HR Initiatives Key for Many Organizations

February 1, 2006 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Three quarters of HR executives who reported in a recent poll that their personnel management programs were in place indicated that those initiatives were a top corporate priority.

That was a central conclusion of the 2006 Talent Management Initiatives survey from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The survey was based on responses from 384 HR professionals.

HR professionals also said that these initiatives have their greatest impact on:

  • recruitment,
  • employees feeling valued,
  • aligning employees with the mission of the organization, and
  • providing adequate professional development opportunities.

With an increasingly diverse workforce and growing global competition, organizations are looking to talent management as a means of ensuring quality and consistency in the workforce, SHRM said. Of those organizations that have talent management initiatives, 65% have a formal budget in place for training. The survey also found that employees are more likely to stay with their organization if they are offered professional development opportunities.

“There is increasing pressure from the global market to produce workforces of the highest caliber in order to succeed,” said Susan Meisinger, SHRM president and CEO, in the news release. “Effective talent management drives that success by promoting employee development, recruitment, retention and coordination to achieve an organization’s goals.”

However, HR professionals also indicated that there remain areas where talent management initiatives need to be improved:

  • creating a deeper reservoir of successors at every level (25%),
  • creating a culture that makes employees want to stay with the organization (17%),
  • decreasing existing gaps in employees’ competency levels (17%).

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