Organisational restructuring - HR left to sort it out

While recruitment, retention and employee absence continue to be the most widely cited priorities of the past year, organisational restructuring has emerged for the first time as the most challenging task facing HR practitioners.

Research published today (May 11 2004) by IRS Employment Review as part of its annual HR Prospects 2004 survey also reveals that HR specialists are frustrated at being brought in late to help manage restructuring and redundancy programmes - often after senior managers have opened their organisation up to possible legal problems.

Despite this, HR professionals remain confident about the next 12 months, and hope to spend more time on issues such as training and development, equal pay programmes and employee retention measures.

This research, conducted in early 2004, is based on a survey of 519 HR departments. The questionnaire was followed up by a focus group and one-to-one interviews. The results are available in the new issue (799) of IRS Employment Review (www.irsemploymentreview.com ) published by LexisNexis UK. The IRS Employment Review HR Prospects Survey 2004 is now in its third year; more than 100 of the organisations who took part in this yearís research also participated in 2003.


Other key findings include:

HR priorities across all sectors are strongly influenced by organisational funding and business needs but, in the public sector, government funding and new employment legislation are also considered very significant influences.

For private sector services and manufacturing respondents, organisational finances and business needs dominate almost to the exclusion of all else - social responsibility, for example, exerting significant influence in just 4.5% of manufacturing companies.

HR practitioners in the public sector are more than twice as likely as those in manufacturing to feel that expectations of what they can achieve are too high; they are less satisfied with their budgets, and have a worse working relationship with senior and line managers.

HR practitioners in private sector service companies tend to have more leeway to set their own priorities, but those in manufacturing have the best relationship with senior and line managers, while those in the public sector appear most alienated.

Many respondents revealed that their proudest achievement of the past year had been the successful conclusion of large-scale restructuring programmes - particularly when this was accomplished without industrial action or employment tribunal claims.

Looking ahead, respondents believe that equal opportunities issues may become more important (an increase of 18 percentage points) while training moves (up almost 13 percentage points to 78.3%) from its already prominent position.

Among manufacturing respondents, just 30.4% say that they exert significant influence over their own priorities; this rises to 39.6% in the public sector, and to 47.7% in private sector service companies.

IRS Employment Review managing editor, Mark Crail said:

ìFor the first time since we began our HR Prospects research, the single issue that most preoccupies HR practitioners is not the ongoing slog of managing attendance or the all-pervading imperative to recruit and retain talent, but their active involvement in changing the organisation itself. For some managers, this has been a frustrating experience and this issue isnít going to disappear next year. The challenge for HR managers is whether they will be able to reconcile their own goals and aspirations with those of their organisation and the outside world.î

The full HR Prospects 2004 survey is published in IRS Employment Review (799) available from customer services on 020- 8662 2000, price 30 or can be found on