The role of HR in international companies





When comes global expansion, an HR’s role is no longer locally focused. When an organisation has multiple offices across borders often with different cultures, how do HR leaders secure a collective identity?

What are the challenges of global expansion?

From distance to culture, these challenges will come up when growing globally and will be on an HR leader’s table. However, having a single source of truth for all employee data across borders will remain the HR’s priority.

When it comes to international companies, it is complex to compare performance across borders or map talent skills when you have HR data in different systems.

Therefore, it becomes difficult to determine the skills gaps and the needed help to develop employee competencies.

 

How to solve these HR challenges?

There is not one magic solution for all companies, however there are certain elements to keep in mind:

  • Welcome local differences while building common understanding across borders.
  • Ensure the collaboration of all people when making change in order to have everyone’s buy-in.
  • Build a common framework for HR processes to work across borders with the possibility of adjusting locally.

5 key elements when buying an HR system for global operations:

  1. Planning growth: check if the system can adapt to your company’s expansion across borders.
  2. Reporting tools: ensure the system enables the creation of global employee data reports which you can easily share.
  3. Flexibility: determine if the system can adjust to the organisation’s global processes with free data flow across borders.
  4. Local details: verify if the system is able to support all the languages, currencies and legislations needed.
  5. International implementations: require from the system provider to showcase experience with global implementations for best results.

Do you have employees in different countries?

Sympa can help you easily streamline all your international HR processes and seamlessly connect to all partner systems, providing you with a smoother global HR ride!