Deloitte Private has officially published the results from its survey of C-suite executives and leaders, a survey where it was revealed that 73% of private companies plan to increase or significantly increase their investment in talent development over the next 12 months.
Named Private Company Outlook: Talent development, the stated survey called upon respondents to share their organization’s top three business priorities for next year. As for the results, they had productivity (36%) and leadership succession (33%) appearing highest on the list of priorities. In response to that, only a small percentage of respondents selected managing liquidity (5%) and pursuing mergers & acquisitions (4%) as top priorities, potentially pointing to increased optimism around company financial performance.
Talk about the survey results on a slightly deeper level, we begin from how it found that more and more private companies are now turning to innovative mentorship strategies to develop talent. This can be better understood once you consider that reverse mentoring (69%) emerged as the #1 talent development strategy that organizations have implemented within the last year, suggesting that leaders recognize skills gaps to address among both early-career employees and senior leaders
Furthermore, training employees on AI (64%) and on-the-job learning, along with apprenticeship programs (52%) emerged as top strategies too in the given context. Turning our attention towards the future, 72% of respondents claimed that their organizations plan to increase or significantly increase their use of apprenticeship and mentoring programs.
Next up, Deloitte’s survey shed light upon the divisiveness among organizations when it comes toincreasing in-person collaboration. You see,respondents who hailed from organizations with $500 million or more in annual revenue (i.e., larger private enterprises) more frequently cited in-office events (37%) among effective approaches to maintaining corporate culture in a hybrid work environment. This contingent was almost 20 percentage bigger than the group containing respondents from organizations with under $500 million in annual revenue.
Alongside that, larger private enterprises were also deemed as significantly more likely than smaller-revenue organizations to say in-office events would increase or significantly increase over the next 12 months (87% and 9%, respectively).
“Many of the preeminent priorities among private companies are talent-centric, ranging from enhancing employee productivity to developing and establishing new leadership,” said Wolfe Tone, vice chair and U.S. Deloitte Private leader. “Investments in talent development are the cornerstone of fostering an engaged and collaborative workforce while ensuring an organization remains competitive and is poised to adapt in the future. While learning and mentorship programs are important pillars to a workforce development strategy, components like well-being and employee satisfaction also play a part in establishing a workforce aligned to company goals and forward progress.”
Hold on, we still have a couple of bits left to unpack, considering we still haven’t touched on the fact that employees engagement and productivity levels emerged, during the survey, as two of the key metrics to judge the overarching picture. In essence, more than7 in 10 (71%) leaders said employee engagement is one of the most important outcomes of employee development programs. On the other hand, employee productivity was adjudged as especially critical in organizations recording under $500 million in annual revenue, with 80% of these respondents selecting productivity as a key outcome.
Rounding up highlights would be a piece of data, which digs into how larger companies face more challenges getting buy-in from stakeholders when implementing new talent initiatives. To expand upon this, organizations with $500 million or more in annual revenue were three times more likely to consider gaining support from other leaders or stakeholders as one of their biggest challenges, as compared to those with less than $500 million. Beyond that, well over half of total respondents took the opportunity to acknowledge challenges like potential for low employee engagement (59%), uncertainty measuring effectiveness (57%) and disruption to current workflows (55%).
Among other things, it must be mentioned that the survey in question included 100 private company leaders, who happen to hold designations like C-level, president, board member, partner/owner at private US companies with annual revenues ranging from US$100 million to more than US$1 billion+
