Soon after the recession, decisions were mostly shaped to counteract the repercussions of the economic downturn. In order to stay ahead of the game, companies have now taken a new approach and decided to embrace change to transform it into a true business advantage.
With markets stagnating and the economy still recovering in the US and Europe, some of the emerging economies have taken centre stage. However, substantial differences in the business environment have to be taken into account in order to be a successful global enterprise.
Some of the significant challenges arising from the shift to the emerging markets include the need to have a deep appreciation of cultural differences and integrating local and global talent, especially with a view to sourcing talent with the right skills, and cost at the right time.
There is also the fact of a shortage of skilled talent with studies showing gaps of approximately 60% in the Asian-Pacific region compared to 45% in the US and 30% in EMEA. In such a competitive environment, talented employees begin to recognise their own value and retention management gains importance.
Tackling these challenges can only be successful when companies tailor their people practices that acknowledge specific regional variances:
Building future leadership - What has worked well in the past will not be as efficient in times of uncertainty. A pool of leaders with diverse backgrounds and different professional levels is pivotal to provide the capability to resolve complex situations.
Integrating culture into the board priorities - Fuelled by the highly competitive employment market, the role and impact of talent on business performance and risk has superseded more traditional factors for corporate success. The ability to attract, develop and retain talent therefore has become a key factor in all capital investment decisions. This has led to a deeper involvement of the HR director in strategy, execution and in ensuring compliance.
Valuing Diversity - With the world becoming more and more connected, the workforce too becomes more culturally and ethnically diverse. As a result, investments need to be directed to enhance inclusion and understanding the organizational culture within the specific context and needs of each segment of such a global workforce. To attract and retain people, a policy, process, program or practice needs to be shaped so it works in the US and modified, as needed, so it works as well as in the Middle East.
Transforming HR - HR functions have transformed moving from a focus on service delivery and compliance to enabling the business strategy. To drive efficiency and effectiveness, the goal is to create a consistent HR delivery framework that can be tailored to the demands of local markets and business units. The emergence of social media, mobility, analytics and cloud are leading to a rise in HR systems enabling employees to converge on these platforms and leadership to enhance the quality of decisions by applying analytics on large quantum of data available.
These integrated tools lead to a paradigm shift from excel-sheet based data to real-time analytics that enables deployment of talent across geographies by creating a global talent database. Global staffing and mobility programmes now also include models that allow scalability and flexibility by drawing upon 'free agent' and contingency workers, as required.
Prithvi Shergill is chief HR officer at HCL Technologies
