5 challenges that HR professionals face today

In light of the rapidly changing business landscape in Singapore today, the challenges within the field of human resources are endless. The role of human resources professionals is constantly evolving and expanding, with new challenges surfacing beyond operational HR issues.

Challenge: Driving Your Workforce

One of the key functions of HR is building a sustainable workforce. Therein lies the key challenge - How to drive the best behaviour within your workforce to ensure optimum productivity. HR professionals are now all looking at re-innovating their workforce to drive business strategies and productivity.

For example within a sales team, their sales structure may be redesigned to ensure better employee behaviour and that they remain engaged and motivated. Talent retention and compensations and benefits are some of the key issues for HR professionals to drive their workforce today.

Challenge: Need For A Global Perspective

Another emerging challenge for HR professionals is the increasing need for them to have a global perspective. The global talent crunch is a notable issue across all industries worldwide. HR professionals now need to look beyond the micro side of HR, the details of turnover rates or demographics, and instead have a holistic, global perspective.

This entails knowing what the organisation needs where to source for professionals who have the required skills and experience and finally, to hire for the company’s needs.

Cost remains important but companies are now focusing on hiring professionals with the right skill sets and mature competencies that will complement the overall corporate strategy. The current gap of mature competencies in professionals today needs to be bridged via further learning and development schemes. Companies can also look into training junior managers to build competency in their current workforce.

Challenge: Maintaining a Balancing Act

Balancing the diverse workforce poses one of the largest challenges for recruitment specialists in the human resources industry today. Beyond the challenges of an international workforce, balancing the various generational workers of an organisation is also a pressing challenge. Gen-Y employees have different needs and expectations from baby-boomer employees.

Some organisations need to balance their male-female ratio too. Specifically, the current lack of female leaders needs to be looked into as well, possibly with the implementation of learning and development programmes to instil management skills.

As the talent pool evolves to include professionals from varying generational demographics, there will inevitably be issues arising from different needs and attributes of respective employees. HR professionals need to know how to balance the different talent pools and create cohesiveness of their workforce.

Challenge: Doing More with Less

With the stiff competition for talent, human resources departments should look into developing their current talent pool. Part of developing and improving is the challenge of creating measurable standards.

While focusing on ROIs, the HR department needs to think about programmes, structures or processes that will be able to adequately track the creation of value. This also requires an analytical focus on the part of HR professionals, moving past details like head counts versus productivity or demographics, moving toward a need to analyse the needs of the organisation and how to create value.

Challenge: Always Planning for the Future

In Asia, there is a growing challenge of building and developing skill sets for the workforce in emerging markets. HR’s role is to create a sustainable workforce, as well as maintaining a diverse talent pool that will help to counter future challenges.

This boils down to the talent management and succession planning by HR professionals. There is need to plan for future challenges and always staying on the ball of knowing what skill sets are necessary to develop and hone in employees.

Gwen Lim, Manager of Human Resources Division, Robert Walters Singapore.
www.robertwalters.com.sg.

Gwen specialises in recruitment of human resources professionals at Robert Walters Singapore and
can be reached at gwen.lim@robertwalters.com.sg.