Deloitte recently launched the 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report, in which it explores 10 major HR trends for 2015. These trends reflect four major themes for the year: leading, engaging, reinventing and reimagining. The study is based on the response of 3300 organisations from more than 100 countries. In this post we will present the report’s most important insights.

According to Deloitte, global organisations today must navigate a “new world of work” – one that requires a dramatic change in strategies for leadership, talent, and human resources. Here are the challenges for 2015:
1. Culture and engagement
Culture and engagement were rated the most important challenge of 2015. It highlights the need for business and HR leaders to gain more insight into their organisation’s culture and reexamine every HR and talent program as a way to better engage and empower employees.
2. Leadership
While organisations continue to focus on building leadership, the report suggests that organizations have made little or no progress since last year. The capability gap for building great leaders has further increased in every region of the world.
3. Learning and development
Learning and development are high on the agenda for organisations. The percentage of companies rating it as very important tripled since last year as they confront increasing skills gaps. However, despite this increase, the readiness to address it went down.
4. Reinventing HR
The fourth biggest challenge was the need to reskill HR. On average, HR and business leaders rated HR’s performance as low. Business leaders rated HR’s performance even 20 percent lower than did HR leaders, showing the importance of speeding up HR’s ability to deliver value to a company.
5. Workforce on demand
For next year eight out of ten organisations surveyed mentioned workforce capability as being “important” or “very important”. This challenge emphasises the need for better processes, policies, and tools to source, evaluate, and reward talent that exists outside of traditional corporate and organisational balance sheets.
6. Performance management
The new world of work increases the need to rethink how organisations manage evaluate, and reward people. New, agile models for performance management are introduced, which will make up the core of the focus on engagement, development and leadership.
7. HR and people analytics
The report shows that HR should start making serious investments in using data to make people decisions. However, while this has the potential to change the way HR will work, HR organisations seem to be slow in developing capabilities to take advantage of big data.
8. Simplification of work
Companies will start to simplify work, implement design thinking, revise the work environment, and help employees focus and relieve stress. In short, we are entering an era of “doing less better” rather than “doing more with less”.
9. Collaborate with machines
The use of machines to read, analyse, speak, and make decisions is impacting work at all levels in all kinds of organisations. HR teams should think about how to revise jobs as we now need to collaborate with computers.
10. People data everywhere
The explosion of external data in social networks, recruiting networks, and talent networks has created a new source of new employee data outside the organisation. Organisations need to take the necessary steps to view, manage, and take advantage of this data for better recruiting, hiring, retention, and leadership development.
What challenges do you face in your organisation? Do you agree or disagree with the challenges mentioned in Deloitte’s report?
Download Deloitte’s report on the New World of Work here to read more about the findings.