Deloitte Report: 2015 Human Capital Trends

According to Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends survey, employee engagement and culture issues exploded onto the scene, rising to become the no. 1 challenge companies face around the world.

Culture drives many outcomes in organizations, perhaps most prominently, employee engagement and retention. That can spell bad news for a lot of companies. More than half of respondents say their organizations have either a poor program or no program to measure and improve engagement. Explore the missing links in the culture-engagement connection and potential ways to close the gaps.

Report Highlights:

• In an era of heightened corporate transparency, greater workforce mobility, and severe skills shortages, culture, engagement, and retention have emerged as top issues for business leaders. These issues are not simply an HR problem.
• Culture and engagement is the most important issue companies face around the world. 87 percent of organizations cite culture and engagement as one of their top challenges, and 50 percent call the problem “very important.”
• Organizations that create a culture defined by meaningful work, deep employee engagement, job and organizational fit, and strong leadership are outperforming their peers and will likely beat their competition in attracting top talent.

Why has culture become so important?

Employees are now like customers; companies have to consider them volunteers, not just workers:

As the job market has heated up and new technologies have exploded, power has shifted from the employer to the employee. Websites like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others not only increase transparency about a company’s workplace; they make it far easier for employees to learn about new job opportunities and gain intelligence about company cultures.

Leaders lack an understanding of and models for culture: Culture is driven from the top down.

Yet most executives cannot even define their organization’s culture, much less figure out how to disseminate it through the company.

The new world of work changes the way we engage people: The world of work is very different from and more complex than it was only a few years ago.

Employees today work more hours and are nearly continuously connected to their jobs by pervasive mobile technologies. They work on demanding cross-functional teams that often bring new people together at a rapid rate. Flexibility, empowerment, development, and mobility all now play a big role in defining a company’s culture.

Employees’ motivations have changed: Today’s workers have a new focus on purpose, mission, and work-life integration.

Research shows that a variety of complex factors contribute to strong employee engagement, including job design, management, work environment, development, and leadership. Today, more than twice as many employees are motivated by work passion than career ambition (12 percent vs. 5 percent), indicating a need for leadership to focus on making the work environment compelling and enjoyable for everyone.

Read the Full Report on Deloitte’s Site

This blog is an excerpt taken directly from Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report. No rights reserved.