HHRR-Culture and the HR function-Culture cannot be ignored

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Culture and the HR function


Culture cannot be ignored



What does culture have to do with Human Resources (HR)? Surely the HR function is about contracts and recruitment, pay and conditions, jobs and promotion, training and development? All correct. However if your organisation markets and sells its products overseas, has customers or suppliers in other countries, employs nationals in or from other countries, or moves (expatriates) its employees across the world, then culture is an issue. This fact has been enhanced by globalization where the processes of business (design, manufacture, marketing, retailing, etc.) can be widely dispersed in a physical sense, and completely dispersed in a virtual sense. In the EU, as well as the free trade of goods and services, labour can flow seamlessly across most of its constituent countries, so your UK team could comprise many nationalities. This, together with the need to expatriate staff, means that culture cannot be ignored.

Enhancing awareness, skills and attitudes


Those doing business overseas or managing culturally diverse teams at home are more effective if they are aware of the key variations that occur across cultures, and of some of the distinctive features of particular cultures. For examples, whilst in the UK work is primarily about getting the task done, in Kenya there is a greater focus on forming relationships first. In the US individual drive and innovation are highly valued, whereas in Indonesia the approach is more collective. Attitudes of openness, curiosity and giving others the benefit of the doubt can really help overcome misunderstandings and misconceptions, create relationships where people appreciate each other’s differences, and build teams that utilise such diversity for business advantage. Skills to communicate and negotiate, manage and motivate across cultures help ensure business is gained rather than lost, and employee relations kept positive and productive. The HR function has a key role to play in ensuring employees are equipped with the knowledge and skills to work across cultures and to manage diverse teams, and in fostering open and inclusive attitudes towards cultural diversity.

Mobilising people

Facilitating the movement of employees to work outside their own countries (expatriation) is another area where the HR function can have huge impact. It can mean the difference between the success or failure of an assignment which, quite apart from the personal upheavals involved, also represents a large financial investment by the organisation. Such assignments are required to deliver skills where they are needed, and can be a powerful means of transferring skills to staff locally, as well as accelerating the expatriate’s personal development. To be successful they require HR support at the home location through: careful selection and preparation of the expatriate; contract, remuneration, social security and tax support; removals and travel, career development and repatriation; and at the host location through: local pay, allowances and partner assistance, housing and education, language and cultural awareness.
Together with such administrative and technical support, the HR function also supports expatriates and their families as they live and work in an unfamiliar setting, and thus embodies the organisation’s duty of care when people are at their most vulnerable.

Culture matters

To manage a business successfully across different countries, and to ensure the effective working together of employees of differing nationalities, necessitate that cultural diversity is taken seriously, not least in the HR function, which is charged with supporting the recruitment, retention, expatriation and development of the organisation’s people to work in an increasingly inter-cultural world. So, to the HR function, culture matters.


By Peter Curran, Senior consultant, Farnham Castle Intercultural Training



Source: www.farnhamcastle.com