2021/22 Insights survey

Towards the end of last year we surveyed hundreds of professionals, including HR & Health & Safety Managers and business owners with the aim to highlight the all-important issues when it comes to Health & Safety, HR, Compliance and Learning & Development. The respondents came from a wide variety of industries, including care, construction, education, manufacturing and private sector professions. Here’s what they said:

Keep reading below for a text only version of the results, including even more of our findings from the survey...

The Workplace

Top 5 challenges businesses face:

• Recruitment 
• High demand for products/services
• Supply chain difficulties
• Staff retention
• Staff mental health and wellbeing

The working landscape: (when government restrictions are not in place)

• A complete mix of remote and office-based workers (26.8%)
• All, or the majority of employees have returned to the workplace (55.9%)
• My organisation can only conduct business from the workplace (9.5%)
• All, or the majority of staff are working from home (5.8%)

Health & Safety & HR

Top 3 Health & Safety Challenges for employers:

• Supporting staff mental health and wellbeing
• Developing a safety culture
• Infection prevention (COVID-19)

2021 Health & Safety challenges:

• Employee concerns over COVID
• Keeping up with government guidelines / HSE recommendations
• Completion of mandatory training

2021 HR challenges:

• Workplace culture
• Absenteeism (including self-isolation)
• Providing employee development opportunities

Personal Development

50% of organisations have an annual budget for staff learning & development whereas 37% fund it on an ad-hoc basis. 

Top 3 skills for employees to develop in 2022:

• Communication
• Teamwork
• Leadership

Respondents rated the importance of employee personal development as 84 (On a scale of 1-100, with 100 being extremely important)

Workplace Training

48.1% anticipate their training & development budget to stay the same, while 27.5% expect an increase.

78% say their eLearning usage has increased a little or substantially since the start of the COVID pandemic.

Quality of training, cost and accreditations are most important to those looking for eLearning.

84% use eLearning for mandatory health & safety training

Key focuses for workplace training in 2022 are health & safety (77%) and mental health & wellbeing (57%) 

Respondents rated the importance of health & safety, HR and compliance training  as 88 (On a scale of 1-100, with 100 being extremely important)

Key takeaways

It is clear that organisations are aware of the challenges they face, particularly when it comes to health, safety and wellbeing, as well as HR compliance & culture. It looks like employers will have an element of homeworking which will alter how the landscape of their business for the long-term.  Employee personal development may be restricted by some budget constraints, however there may be more scope for learning and development as businesses begin to reemerge from the pandemic. What remains to be seen is whether business managers and leaders can effectively address some of the challenges they face.

You can read the survey report in The Workplace Journal, a must-read for business leaders and managers, which brings together all the important issues for workplaces in 2022. 

Download your copy here.