Compliance and legislation pressures increase burden on employee supply and management

HR departments are expressing increasing concerns regarding the resource available to cope with employee supply and management, says a new report launched today by Adeccoís Managed Services Division.

The HR Innovation Report, conducted in August 2005, questioned 100 HR decision makers in the UKís largest businesses and found that their departments were under-resourced and struggling to cope with the volume of employee admin. The key findings were:

Doing the right thing takes time - 81 per cent of respondents believe that compliance and legal pressures are increasing within their organisations and 84 percent of respondents cited íresponding to new legislationí as a priority for the next 12 months.

Admin gets in the way - 39 per cent of respondents selected íadminí as the area where the biggest resource issue lies. This back office burden may provide some insight into the rankings of strengths and weaknesses - when asked what they do well, with HR Directors admitted that íinnovationí is a the bottom of the list.

Managing multiple suppliers takes its toll - The average number of recruitment providers to organisations was seven, although one in six businesses is dealing with 15 recruitment suppliers or more. Understandably, 46 per cent majority believed that valuable resources are wasted dealing with multiple suppliers .

Managing large pools of employees fuses the skills of corporate HR and purchasing departments, said Steve Twelftree, Director of Managed Services for Adecco UK. The major challenges are that people are not commodities and therefore present more variables in managing supply, and also that employment law is more complex and dynamic than other areas. The bottom line is that no one has to manage the morale of a paperclip, company cars donít take you to court and PCís donít resign.

87 per cent of respondents say that improving employee morale is a priority, and with many also putting emphasis on responding to legislative pressure, the challenge for HR is that resources are stretched too thinly to cover both ends of the spectrum.

Managed Services is geared towards removing legal risk and reporting pressures whilst finding quality candidates in a fast, effective manner, said Steve Twelftree. With legal pressures on the up, there is a clear support for robust managed services provision - our intention as the worldís largest recruiter is to allow HR departments to innovate by easing the pain of managing a corporate workforce.

HR directors believe that a key way of reducing the risk of failure is to look at a managed service approach to staffing. 61 per cent of respondents see recruitment managed services as a positive step in the industry. 60 per cent think that managed services mitigate against risk by improving HR resources available to the organisation.

If given the time, HR Directors want to start to strategically address some of the key challenges facing their businesses. 64 per cent think that the biggest challenge facing them is the skills shortage with flexible working practices (51 per cent) and labour shortages (41 per cent) coming closely behind.

To obtain a copy of the HR Innovation Report or for more information on the research findings, please contact:

Jon Lonsdale / Sam Hall
Adecco Press Office
Tel: 01753 672 755
Email: adecco@octopuscomms.net