According to a recent survey, there are three areas where human resource departments feel they need to focus their efforts the most – succession planning, employee engagement and culture management.

More than two-fifths of the companies surveyed said succession planning was a primary concern. This is an outgrowth of the difficulty companies are having in finding workers with the needed skills. Because of this difficulty, businesses are concerned about the rate of turnover. This has also led to increased efforts to retain workers, as well as training and promoting from inside the company.

And human resource departments are looking at managers within the company more and more to assess their suitability for leadership roles.

About the same number identified employee engagement as a fundamental emphasis for their companies. Companies are focusing more on this area because of research that has shown the strong link between employee engagement and better results. The more engaged employees are, the better they perform, and the higher the profitability of the company.

The third key area identified by human resources specialists is culture management. This was cited by about one-third of the companies as the most important concern. Companies understand the importance of corporate culture, but it has always been notoriously hard to quantify. Businesses are constantly looking for ways to measure this to determine whether it is helping to strengthen company values and goals.

Other areas identified as concerns by companies include performance management, recruitment, employee retention and satisfaction,

The survey also revealed that companies with strategic recognition programs have employees who are less frustrated and more enabled. Companies also reported that strategic recognition programs that are tied to corporate values are more effective than recognition programs that are not. And companies that spend more than one percent of payroll on employee recognition have the best results.

The survey was conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, along with Globoforce. It is conducted twice a year, with the aim of discovering trends and challenges among human resource specialists, along with the strategies used to meet these challenges. Some 815 human resource specialists were contacted in the 2012 survey.

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