One of the reasons human resources (HR) ranks lower on the corporate totem pole today than the finance department is that HR managers often cannot quantify their successes. This report, jointly produced by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA), hopes to rectify that shortcoming, raise the profile of HR to its proper place in the corporate hierarchy, and enable companies to start to create a sustainable people advantage.

 

SHRI, being a member of the world body – WFPMA – held the baton of the project in Singapore.

 

Top 8 Future HR Challenges

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the European Association for Personnel Management (EAPM) conducted a web survey in Europe through January 2007, receiving 1,355 responses from HR and other executives in 27 European countries. The survey captured the views on 17 topics in human resources management and a total of 194 specific action steps associated with the topics. In conjunction with that survey, during May 2007, 102 senior executives were interviewed in Europe. Between September and November 2007, a global web survey was conducted in cooperation with the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA), eliciting an additional 3,386 responses from participants in 56 countries. In all, the two web surveys elicited 4,741 responses from 83 countries and markets, and BCG conducted 220 interviews from senior executives.

 

The top eight future challenges in HR identified by the survey are the capabilities that executives expect to be the most important in managing human capital from 2010 through 2015 – and in which they reported that their companies were currently weakest. The eight critical challenges fall into three strategic categories:

 

Developing and Retaining the Best Employees

The first category consists of the challenges of managing talent, improving leadership development, and managing work-life balance.

 

Anticipating Change

The second category encompasses managing demographics, managing change and cultural transformation, and managing globalisation.

 

Enabling the Organisation

The third category consists of becoming a learning organisation and transforming HR into a strategic partner.

 

Corporations that can meet these challenges head on will build and sustain competitive advantage.

 

How about the HR challenges unique to Singapore?

Executives in Established Asia – a region of mature economies such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea – are primarily concerned with managing talent, improving leadership development and managing globalisation.

 

As shared by Michael Leicht, project leader of BCG and one of the report’s authors, he noted that managing talent is the only key challenge in Singapore that he gathered from the 116 respondents in Singapore. This comes as quite a surprise in comparison to the HR agenda of Europe, which consists of managing talent, managing demographics, becoming a learning organisation, managing work-life balance, and managing change and cultural transformations. Establishing alumni networks will be the action with the strongest growth in Singapore. Although only 14 per cent of companies have these in place today, 32 per cent expect to be using them until 2015.