Deloitte conducted its annual Global Human Capital Survey 2015 across industries which included over 3000 HR managers and business leaders from 106 countries. The survey sought to unearth critical trends that are shaping the human capital agenda within organisations. The survey this year has reflected worrying trends for the HR industry and is said to be a wakeup call for HR.

Below are the top challenges for organisations, and more so for HR that the Global Human Capital Survey revealed:

Culture & Engagement: With the heightened demand for corporate transparency and workforce mobility, building cultural strategies that meets the expectation of employees is absolutely necessary. With the ever expanding skill shortage and the growing war for talent, employer-employee relation is now changing. “As demand for talent picks up, the balance of power in business is rapidly shifting from the employer to the employee,” claimed Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Culture is a driving factor for many organisational outcomes; most importantly, it is integral to employee engagement and retention. As the issue emerges as the most serious concern for 2015, HR needs to proactively take steps to build culture that ensures greater engagement.

Leadership: Seeking a spot as one of the top challenges for organisation for the third time, Leadership now becomes a perennial concern. Effective leadership appears to be lacking at all levels across industries with 86 per cent of the respondents indicating concern on the issue. Emerging as a recurring challenge, the survey hints towards lack in effectiveness of companies to address this issue. According to the Business Confidence Report 2014 conducted by Deloitte it is interesting to note that only 49 per cent of C-Suite executives indicated that they are working towards development of leadership skills. “Skills needed on the job are changing faster than ever. Organizations are quickly falling behind on developing the right skills across all levels. There’s an urgent need for organizations to re-evaluate their learning programs and treat leadership development as a long term investment, rather than a discretionary training spend item when times are favourable,” emphasised Brett Walsh, global human capital practice leader, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd.  Failing to meet the leadership talent issue could land companies far behind their competitors.

Learning & Development: Corporate Learning emerged as another pressing issue. 85 per cent of the respondents ranked Learning & Development as a priority issue as compared to 70 per cent last year. There exists a wide skill gap in organisations today, and learning has become business-critical priority for skilling. With many companies coming together globally in a war for talent, companies have already started making heavy investments in order to build the kind of skill required for business success. It’s now time for companies to actively explore a whole new way to approach Learning & Development.

With digitalization sweeping the corporate learning market, organization need to create a new environment where a new vision to learning can be implemented. “By leading the process of ‘job redesign,’ developing hard-hitting training programs, and working with technologists on the implementation of new technology, talent and HR leaders can help ease the transition of these technologies into the workforce and, ultimately, improve productivity and engagement,” argued Bersin. The experience of corporate training should affect each employee in a significant way.

HR performance: The need to reskill HR itself was revealed to be the fourth biggest concern for 2015. Not to mention, the progress from last year’s survey has been meagre on this front. The performance rating of HR by business leaders and HR themselves was very low. Once considered to be only a support function, HR today needs to evolve into agile, business oriented, data-driven role that is highly skilled in attracting, retaining an developing talent. Therefore, it’s time that HR looks at its own makeover and reinvent its function.

Apart from these, Performance Management and People Analytics were other factors that are likely to emerge as challenge in 2015. The reason the survey is raising concern as a wakeup call for HR is the fact that HR performance rests at number four as a pressing issue, making the top three HR-driven issues even more worrying.