Your Opinion Counts - Hot Button HR Issues for 2010 February 5th, 2010

Sean Conrad

Earlier this week we released the results of a recent poll of human resources professionals’ opinions on controversial topics in business and talent management. The poll was conducted in conjunction with a panel webcast that took place last month with seven HR thought leaders as part of our HR Raging Debates Forum.

The results can be found on the latest update to Halogen’s Raging Debates Forum.

It was a great discussion, and the results show a collective view on topics including merit-based pay, social media in the workplace, EFCA complacency, and the future role of HR.

When succession planning was discussed with regards to whether employees should be notified of their place in a succession pool, a whopping 84% of respondents said yes. Panelist Kris Dunn, Vice President of People at Daxko and popular HR blogger at HR Capitalist, reinforced the importance of disclosure, saying, “There may be a lot of employee relations issues around disclosing but you have to do it… A big benefit of succession planning is retention, if people know they’re on the list.”

Another landslide was the issue of who should make decisions on executive compensation for companies that were bailed out (like GM). An overwhelming percentage of respondents - 65% — said the government should, since the debt isn’t repaid yet. Expert panellist Libby Sartain, HR Advisor and former CHRO of Yahoo! Inc and Southwest Airlines summed it up well; “Although I am not in favour of government bailing out businesses, once they do, they should be granted oversight.”

There were some other issues in which responses were more mixed, including how to manage generational differences and the use of stack ranking. I won’t go through all of them, because you can check them out for yourself, but I wanted to leave you with the very interesting responses about HR metrics. Since we were talking about the importance - and underuse - of benchmarking talent management earlier this week, I thought you’d like to see what respondents rated the #1 HR metric to report to the CEO. It broke out like this:

• ROI on talent management - 35%
• Employee engagement - 24%
• Retention - 17%
• There isn’t one - 24%

Let us know what your key metrics are, and where you stand on some of these hot button issues! Share your comments below.

Tags: employee engagement, Generation Y, HR, succession planning, talent management