"Why aren't people applying for jobs?" is the anguish shared by most HR professionals. Recruiting people was ranked in the top 5 priorities by virtually 8 out of 10 respondents, and 40% even ranked it first. In total, they selected their TOP 5 priorities from the 12 options that kept them most busy this year.
However, the biggest concern for HR professionals is the lack of quality candidates. Data shows that it is a problem to find good people across industries—from IT to creatives to production workers. And small, medium, and large companies are facing the same problem.
Recruitment also made it into the Top 5 HR questions. How to get more candidates into the recruitment process?
Hand-in-hand with recruiting challenges go the initiatives of Company Culture (addressed by 68% of respondents) and People Retention (60% here). HR professionals most want to focus on aligning company and people values, nurturing employees, retaining the best people, well-being, or employer branding.
"We want to keep people happy and growing with us, not constantly looking for new ones."
"Given the situation, I would like to keep experienced professionals in their positions and keep them happy."
Retaining the best people was given priority after a bitter lesson in how hard it is to find quality candidates in the current market conditions.
On the question of corporate values, well-being, and motivating people, 50% of HR professionals would like better answers: What are people satisfied/dissatisfied with in the company? What can be done to reduce the risk of turnover? or What motivates people in our company?
We have not included inflation, and its associated costs, as an option. Respondents gave us a good talking to in the open-ended question box, where this threat dominated almost every answer.
Inflationary pressures, rising costs, indexation, or salary reviews are recurring among the other challenges HR professionals have to deal with this year. And they often feel like they're among the millstones.
"It's a constant balancing act between employee demands for wage increases and making sure the company can sustain it."
To our surprise, Goal and Performance Management or the challenges associated with Remote Work did not make it into the top 5 priorities.
75% of the companies for which respondents work operate in hybrid mode. We will assume that companies have managed to work out most of the issues in the two years of the pandemic and this is the new normal for them.
The challenge of Willingness of employees to return to the office is no longer perceived as essential at all, and satisfaction with the remote working setup was rated 74 out of 100 by respondents overall.
Only 1% of companies are now 100% remote. Half run in hybrid, fully free mode, and another quarter run in hybrid mode with mandatory office several times a week.
A slight majority of respondents perceive the work of HR as more challenging than before the pandemic. This result was a big surprise, given how dramatically COVID-19 has affected the way work is done and the demands on people.
We live in a beautiful but challenging time where things and priorities are changing rapidly. Respondents themselves admitted that they are not yet fully prepared for the challenges of the Future of Work. They rated their readiness at 2.8 out of 5.
50% of respondents have set metrics for their work. The two areas they measure the most are Recruitment (Time To Hire, Cost Per Hire, Number of Candidates Per Position) and Retention (KPIs for turnover).
However, 7 out of 10 respondents said they could not measure everything they needed to. This mainly relates to the impact of company culture on employee satisfaction or employee engagement.
68% of respondents measure engagement and most often use their own surveys to do so.
The frequency with which they survey employees varies greatly. Most respondents send it out once a year or several times a year. However, they often responded that they send it out irregularly.
105 HR professionals from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Central Europe completed the survey. Respondents are a relatively experienced group, two thirds of them have more than 3 years of experience and 40% of respondents have been in HR for more than 6 years.
Respondents, as ambassadors for their companies, do a good job, as the Employee NPS of all represented is 30.
At Behavera, we plan to continue our surveys and you can look forward to trends and challenges for the coming year. We are also developing the Behavera Well-being Index initiative to help HR professionals identify why employees are dissatisfied and how they can prevent burnout to retain them in the end.
Try Behavera Well-being Index now! Sign up here.
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