HCI and SuccessFactors Reveal Key Features of High-Impact Human Resources Functions in New Study
New York,New York (PRWEB) October 10, 2013 -- The Human Capital Institute (HCI), the global institution for strategic talent management, today announced the release of a national study conducted jointly with SuccessFactors, an SAP Company, aimed at identifying the practices and strategies that characterize high-impact HR functions. The findings are based on the responses of more than 370 participants, ranging from individual contributor to C-level positions at their organizations, 89 percent of which are headquartered in North America. Respondents’ organizations ranged in size from less than 100 employees (17 percent) to more than 20,000 employees (19 percent).
As more organizational leaders recognize the value of the strategic management of human capital, there is an increased focus on how HR professionals can make an impact to their business. Perceived inability to manage talent efficiently and effectively can create negative impressions of HR. By exploring how high-impact HR functions operate and identifying the barriers often encountered by HR professionals, the study uncovers some of the challenges that HR has faced in contributing to the organization's bottom line. The research also highlights opportunities for HR professionals to provide strategic value to their organization.
“Our research offers a glimpse into the major challenges that prevent today’s HR professionals from operating at an optimal level and showing the C-suite the deep value they bring to their organizations,” said Carl Rhodes, HCI chief executive officer. “Understanding these barriers and identifying the methods and best practices to get over them is the key to the development of a high-impact HR function.”
Insights from the study include:
•Businesses need tangible and intangible investments to create a high-impact HR function that has more engagements with C-suite executives, a larger budget, a stronger relationship with the IT department, more time to spend on strategic tasks and more metrics, as well as better HR leaders and stronger HR talent.
•The biggest barriers to HR program effectiveness are a lack of strategic focus and inferior human capital management technologies, rather than a lack of HR staff or weak leadership.
•Despite being the strategic leaders of HR, C-level leaders, executive vice presidents and vice presidents spend 43 percent of their day mired in transactional tasks.
•One of the biggest struggles in developing an effective HR function is the poor or limited perception by other employees and business units, particularly for HR leaders’ leadership skills.
•Underutilizing metrics, such as market performance and unemployment numbers, undermines HR’s ability to be strategic and future focused. At the same time, 38 percent of survey respondents said that more advanced technologies are needed to be effective at using HR metrics.
“Our study found that the inability to see organizational priorities is the biggest hurdle preventing HR from being more strategic. It is, therefore, clear that HR professionals can benefit from aligning their practices more closely with overall business goals,” said Dr. Karie Willyerd, vice president of Social Learning and Adoption, SuccessFactors. “This can be accomplished by working collaboratively with other business units and line managers to understand the needs of the organization and figure out what can be done to meet them.”
“We’ve seen that organizations with high-impact HR functions typically enjoy greater financial success and that’s again been validated here,” continued Shawn Price, president, SuccessFactors, SAP Cloud. “Leveraging advanced HCM technologies and the insights connected applications deliver enhances the value of HR, and allows HR professionals to be recognized as equal-footing partners to the business.”
To download a copy of the report, please visit: http://www.hci.org/hr-research/high-impact-hr-challenges-and-opportunities-related-building-effective-strategic-and.
Accompanying this report is an infographic illustrating the top challenges for HR. Visit http://www.hci.org/blog/hci-research-infographic-barriers-high-impact-hr to learn more.
About SuccessFactors, an SAP Company
SuccessFactors provides the leading cloud-based HCM Suite, which helps HR drive business execution with solutions that are complete, beautiful and flexible enough to start anywhere– optimizing your workforce today and preparing them for tomorrow. SuccessFactors solutions are supported by a global partner ecosystem and the experience and commitment of SAP. With approximately 22 million subscription seats globally, we strive to delight our customers by delivering innovative solutions, content and analytics, process expertise and best practices insights from serving our broad and diverse customer base. Today, with more than 3,700 customers, we serve organizations of all sizes across more than 60 industries in more than 177 countries using our application suite in 35 languages.
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About Human Capital Institute (HCI)
HCI is the global association for strategic talent management and new economy leadership, and a clearinghouse for best practices and new ideas. Our network of expert practitioners, Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 corporations, government agencies, global consultants and business schools contribute a stream of constantly evolving information, the best of which is organized, analyzed and shared with members through HCI communities, research, education and events. For more information, please visit http://www.hci.org.
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Jeanne Achille, The Devon Group, +1 732-706-0123 11, [email protected]
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