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The top 10 challenges your franchise business has to face in the new world of work [report]

Sarah Stowe

Are you able to navigate the new world of work? It requires “a dramatic change in strategies for leadership, talent and human resources”, according to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2015 report.

This report highlights the 10 trends that emerged from research undertaken with more than 3,300 business and HR leaders from 106 countries.

So what’s on the radar for workforce trends?

The challenges facing employers are, in order of importance for the Oceania region:

1. Culture and engagement

2. Leadership

3. Reinventing HR

4. Workforce capability

5. Performance management

=6. Learning and development

=6. HR people and analytics

8. Simplification of work

9. People data everywhere

10. Machines as talent

The report authors write “This year culture and engagement was rated the most important issue overall, slightly edging out leadership (the number one issue last year). This challenge highlights the need for business and HR leaders to gain a clear understanding of their organisation’s culture and re-examine every HR and talent program as a way to better engage and empower people.”

We’re seeing an increased focus on culture from franchisors when it comes to recruiting franchisees – how does your business shape up?

Leadership remains a perennial issue, with little progress apparently made across firms. What are you doing in your business to close the gap for building great leaders?

Learning and development is seen as important but only 40 percent of respondents believed their organisations were ready to embrace this. That’s dropped from 75 percent last year. What’s your attitude to developing and training your team?

It’s not good news for HR: again little progress has been made to reskill this area, and performance is generally regarded as low. One trend is for CEOs to bring in non-HR professionals to take on the role. What’s your approach to improving HR performance?

Is your business ready to embrace the trend towards an on-demand workforce with varied employment contracts? Firms need to “develop better processes, policies and tools to source, evaluate and reward talent that exists outside of traditional corporate and organisational balance sheets” suggests the report.

Performance management is the secret ingredient, the report authors indicate. Agile models of performance management form a “core component of this year’s focus on engagement, development and leadership”.

People analytics has been an evolving strategy that will change how HR works, but HR organisations are slow in building the capabilities to take advantage of these analytics. Are you working with an HR firm? How forward-thinking is it?

The simplification of work is coming. Perhaps you’ve already addressed the issue of overwhelmed employees. The report predicts this will be a long-term movement to overhaul the work environment so we focus more on doing fewer things well, rather than trying to achieve more with less.

Employee data outside the business (think social, talent and recruiting networks) is growing. “It is now urgent and valuable for companies to learn to view, manage and take advantage of this data for better recruiting, hiring, retention, and leadership development”.

Collaborating with intelligent machines is the solution to the encroaching power of machinery to impact work at all levels. Is this is an issue in your business? How can you redesign jobs to work in co-operation with computers?

Overall, softer issues such as culture and engagement, leadership and development are urgent priorities for all franchise businesses.

Read the full report from Deloitte University Press: Global Human Capital Trends 2015