Sourcing skilled employees globally and giving them a good work-life balance are important issues for HR managers, writes Gerald Flynn.

Five keys challenges facing Irish human resource managers are likely to become more intense over the next seven years. These include:

• managing talent;

• managing work-life balance;

• developing learning organisations;

• improving leadership development and

• measuring both HR and employee performance.

These are the findings of a comparative study of HR factors in Ireland compared with eight other European states conducted by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The research, released yesterday, was commissioned by the European Association of Personnel Management, which includes the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Ireland among its members.

The institute's director, Michael McDonnell, said that the key areas of concern to HR practitioners in Ireland reflect the impact of growth in the face of increasing competitive pressures and a tight labour market.

The survey was carried out among 1,355 senior personnel practitioners based on 17 relevant topics or achievements identified from literature searches of business and HR journals and focus-group questions.

These 17 topics were then grouped into the following categories:

• economic development;

• societal development;

• company performance and

• HR reorganisation and improvement.

On the accompanying chart, all of the 17 topics are positioned on the basis of their importance and relevance to the respondents, combined with an assessment of both the current capabilities needed to address them and their future importance.

Among the low priorities identified by Irish HR leaders was mastering the HR process, restructuring organisations, managing demographics and, surprisingly, given recent financial, accounting, employment and business scandals, managing corporate social responsibility.

Providing shared services and outsourcing of HR services was also a low priority, though that may reflect the respondents' preference for retaining their existing HR structures and status.

Topics such as managing diversity, improving performance and enhancing employee commitment as well as managing change and cultural transformation all ranked at "medium importance", but were still seen as of greater relevance than a topic like managing globalisation.

Commenting on the five prime concerns, the BCG's study notes the raised demand for employees in the engineering and information technology areas.

It contrasts the difficulties with attracting a higher proportion of third-level students to science and technology subjects with the difficulty in attracting foreign graduates to a State with a high cost base and expensive living costs.

The economic boom of the past decade has resulted in a rise not only in prosperity but also in the work-life balance expectations of workers.

The report notes that "the shortage of skilled workers obliges companies to introduce work-life balance initiatives to attract and retain both Irish and foreign workers".

Like many of their European counterparts, the Irish HR managers identified "becoming a learning organisation" among their priorities - both as being of high importance and being highly relevant. Essentially, this means that an organisation using specific means to develop its employees' competencies, whether of a general nature or in areas specifically related to their jobs.

It is a type of planned "up-skilling" and, so far, it appears from other research by the National Centre for Partnership and Performance, that those with higher skills are more likely to receive investment in additional learning initiatives, widening the skills gap even further.

At the launch of the BCG report yesterday, McDonnell said that the study across different European economies from Russia, Germany, Italy, France and Britain to Ireland, Turkey, Portugal, Denmark and Norway, showed the common and divergent HR needs that cannot all be catered for by single EU positions or initiatives.

"In Ireland, there is a clear need for more focused research into people management competencies and I expect that CIPD Ireland will lead the drive for leading-edge research with academic bodies, State agencies and HR interest groups like Ibec and the Ictu," McDonnell added.

The pan-European study also noted that the Irish managers ranked both "improving leadership development" and "measuring HR and employee performance" as being more important that most of the other 1,230 executives surveyed.

The first centres largely on influencing, motivating and enabling others to contribute towards achieving an organisation's overall stated goals. In many companies, poor communications of strategic goals leads to a shortfall in this area or else knowledge of the goals is confined to senior management layers and failed to percolate to everyone.

The second topic concentrates on implementing means of measuring human capital in quantitative and qualitative ways to implement relevant corrective action. It reflected a higher level and more embedded form of HR management.

Delving deeper into the European HR study, the compilers identify positive and negative HR interventions. There was a high correlation between the high-performance companies and their willingness to seek talented staff globally, while only 17 per cent of the poorer-performing firms sourced talent globally.

Across Europe, if senior HR managers could get "just one Christmas wish", it would be to solve the issue of excelling at managing talent by attracting and retaining all individuals with high potential whether at manager, specialist or front-line operational levels.

Talent management, in Ireland as in nearly every other state, ranked as the prime or second most important issue of current and future importance.

We see it all the time now, with medical and nursing staff being recruited from Asia and Africa and moves to attract science and maths teachers from countries with lower living standards.

CIPD Ireland, which helped to commission the study, noted that attracting talent was just the first key step.

"Then you have to provide all your talented people with opportunities to perform, excel and advance in an environment in which they will stay and grow; otherwise, the initial talent management successes will be short-lived and prove relatively expensive," McDonnell cautioned.

Gerald Flynn is an employment specialist with Align Management Solutions in Dublin.