Powerful strategies for retaining your best employees

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The 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report by Deloitte University Press suggests that competition for top talent has increased, driving culture and engagement, leadership, and development to the top of the human capital agenda. "We uncovered six key findings that paint a high-level picture of how organizations are approaching talent and work. Softer areas such as culture and engagement, leadership, and development have become urgent priorities," the authors of the report said.

According to Deloitte University Press, the research described in the report involved surveys and interviews with more than 3,300 business and HR leaders from 106 countries. Based on the survey data, culture and engagement was rated the most important issue overall this year, slightly edging out leadership, which was the top issue in 2014. "This highlights the need for business and HR leaders to gain a clear understanding of their organization's culture and reexamine every HR and talent program as a way to better engage and empower people," the authors said. Building leadership remains paramount, but the survey shows that organisations have made little or no progress since last year.

This year's third most important issue was the need to transform and accelerate corporate learning. This is because the percentage of companies rating learning and development as very important in preventing talent poaching tripled since last year. The fourth biggest issue was the need to reskill HR, followed by workforce capability, which eight out of 10 respondents surveyed cited as being either "important" or "very important" in the year ahead.

Another secret ingredient in the new world of work is the need to rethink how organisations manage, evaluate, and reward people. "New, agile models for performance management have arrived, and we see these new performance management models as a core component of this year's focus on engagement, development, and leadership," the authors said.

The survey shows your HR should also make serious investments in leveraging data to make people decisions, because people analytics has been evolving over the last several years. Other emerging trends that the survey identified include simplification of work, redesigning jobs to match new technology, and taking advantage of social media data to enhance better recruiting, hiring, retention, and leadership development. Register your business in the Biz4Afrika platform for more useful tips that will enhance your competitiveness and performance in business.