People Management- A Globally Multicultural Outlook

Diversity recognises existence of differences in a work force with regard to the race, gender, physical ability, lifestyle, tenure, age, religion, geographic origin, education, attitude/behaviour, functional expertise and personality. A study on one of the Fortune 500 companies, a multi cultural organisation, gained immense popularity from its employees on implementing a multicultural policy. The policy ensures that there are no discriminatory issues in an organisation with regard an employee's nationality.

Diversity management is considered a new organisational paradigm. Companies have realised the need to move beyond a human resource model to a model with inherent value in diverse workforce. Globalisation has brought the 'diversity' factor into focus. Employers feel that diversity should be given significant importance since complications on such issues are unwarranted at work place.

Many Indian companies have expatriates occupying senior management positions and find it difficult to deal with the rest of the employees. Management should formulate anti discrimination policies to cater to such problems. To be a global player, it is imperative to have a diversity initiative programme in place.

The Diversity Programme

Dow Chemicals with plants and offices all over US was designated a multicultural organisation. It made substantial progress towards 'inclusion'. It identified certain key areas, which influenced diversity initiatives.

Initiation and support from the top management

Dow Jones, an organisation that has its offices all over the U.S., has an anti discriminatory policy, which focuses on serious commitment towards the diversity initiative. Though it was considered as 'frivolous' for some, the top management's initiative made a lot of difference to employees across the board. Employees started taking the issue more seriously than before.

Another company with a good track record of diversity management is Xerox. The top management's objective was to convince employees that managing diversity was not an obligation but was a business imperative.

Companies looking to tie up or acquire global companies should ensure that a diversity management policy is in place.

HR initiatives

Several inclusionary measures were made sub functions of the human resource department. A committee called

'The Preferred Employer Quality Action Team' comprising of a cross-section of managers at corporate headquarters spearheaded policies. The team identified five categories for improvement: overall compensation, employment security, operating environment/culture, policies and values and personal dimensions. It believed that these areas affected employee satisfaction and were derived from general attributes that the company hoped to achieve.

Organisational communication

Employee involvement in HR policy making was the high point of the diversity initiative the organisation could have come up with. The Equality Council comprising of a cross-section of employees met once a month to discuss issues related to a diverse workforce. Membership rotated every two years.

Suggestions ranging from a diversity booth at the Family Day Picnic to offering discrimination refresher training sessions, preparing guidelines during performance appraisals and creating an anonymous suggestion box titled "Dr. Equality" were conceived by this council.

The council also designed posters, calendars, and coffee mugs to promote the diversity theme. Employees collectively determined policies at work and could express disgruntlement with existing policies through the council. The HR manager moderated the discussion.

The council also helped design yearly employee opinion surveys. Diversity progress at plants within the organisation was highlighted, in an annual corporate diversity conference. The in-house and corporate newsletters encouraged employee involvement and helped to transmit the diversity message.

The organisation had a corporate philosophy governed by diversity policies. The standardisation of policies was in accordance with the desire to create a stronger organisational unity and identity among the employees. These policies created a "sense of linkage" and a feeling of unity by having a common cause.

A true commitment to diversity encompasses a variety of measures over a period of time. Creating a climate of acceptance requires major, systematic, and planned change efforts, which are typically not part of affirmative action plans. Efforts to address managing diversity must be supported by profound changes that are reflected in the day-to-day operation.

Managing Global Talent With Integrity

The enormous cultural diversity in today's global economy makes evaluating, assessing, recruiting and managing talent a challenge - perhaps the challenge - for transnational companies. There are several key steps companies and their talent leaders can take to meet that challenge and build a global workforce that delivers high performance with high integrity.

First, contemporary corporations must explicitly establish high performance with high integrity as the foundational goal of the enterprise, recognizing that it should indeed be the goal of global capitalism.

High performance means strong, sustained economic growth based on superior products and services that provides durable benefits to shareholders and other stakeholders.

High integrity means:

a) Tenaciously adhering to the spirit and the letter of formal rules, both financial and legal.

b) Adopting voluntary global standards that bind a company and its employees to act in its enlightened self-interest.

Living the core values of honesty, candor fairness, reliability and trustworthiness, which infuse the creation and delivery of products and services, and guide internal and external relationships.
Combining high performance with high integrity must counter strong pressures to cut corners to make the numbers. It isn't just about avoiding evils and the potentially catastrophic impact of an integrity miss. It is also about creating strong, affirmative benefits for the company, the marketplace and the broader society. Such trust is needed to sustain corporations' enormous power and freedom - even under current regulation - to allocate capital, to hire and fire people, to drive productivity, to invest in new geographies and communities, and to innovate with new products or services.

This is not a frill or a nice-to-have. It is not the initiative of the month. The fusion of high performance with high integrity should be the foundation of an organization. This is especially so for companies seeking beachheads in difficult markets.

During my time at General Electric, whenever I was asked what I lost sleep over, my answer was always the same: emerging mistakes. For understandable reasons, multinationals have embraced the potential of significant new growth in the developing world, touting it at analysts' meetings and in public speeches. At the same time, they are quietly aware of the significant integrity minefields that threaten to impair performance and destroy margins: limited rule of law, endemic corruption, rampant conflicts of interest, erratic enforcement, money laundering, unscrupulous local competitors and hard-to-assess economic and political risk. To meet their dramatic growth projections, transnational companies must navigate treacherous shoals.

Second, corporations must adopt a uniform, high performance with high integrity global culture. Culture is the shared principles and practices that influence how people think and behave. The right culture is not punitive but affirmative. Such a culture only can exist when it flows from top leadership - when aspirations are matched by actions. Integrity principles and practices should be driven deep into business operations, without compromises for tough markets.

An important dimension of such a culture is the adoption of global ethical standards. "Globalization through localization" is one of the mantras of transnational companies. Localization, of course, includes adherence to the financial or legal rules of the specific national jurisdiction. GE's code of conduct, for example, begins: "Obey the applicable laws and regulations governing our business conduct worldwide."

But that's not always enough. In some cases, the answer to questions such as, "Is it according to GAPP?" or "Is it legal?" may not be adequate because formal rules don't address the broad problems facing a company. A corporation may find the best answer is to go beyond required duties and voluntarily impose a higher global ethical standard on itself and its employees.
An organized, systematic process is needed to decide whether to adopt such global standards. Once adopted, these standards should have uniform application and implementation across business units, product markets and geographies as formal financial and legal rules. Examples include ethical sourcing and building Greenfield plants in emerging markets to world, not local, standards.

Another important dimension is hiring "A" players in key leadership positions throughout the company and recognizing that driving performance with integrity into business operations requires resources. In most corporations, there is a constant struggle to find the right people and allocate adequate resources. Unless both happen, the merger of integrity and business processes isn't possible.

Hiring experts inside the corporation is vital and cost-effective for risk assessment and abatement. Inside experts know the company far better than any outsider, and they can act quickly. For example, Jack Welch encouraged me to hire outstanding experts in taxes and environmental programs, who had developed world-class expertise both in government service and private practice. Beyond minimizing and mitigating integrity risks, they also proved extremely valuable to the CEO in transactions and financial planning and in offensive and defensive public policy.

Questions about paying for the integrity infrastructure need to be faced candidly and systematically. There's no way around it: Funds must be found and spent to establish the fundamentals. Unless the CEO makes this a clear performance metric for business leaders, these costs inevitably get shoved to the bottom of the list.

This is a forward commitment, as well: When the company engages in the next round of "10 percent across-the-board cost-cuts," the CEO and other business leaders must fight the temptation to wield the ax in this sensitive area, and instead scrutinize the actual impact of reductions.

Third, performance with integrity education and training must come alive. It must be given the same commitment as training in business skills such as finance, marketing, sales and IT, and employees must be given a voice to raise integrity concerns.

The largest challenge: finding the people, message, method and evaluations that collectively constitute a culturally sensitive, yet globally effective set of communications in each market. Face-to-face sessions with employees unschooled in the company's global culture are essential; Web or paper training are second-best.

For example, GE Healthcare developed a short training case about the now famous but fictitious Mr. Vu, who faced multiple tough scenarios, such as hiring third-party consultants, approving travel and living expenses, dealing with customers' demands for bribes and the use of the GE mark.

Such learning by example isn't easy. Talent leaders will need knowledgeable trainers to develop trust and get the most out of illuminating discussions. GE often found it hard, given the exponential growth in Asian employees, to deliver live, in-context training. Too often, we had to settle for an interactive Web-based approach. This challenge is mirrored in the difficulty of finding multilingual, multicultural leaders who can help the corporation act with local sensitivity and global discipline in emerging markets, while also anticipating contingencies, diversifying operations and finding top talent.

One of the most powerful principles in creating a high performance with high integrity culture, and for ensuring accountability up and down the corporation, is to give every employee a voice. This means encouraging, and indeed requiring, the reporting of concerns about possible violations of financial, legal and ethical standards.

One channel for such voice is a company "ombuds" system that encourages employees to express their concerns, addresses those concerns promptly with professionalism and respect, makes failure to report itself an integrity violation and, of course, sanctions those who engage in retaliation. A vibrant, fair, trusted ombuds system not only detects issues early, before they can metastasize into huge problems, it also deters improper acts inside the company right from the start.

Another channel for employee voice is through the finance, HR and legal functions. These key staff members must reconcile dual, conflicting roles. They must be partners to business leaders and help accomplish performance goals. But they also are corporation guardians and must report legal, financial, ethical and reputation concerns to corporate staff leaders if they have problems raising and addressing them in their business units.

Finally, corporations must develop compensation regimes that do not just pay for performance, but pay for performance with integrity. We can measure integrity by looking at whether leaders have adopted the core performance with integrity principles, are implementing the key practices to achieve them, have created the affirmative culture - through employee surveys and 360 degree assessments - compare favorably to peer companies and have achieved annual performance with integrity goals and objectives. Similarly, the management development process should be aimed, in part, at training future leaders in the principles and practices of high performance with high integrity, especially in international markets.

[About the Author: Ben W. Heineman Jr. is senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School and senior counsel to the law firm of WilmerHale. This article is adapted from his book, High Performance with High Integrity.]

Counselling at work place- The Resonance Way

The Resonance Way
“I no longer have the enthusiasm, energy or creativity I once had towards my work", says Indu Jain, Fashion Designer at L'haut, a garment manufacturer.

Like Indu, employees who once derived pleasure from their work, have begun to lose interest, energy and talent. Though such employees turn in mediocre performance, increased competition and globalisation demand excellence and continuous improvement.

“We direct our efforts to help employees renew and revive the way they once felt about their jobs ", says Ravi Menon, HR Manager, La Femme. This helps the company retain some of their best talent for competitive advantage. These efforts make an employee feel that the company values his past contributions, and wants him to have a fulfilling and positive attitude towards work.

Talk ' Resonance'.

'Resonance' or 'flow' refers to the state of mind where an individual employee is deeply involved with a task, overcomes obstacles effortlessly and finds the experience more satisfying than the result. For example, in a game of tennis, the player is more satisfied with the techniques he used to overcome his opponent's moves rather than actually winning.

Identify and Rediscover.

HR needs to identify if employees ever experienced ' resonance' during their careers. Ask employees about their experiences at work or with any other activity. Ask open-ended questions like how an employee felt when he received the award for the ' best performer of the year.'

Identify and Recreate.

To prevent boredom and monotony at work, employees are eager to pursue hobbies and interests. At times, this can be given more priority and thus effect an individual's concentration at work.

Revisit a dream.

Dreams and personal aspirations play significantly influence an individual's performance at work. People tend to work better to fulfil personal aspirations rather than duty or obligation. However, obstacles like ill health or circumstances often prevent the realisation of a dream.

People who were successful and were excellent performers may never have had a dream to work towards. Despite success and fame, such employees never have anything more to look forward to. They do not put in the time, energy and talent that they once used to. Resonance makes them reflect on work and how they can make it more meaningful.

Reference: TheManageMentor

The Current State of HR

Year-end 2008 is quickly approaching and all across the globe the news is dominated by negative stories about the dismal economy. We have all experienced irrational thinking and are guilty of doing it from time to time, but as we prepare to move into the New Year there is no greater threat facing global companies than irrational thinking in the HR function. Looking back, one thing was glaringly obvious more companies than ever before realized just how ill-prepared they are for the emerging labor climate. All throughout 2008 stories emerged from iconic organizations detailing just how out of touch they had become.

Moving Forward, No Reprieve
Despite night after night of negative economic news around the world, the vast majority of global companies (70% according to the most recent Gallup research) were actively trying to maintain or grow their workforce in December. Despite burgeoning unemployment, demand for top talent in skilled and professional roles is as tough as ever. Global growth combined with profound labor force demographic changes impacting more than 85% of the developed world are keeping competition for top talent fierce. While recruiters understand the challenge of recruiting today, and senior leaders understand the demand for continued investment, the vast majority of HR leaders appear to be doing business as usual.

Are You Prepared?
The near future requires robust and prescriptive action that cannot be influenced by irrational thinking. Do your measures reflect reality, or rather the perception you want others to have regarding your efforts? Are you comfortable standing up and saying the ship is already taking on water and a change in course is needed? These are the kind of questions VPs need to be asking right now. For every major strategic initiative, as well as all core deliverables, you should have objective evaluation processes in place that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your efforts are effective.

Three Most Important Things

While every organization has different strategic priorities and will undoubtedly work to achieve them in differing ways, there are three things that every world-class HR organization should be doing, including:
1. Prioritizing mission critical and key jobs. For far too long HR professionals have equated the terms equitable and equal. All jobs do not impact the organization the same when performed well, below average, or left vacant. While politically difficult, organizations must find a practical and accepted way to define mission critical and key jobs, and then to prioritize HR deliverables towards those roles and the talent that occupy them. Once identified, its a lot easier to deliver world-class service and demonstrate a profound impact on the business.
2. Macro level workforce planning. Too many organizations that have tried to implement workforce planning programs have gotten bogged down in the complexities that arise when the focus is too granular, i.e. every role, every employee. Granular workforce planning produces too much data and makes it easy to get lost in the statistics. Workforce planning programs should be actionable in nature, they should help answer several high level questions that establish whether or not the workforce in moving in the right direction to support the future needs of the organization and at the right pace.
3. Leveraging robust analytics and process yield modeling approaches to prove impact. With mission critical and key roles identified and macro level workforce planning initiatives in place, the next practice firms must focus on is yield modeling transformative processes such as development efforts and staffing programs. HR professionals should be able to respond with precise plans that include cost, timeline, and resources needed.

Final Thoughts
A perfect storm of environmental factors is lining up to make the next ten years very difficult with regards to recruiting and retention of top talent.

Ref: HR Funda

Managing Recruiting During an Economic Downturn

A key question in every recruiting manager's mind these days is "how will recruiting and talent management be impacted by the economic downturn?"

Periodic economic downturns quite often negatively impact the recruiting function through hiring freezes and dramatic budget cuts in recruiting as organizations seek to "contain costs." However, this economic downturn is different. Traditionally, when the economic cycle peaks and starts its cycle downwards, everything related to business and recruiting declines; events are consistent and relatively predictable.

Instead of recruiting heading straight down, it will be volatile. The demand for talent management services will go radically down, then back up again in short spurts, and then down again. This volatility will require more planning than ever before from the recruiting function. Instead of planning for one consistent, long, downward spiral with associated layoffs and hiring freezes, organizations will need to prepare for spurts of growth and continuous hiring in some areas while layoffs occur in others. Some might call these actions "right-sizing" the workforce, but that would imply that organizations are much better at forecasting and workforce planning than most actually are.

There are several reasons why hiring will continue:
The volatility in credit markets
Globalization
The need by organizations to continually innovate


The first and perhaps most important cause of volatility will be the chaotic availability of credit and capital. The continued uncertainty related to financial markets will cause oscillations or "spurts" during which capital will be easier and then harder to get. This volatility will cause firms to grow and to hire in spurts.

A second cause of volatility is globalization. In a truly global business world, there will almost always be some degree of economic growth in emerging economies scattered around the world. Because many major US companies now book a majority of their revenues abroad, pressure to keep corporate functions fully staffed will continue despite possible layoffs in production and client service groups.

A third reason volatility will plague the recruiting function is relentless consumer demand for new innovative products. Despite the downturn, consumer demand remains high. When negative news erupts, those in Western societies go shopping!

Because the rate of innovation among competitive firms is unlikely to slowdown, firms will still need to rapidly innovate in their products and business processes. The demand for relentless innovation will continuously alter the skills needed by a firm at any particular point in time. Firms will need to learn how to continuously hire workers with new skills, while simultaneously releasing workers with obsolete skills with surgical precision. Truly strategic firms see economic downturns as an opportunity, in part because it's now faster and cheaper to "buy" talent rather than to "develop" existing talent.

*Ref: Dr. John Sullivan

Global Leadership Challenges

Accelerating growth and globalization are forcing organizations to identify and nurture leaders who can operate effectively across the organization and, in many cases, across borders. Aging workforces in many countries increase the pressure, as a generation of senior leaders prepares to retire.

For some organizations, the key challenge is immediate: aligning current leadership with the business strategy. Other organizations struggle more with “bench strength” issues – finding and developing the leaders of the future. Many organizations face both of these leadership challenges, and almost all struggle with ensuring smooth leadership transitions.

The demands for growth and change have put HR leaders into a key role in ensuring their companies have right global leadership talent, in the right place at the right time. HR executives bear increasing responsibility for helping their organizations find and develop leaders who can move their companies forward – and then for helping those leaders to succeed. This responsibility is complicated by the fact that it’s often difficult to get a clear view into the future state of the business. Among the outstanding questions for HR executives:

How fast must they be prepared for change throughout the organization and change at the top?
What leadership skills are required for the future? How do they ensure that they hire, develop and retain the people with the right skills – intellectually, technologically and emotionally?
Should leaders be the same worldwide or should they have distinct talents and characteristics based on their location? Is there one leadership brand for a company or many?
How can they prepare the next generation of leaders, fast enough and well enough, to meet the company’s strategic goals?
How will they find the leaders who can work effectively in an ever more globalized environment?

Recruitment- Challenges faced

Recruitment is a function which requires business perspective, expertise, ability to find and align the best potential candidate for the organization, marketing & selling skills and intelligence to align the recruitment process for the benefit of the organization. The HR professionals associated with the recruitment function are constantly facing new challenges. The biggest challenge for HR professionals is to attract and recruit the best potential candidate for their organization.
Some of the major challenges faced by the HR professionals are;

Adaptability to globalization: The HR professionals are expected to keep in themselves in tune with the changing times, i.e. the global trends. HR should maintain the timeliness of the process

Lack of motivation: Recruitment is considered to be a thankless process. Even if the organization is faring well, the HR department or professionals are never given the credit for hiring the right professionals.

Process Analysis: The immediacy and speed of the recruitment process are the main concerns of the HR in recruitment. The process should be flexible, adaptive and responsive to the immediate requirements. The recruitment process should also be cost effective.

Strategic prioritization: The emerging new systems are both an opportunity as well as a challenge for the HR professionals. Therefore, reviewing staffing needs and prioritizing the tasks to meet the changes in the market has become a challenge for the recruitment professionals.