Since 2013, The Hong Kong Management Association (HKMA) has been the regional partner of The Conference Board in its annual CEO Challenge survey, which is an annual survey asking CEOs, presidents, and chairmen across the globe to identify their most critical challenges. This year, the HKMA is proud to announce that, an individual report of the top challenges facing Hong Kong CEOs has been produced for the second consecutive year. And the survey results were presented at the Release of 2016 CEO Challenge Survey Findings cum Forum on "Addressing CEOs Top Challenges: How to Build Organizational Capabilities and High-Performing Cultures to Spur Business Growth" (Monday, 18 April 2016).

In the 2016 edition, the survey was pivot away from the traditional ranking of broad challenges, and focus more on the critical strategies the 605 responding CEOs around the world will employ to improve performance related to sis key-pre-selected business topics:

While the long-term challenges identified by CEOs show a great congruence across regions, the strategies they are employing to meet these challenges highlight the disparity of the issues in their micro climates. Some major trends clearly emerge from this year`s survey responses:

• Improving organizational capabilities to drive better business results and inspire innovation
  CEOs intend to use a wide variety of strategies across organizational functions, ranging from improving performance management and accountability to providing employee training and skill development, creating a consumer-centric and innovation-focused culture, supporting organizational agility, and strengthening process improvement and cost management. Throughout the Asia-Pacific region and in Hong Kong, there is particular focus on improving the performance management process and the impact of senior and front-line leadership while building a culture of continuous improvement, and improving quality processes to enhance internal organizational capabilities.
• Overcoming a critical shortage of talent globally
  CEOs see attracting and retaining quality talent and developing new leaders as fundamental to organizational success. The retention issue is a particular concern among CEOs in Hong Kong who see improving their employee value propositions and leadership development programmes as critical recruitment and retention strategies.
• Getting their organizations aligned and making them more agile-supported by effective, enterprise-wide communication
  Communicating effectively at all levels of the organization is seen by CEOs in Hong Kong as a critical contributor to organizational effectiveness. Improving agility is also seen as an important risk mitigation strategy throughout the region and is the top priority for CEOs in Hong Kong.
• The role of cost management and strengthening process improvement to mitigate risk
  There is acute awareness of the need to improve processes and better manage costs to both reduce risks and smooth out the impact on cash flows and of currency gyrations. CEOs in Hong Kong are focused on reducing their baseline costs to maintain profit margins.
• Leveraging differences to make a difference
  CEOs recognise the impact that diversity and inclusion can have on performance and innovation. CEOs in Hong Kong rate more diversity and inclusion on innovation teams as a top strategy to meet the innovation challenge and see a critical role for management when it comes to idea sharing on innovation teams.
• The importance of building strong organizational cultures to drive performance
  Across the spectrum, the cultural DNA of an organization is critical to success, from operational efficiency to better customer service, greater talent attraction and retention, higher levels of business performance, and breakthroughs in innovation. The importance of creating strong organization cultures especially when it comes to customer focus and innovation is stressed by CEOs in Hong Kong.

In addition, the CEOs were asked to choose their most pressing concerns from a list of 22 "hot button issues", i.e. more immediate and tactical events and situations that CEOs believe will potentially require much of their attention in the coming year.

In a world of looming talent shortages and a squeeze on profits, failure to attract / retain top talent and developing the next generation of leaders were the top two hot button issues for CEOs in Hong Kong.

At the forum, Mr NiQ Lai, Head of Talent Engagement and Chief Financial Officer of Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited was invited to showcase how the HKBN`s out-of-the-box ideas of engaging employees and attracting high-calibre talents contribute to its business success.

And three HR elites, including Ms Bianca Wong, Group Human Resources & Corporate Communications Director from Jebsen & Co Ltd; Mr Kenneth Wai, Director of Human Resources, Island Shangri-La Hotel; and Dr Alan O`Neill, Executive Director of Global Head Office Limited (former Group Head of Executive Development of Jardine Matheson Limited) together with Mr NiQ Lai were invited to join the panel discussion moderated by Dr Ritchie Bent, Chairman of Human Resources Development Management Committee of HKMA and had a fruitful discussion on how to build organizational capabilities and high-performing cultures to spur business growth in order to address CEOs top challenges.

The Conference Board is a not-for-profit organization in the USA. Working as a global Independent membership organization in the public interest, it conducts research, convene conferences, make forecasts, assess trends, publish information and analysis, and bring executives together to learn from one another.

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Issued by The Hong Kong Management Association on 29 April 2016.