The skills of a global HR to accelerate business strategy

What I learned about global HR practices;

Along my professional career, I had the opportunity to work advising leaders of companies that have the most valuable brands in the world. Therefore, I decided to share what you need to know if you want to become a global HR representative.

Several regions of the world have a surprisingly strong correlation when it comes to the challenges faced by the HR team and business performance.

I will explain how it happens around the world.

With relation to specific HR collaborations to Europe, the United States, Canada and Africa, alignment strategies often come first. For the Middle East, what matters is the external focus of the stakeholders, while for India the impact of HR actions is greater. For Latin America, cultural models have a greater impact, while in Australia, clear roles are more important.

There is no right or wrong strategy, there is a business need. These differences reflect what cultures are like and what is the focus of HR in each of these locations, but it is clear that there are skills needed around the world.

The answers to these questions can bring intellectual property and help to measure the HR strategy.

1. How can I compare myself with other HRs in my region and in the world?

2. What is the best way to turn evaluations into a business development plan?

3. What are the contextual and stakeholder changes that are driving the business world globally?

I learned that no matter how you name your company's talents (workforce, people, human capital, performance or competence), what matters is that people are still at the center and will continue to be in any type or size of business.

Talent results in productivity that shows the added value between customer and product. Several trends are already talking about increasing productivity through human talent.

"The future will be global, demographically diverse, technologically connected and economically adaptable". (David Urich)

Truly global companies have gone through a four-step process: national to international and multinational to global. National companies create products and services exclusively for the country's markets. When companies go international, they export their products to other countries, developing a global supply chain, manufacturing and opening sales offices or distributors in other countries.

Companies became multinationals when they adapted their products to different markets and built a presence in each local market. Multinationals seek efficiency as they tailor services to the local condition and, finally, target companies share knowledge, talent, capital, customers and best practices around the world. In the future, companies will continue to move along this line. Small and medium-sized companies, often in Africa and Latin America, will evolve from national to international markets as family businesses continue to grow. Future global orientation requires a mindset that involves more than any specific HR management or practice.

What are our main challenges as a global HR?

1. Facilitate a Diversified Demographics

Employee demographics have traditionally focused on race, gender and lifestyle for a long time. With globalization trends, the composition of the workforce will change dramatically. HR professionals need to be more sensitive to global demographics. They need to respect people with different backgrounds, but they also need to be unique in finding talent for a globally shared organization.

2. Technologically Connected Business and Talents

HR professionals need to use technology not only for more efficient delivery of transactional work, but also for better access to information about relationships and networks. In the future, the important field of people analytics should start by specifying the competitive decisions that need to be made in the field of people management and then find alternatives to improve them.

3. Activating people's strategies in an economically adaptable scenario

The rates of change differ in different parts of the world. Europe, Australia, North America and other more mature markets anticipate slower economic growth. HR professionals who anticipate budgets and regulatory know-how will help your organization build a capacity for change that surpasses competitors.

4. Organizational capacity

What the organization knows, what it is good at, and how standards activities provide value. The capacity approach for organizations builds other approaches. In the future, we hope to see organizations pursuing a range of critical capabilities - flexibility, collaboration, cognitive diversity, social responsibility and integrity (corruption is still a problem in many parts of the world)

5. Leadership

Leaders have a dual responsibility to provide talent and build organizational skills. In this round of study, I discovered that the ability to create leaders and establish leadership across the organization is a critical competence and role for HR professionals.

Leaders cannot govern by watching or telling others what to do, they have to activate common goals through engagement, sharing and creating a growth mindset.

When HR professionals realize the importance of leadership across an organization, they guarantee sustainability over time.

Global HR competencies go beyond HR practices, they are a strategic positioning to make change management flow and activate company performance. And most importantly, affecting business performance is not so simple, it depends on where you are in the world and the different forms of approach.

How to do this?

1. Focus on the external stakeholder - understand your customer and your local, regional and global market.
2. Align your HR strategy with the business need - Start by understanding the business plan and anything you can't answer, stop doing it now!
3. Ensure strategic priorities - Understand that you cannot do everything at once if you just react to the circumstances of the business and reconsider the possibility that there will be no priorities.

Finally, make sure that you and your team understand the key needs of the business, the necessary talent capabilities, goals, customer expectations, local and regional economy, investor goals, regulations and communities.

Encourage and help leaders to sustain behavior and adapt to market changes.

These global competencies do not change on any continent or place in the world. What changes is how to manage the globalization trend.

Do you want to know more about my work with HR, Executive Coach & Career? Talk to me on inbox!