create efficiencies and save money – while allowing you to focus on your core strengths.
- Revitalise your EVPs: When competition for talent is fierce, define a compelling employee value proposition to strengthen your employer brand. What is it that makes your company unique? Why do people choose to work for you? Use your employer brand to convey these important messages. Employers who lead this charge will enjoy better retention, engagement and productivity and attract a higher calibre of talent.
- Manage change successfully: Ensure you have the right people/teams and leaders in place to effectively manage change – whether it’s internal or external – and realise this is an ongoing process that can have a significant impact on the overall success of your business strategy.
