Improving the effectiveness of leaders and managing change are among HR leaders’ top priorities for 2023.
A global survey of 860 HR leaders by consultancy Gartner identified the top five areas HR professionals want to focus on next year. These were leader and manager effectiveness (60% stated by respondents); organisational and change management (53%); employee experience (47%); recruiting (47%) and the future of work (42%).
A quarter said their current development approach does not prepare leaders for the future of work and 36% said their recruitment strategies are insufficient for finding the skills their organisation needs.
Mark Whittle, vice president of advisory in the Gartner HR practice, said the new world of work requires requires leaders to meet their core responsibilities in different ways.
”The new dynamic is not simply a leader-to-employee relationship, but a human-to-human one,” he said.
Effective leadership
Fifty-one per cent said their workforce planning is limited to headcount alone. Many are finding it difficult to predict future skills needs or fill future talent gaps.
Whittle said: “HR leaders must design careers and mobility more like navigation systems, which dynamically inform drivers of new preferred routes, obstacles to avoid, and choices between fastest- and most fuel-efficient routes.”
Almost half of HR leaders said their employees were fatigured from the continuous disruption seen in the past few years. Separate Gartner research showed only 43% of employees who experience above-average change fatigue intend to stay with their organisation, compared with 74% of employees with low levels of fatigue.
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Gartner said employers can help reduce change-fatigue by adopting fewer top-down approaches and encouraging more collaboration in times of disruption. This “open-source” approach can decrease the risk of change fatigue by 29 percentage points and increase employee itent to remain by 19 percentage points, Gartner claimed.
