The 10 Biggest Challenges HR Professionals Face Today

I talked to HR professionals around the world to identify trends & common challenges that they face, and come up with actionable insights that help.

This article was originally published on getreadii.com

At times, it seems that HR’s challenges are never-ending. This led us to ask ourselves: what are the biggest challenges facing HR professionals today? To answer this question, we talked to HR professionals around the world and looked at studies to identify trends and common challenges that all HR professionals are seemingly facing today. In this article, we’ve identified the 10 biggest challenges facing HR professionals today and included actionable insights to help solve each of these challenges.

🔎 Finding the Right Talent

Unemployment rates continue to be a global problem: 2021 statistics reveal that more than 220 million people were unemployed. While a lot of it has to do with the COVID pandemic, unemployment has always been a pain point for most economies. One might think that it would therefore be easy to find good talent when sourcing for skills in such a vast pool.

However, most HR professionals know that as much as they may get a high engagement rate on job offers, many candidates fall short of the company cutoffs. After all, their qualifications, work ethic, experience, and dedication may not align with the company’s culture or onboarding methods. Additionally, in-demand jobs such as developers can be hard and costly to recruit. Unfortunately, this talent mismatch is likely to ensue for years to come and is one of the biggest pain-points facing HR departments and managers alike.

Actionable insight: They key is to attract candidates to your organization. To do so, be very clear and transparent with the benefits and pay. To attract 18–35 year olds, posting a salary range on the job description is especially important: a study found that 48% of 18–35 year oldshave a negative perception of company that doesn’t post the salary in the job description. Not doing so may be cutting yourself from nearly 50% of great candidates!

♻️ Change Management

If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that being flexible and open to change is a requirement for any successful business. HR departments especially have seen a complete reversal in their usual ways of doing things, from remote work to an open talent model. It has become ever-more important for HR departments to keep up with changes in the global working environment. However, successful change management can be very difficult, with HR leaders recording it as one of the biggest challenges they face today.

Actionable insight: To help with change management, we recommend implementing “change sponsors”. Change sponsors are individuals inside of the company that are extensively trained on the change you hope to aspire, such that they can be your sponsor “on the ground” and help their colleagues on the change. Identify the individuals most excited by the change, train them extensively and give them responsibility for helping those around them.

🚀 Leadership Development

Are leaders born or made? Regardless of where you stand on this hotly debated topic, it’s no secret that HR professionals often face challenges in developing leaders in the workplace. But not having leadership development measures in place leads to the loss of talent — or stagnation of the company by not tapping into internal talent pools. A study revealed that leadership training programs have become a necessity inside companies today, as they boost both learning capacity and productivity. The tests showed 25% and 20% increases in learning capacity and productivity, respectively. Successful leadership development however, is not easy.

Actionable insight: Work with managers and employees at all levels to nurture leadership that supports the organization’s growth and encourages a positive work culture. You can ask well-respected leaders inside your company to give a presentation of their interpretation and insights on leadership. Record the presentation and include it into your onboarding!

📈 Training

Besides leadership development, HR professionals must create a culture of continuous learning in the organization (read our tips on how to create a learning organization to know more). Unfortunately, HR professionals face difficulty in doing so because of poor engagement from the employees. It turns out that 1 out of 3 employees loses interest in training programs when the program doesn’t feature inspiring content. Beyond this, we also forget quickly: studies have shown that humans forget 40% of what they learn in 20 minutes and 60% in under 6 hours. That means that employees will be back to their norms by the end of a day training program. How can you work around this?

Actionable insight: You can work around the difficulties of engagement and forgetfulness by creating a learning organization. That is, facilitate the learning of your employees and continuously transform yourself. To do so, focus on the 4 pillars of a learning organization:developing personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning. It’s important to explicitly explain and include these notions in your onboarding so that all new employees can quickly and be eased in to your learning organization.

👥 Diversity

Did you know? White people make up 78% of the workforce in the United States. African Americans make up 13%, Hispanic people make up 18%, and Asians make up 6% of the U.S. workforce. Moreover, the underemployment rates (not to be confused with unemployment rates) are higher for black and Hispanic people. Unfortunately, research has also proven that systemic discrimination exists in organizations, further fuelling a lack of diversity. Because inclusion is vital in any workspace and any form of discrimination can bring down a company, it’s important to have serious discussions and workshops surrounding diversity. Unfortunately, engaging employees around diversity issues poses a challenge to HR managers.

Actionable Insight: Building a fair recruiting process is the first step in building a diverse organization. Be open to all qualified candidates, irrespective of gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, etc. As for engaging employees around these issues, facilitate cultural awareness inside your company through sessions and workshops and have employees tell their story. People often don’t realize the prevalence of diversity issues. Make sure to explain why you are running these sessions and what your company’s objectives are — people are more likely to listen and partake with a common objective in mind.‍

❤️ Employee Health

While you may not know this, burnout has a substantial social and economic impact. HBR Research shows that burnout alone was to blame for more than 120,000 deaths and health costs amounting to $190 billion. Moreover, people dealing with burnout are more likely to fall into depression or suffer anxiety, lowering their work productivity. Guess what? Burnout has more to do with the workplace than its people, and it’s up to HR professionals to figure out what’s causing it and how to prevent it from happening.

It’s important for HR professionals to implement systems that cater to the health and safety of their employees to avoid burn out. It is equally important to not discriminate against employees that are experiencing burn out nor face mental issues. Beyond this, HR professionals should also train employees during onboarding on how to manage their stress levels and how to speak up when they feel overwhelmed.

Actionable insight: The best way to deal with this is by checking in with employees and assessing workloads through anonymous surveys. It is important to build a culture of trust and non-judgement as employees will be hesitant to speak out as being overwhelmed for fear of repercussions. Anonymous surveys can be a great tool to asses the reality of the situation.‍

💼 Employee Turnover Rates

Consider these statistics: 4% of new employees leave a new job after a bad first day. 22% of employee turnover occurs within the first 45 days of employment. The cost of replacing an employee is of 0.5x — 2x their annual salary, i.e. employee turnover is extremely expensive and often occurs during the onboarding process. Why? Because most companies aren’t investing in successful onboarding. Additionally, continuous turnover and onboarding takes a toll on the work environment and budget. A sure way to combat declining employee turnover rates is by increasing your employees’ engagement with the company. If you’re interested in actionable advice on how to do so, you can read our article on how to increase employee engagement.

Actionable insight: The most important element in reducing turnover is understanding whyemployees are leaving the company. Is it management? Salaries? The solution can only be learned from anonymized exit surveys conducted across your organization. Often times, the problem lies in the onboarding process. The only way to know for sure is to assess the employee lifecycle, get feedback from the existing employees, and use this input to better the onboarding and retention strategies.

🧑‍💻 Remote Employees

16% of companies are fully remote! Because of the pandemic companies have been forced to adopt remote work techniques. While this may have displeased some employees, there is a positive: companies have understood that hiring remote talent is sometimes the most cost-effective solution, especially for temporary placements. However, the HR professionals we interviewed have repeatedly mentioned facing issues with onboarding and overseeing such hires. With globalization and remote work becoming a norm, one cannot afford to ignore the onboarding of remote employees (or any employee for that matter). To deal with this, we recommend reading our ultimate guide on remote onboarding, that also includes tips on how to ensure successful remote onboarding.

Actionable insight: Build a process for the onboarding of remote employees. Wherever you adopt a software to automate your onboarding or not, it is important to have a thought-out process in place. We recommend doing “knowledge transfer” asynchronously in order to focus on human connection synchronously. Do not forget your remote employees.

📄 Compliance

You’ve probably heard of HR professionals in hot soup over their onboarding, diversity, inclusion, harassment, or even data security policies. These issues impact an organization adversely and lower employee morale. Moreover, they can also lead to the downfall of the company. From HIPAA compliance to data security, it is extremely important for HR departments to ensure their company is compliant on all fronts.

Actionable insight: Schedule a compliancy check at least once a year. We recommend creating a “compliancy checklist” to help make this process smooth. Keep a thorough compliancy checklist inside the HR department for the yearly checks and share an employee-compliancy checklist. Include a review of the checklist during your onboarding to ensure employees are aware of it and how to remain compliant.

📝 Takeaways

We’ve seen what the biggest challenges are and how to solve for them. So what is our takeaway from all this? Well fundamentally, these issues can be boiled down to two main difficulties: transparent communication and learning management. It is important to be very transparent and focus on creating a learning organization.

The first step in this is onboarding. Onboarding is where employees learn about your organization and their responsibilities. It’s important to be transparent from the beginning. Focus on onboarding and you will already be yards ahead of other HR professionals. At Readii, we are dedicated on helping any company create automated and engaging onboarding experiences. Our powerful platform encourages you to automatically provide your new employees with the information they need. Schedule a demo to see how automating your onboarding can help you gain time back and help grow your company.