Are firms really investing enough in their people?

For as long as I can remember, the word from CEOs across every sector has been that securing and retaining top talent for their organisation is their number one priority. This still looks to be the case with the latest CEO Outlook report from KPMG citing Talent as the top threat to businesses in the post-pandemic world. As a recruiter, this should be music to my ears and after all, analysis of businesses that survived the recession following the 2008 Financial Crisis, showed that it was organisations that had made real investments in Talent and HR that were best placed to thrive.

However, the same report that detailed the extent to which Talent is the main concern for CEOs, also states that over two thirds of these CEOs are more likely to invest in technology than people. Is this just a short term measure that is being fuelled by the breakneck speed of digital transformation across many sectors or does this show that there is a disconnect between where investment is required and where it is delivered?

I wrote a few months ago about how many firms are likely to be facing a crisis in retention as lockdown eases and people return to work. There now also seems to be a realisation amongst business leaders that many employees simply don’t want to return to the office or in many cases, their jobs at all! To me, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The last 6 months have shown us that when faced with no other options, the majority of office based businesses have been able to adapt to home working with some degree of success but is this has been an artificially created situation and in hindsight, many business leaders would admit that they would have done it differently given the chance. A lot of the key learnings for businesses are to do with employee engagement and welfare.

It is with this in mind that CEOs must focus on recruiting and retaining talent in the weeks, months and years ahead if they want to thrive in the post-pandemic world. None of us know how long ‘this’ will last for and so although investing in decent teleconferencing facilities or cloud based CRMs might appear to be a wise move, it’s not your software or hardware that can refuse to come back to work, it’s your people.