Top HR challenges (hint: they include acquiring, retaining and grooming key talent)

Ranked list of the top HR challenges (in North American business)

1. Acquiring key talent/lack of available talent
2. Building leadership capability
3. Driving cultural and behavioral change in the organization
4. Retaining key talent
5. Increasing line manager capability to handle people-management responsibilities
6. Succession planning
7. Constraints on headcount (“making do with less”)
8. Increasing workforce productivity
9. Lack of consensus about the organization’s strategy/direction
10. Encouraging organizational innovation
11. Resourcing and managing HR issues in “new geographies” for the company
12. Managing human capital during and after an acquisition or merger
13. Implementing people changes resulting from changes due to operational performance
14. Workforce planning
15. Measuring the contribution of human capital to business performance
16. Reducing overall human capital costs
17. Coping with an aging workforce

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Base: Survey of 154 senior HR professionals in the U.S. and Canada
Source: “The State of HR Transformation,” North America, Mercer Human Resource Consulting, 2006
Discovered via Workforce Management (10 September 2007)