Easy to try than hesitate.

Comfort zone. What does it mean for us?

What is our comfort zone? Everybody needs to make a good impression from time to time. First date, first business meeting. We are worried about our good-looking, we think that we have only one chance to make the right impression and would like to make all efforts to be successful. What do we usually do? We go to our favorite barber; we buy clothes in our favorite shop, somebody takes talisman or keeps his fingers crossed. Hence, we do everything to keep our comfort zone and don’t want to care about unimportant things, we trust to proven assistance and prefer to focus on essential.

One cannot deny that employees’ attitudes to upcoming changes can be different. Many managers welcome the changes as a positive effect on business in general and their job, in particular. The positive attention is growing if they get commitments to receive more benefits, for example, they could be selected for the pilot project and try some new system or approach. Form the other side, many employees still hesitate in success and don’t want to step out of their comfort zone, keeping the status quo. As a rule, such people have had negative previous experience of promised but never received benefits (Sonenshein, 2009).

Analyzing salary surveys (PayScale, 2013), we can see the evidence of sustainability in companies with employees average age more than 35 years and high turnover in companies where millennials are most of the staff.

Change! Is it the benefit or frustration?

It is obtained, those young people are ready to encourage changes and try new technologies but frequently have no appropriate experience, vice versa, elder and more experienced employees are not prepared to try, they worry about their future and the possible consequences.

Despite the demonstration of a clear desire for changes young people, the average median age of employees is 29 years, have an incredibly low employee tenure (1,1 years), (PayScale, 2013). Furthermore, it is curious that the most significant problems with turnover face many IT companies, well-known for their fantastic employer brand and a great culture, high-performance HR practices. IT market is a high-competitive where the war for talents requires using the most innovative approaches to satisfy growing needs and expectations.

The other challenge is the organization desire to be more geocentric. The effectiveness of employee's performance management focuses not only on internal organization needs and capacity but geographical, economic, and social factors as well. In some cases, the activities emphasize national strategies and global trends and respond to different needs of the emerging markets (Gratton, 2011).

The issues of cross-cultural and cross-countries specifics refer to managers and their ability to monitor local rules and regulations, speed on responding to the requests, tasks' execution, hiring the engage professional management. Not all of them are ready to face reputation risks and prefer to work with the trusted and local teams.

Hence, the more the company seeks the ways for development in new markets, the more complicated the balance between employees' and stakeholders' expectations. As a rule, they are not able to fit each other and prevent new product development or service delivery within a reasonable timeframe and with good quality.

Welcome to cultural differences.

Knight (2015) argues that people facing different cultures need to take into consideration various cultures and national specifics. Work with staffing people requires learning of transcultural specific, market potential, ability to apply innovative technologies and infrastructure (Sparrow, 2007).

Here, the critical role is synergy, which helps to create a culture where individual members can contribute their best talents. If the organization has diversity teams, it needs navigation through the threads in communications. The ability to understand different business cultures and build a strong network within and outside the organization helps in intercultural management. 

Work in the multinational environment enhances a commitment to keep promises and fulfill the obligations. However, some people try to use cultural aspects as an excuse to avoid their responsibilities and pose miscommunication and the following difficulties.

Melissa Hahn, who helps people navigate through cultural differences in relocation, education, and family, believes that you can be successful if you are respectful to your colleagues and their culture (Hahn and Molinsky, 2016). If you spend some time on the research on the country-specific and look for the appropriate place or style, where you can overlap with your colleague's style, you will be able to focus on the approach that matches the most.

Despite many shreds of evidence of advantages after applying the flexible and geocentric approach, many leaders still work with local employees using a standard and well-known type of cooperation. It gives them more confidence in a good result, but bounds down the opportunity to see new perspectives and probably peak performance.

So, what's easier? To hesitate and take your time or try to go straight ahead. For the vast majority of people, staying within their comfort zone means – sustainability and good psychological contact and, hence, well-being. However, is your comfort zone cause of stagnation? Maybe it's time to go outside the boundaries and use all your potential. Easy to try than hesitate.

Based on the Gallup report (Hickman & Fredstrom, 2018), more than 43% of employees are working remotely, and half of them confess that this type of cooperation gives them a chance to have more significant work and life balance and it's essential to them. That could be a good impulse for managers to go out of the comfort zone and build trusted relations with virtual off-shore and near-shore teams.

How to go out of the comfort zone.

1.     Start to be transforming self.

The objectives of HR transformation could be expressed in the following attributes: (Timms, 2016).

Understand yourself – show high self-worth;

Understand others – be the Relationship Exemplar;

Understand needs – what others want from work;

Understand innovations – enhance changes as an acknowledgment of the evaluative vitality of the company and human resources;

Understand Systems – orient in a world of solutions and technology, use design and sense.

2.     Build up trusted relations.

Right communication and clear feedback could help build trusted and positive collaboration. If most employees don’t understand the reason, don’t see input, don’t see any changes, they lose confidence in the organization, and enhance turnover. The psychological contract is an excellent management tool; however, if somebody breaks promises, it enhances a negative effect on reputation than a lack of pledges and arrangements.

3.     Create a community of practice.

Many organizations try to use community of practice and social programs as underlying principles behind the Leadership journey. Based on AkzoNobel's (2016) example we can see the strength of the community for business capability and social life. The company created a clear link between employees’ daily activities and strategy. For achieving this goal, they developed a new functional capability framework, which helps to measure and improve capability. The company promotes diversity that means doing everything for and with society all other the globe. They have a global community program, calling Human Cities initiative, combining company expertise with their passion for working closely with the local communities. This program enables deeper conversations/relationships among employees in all locations and their engagement via society problems. The community of practice could be a “place” for new ideas, exchange knowledge, and engaged network.

4.     Encourage Talent development and engagement.

The big part of the leader’s job in talent development is an understanding of the employee's “life values.” Based on this information manager can plan the objectives for the employees. If somebody, for instance, has a family and doesn’t want radically to change something, we offer sustainable work (usually, support). For employees, who would like to go ahead and invest his/her time to the company, one can offer special benefits like participation in the international project or relocation to other countries.

In a recent survey, we asked our colleagues to share with us their ideas concerning the distinction in employee engagement and experience. In their answers, they emphasized the role of a mentor, who helps to achieve recognition from employees and promote “freedom to act and offer”.

“The most significant advantage is the chance to work remotely which is appreciated in the employee engagement, but except for the remote work you get also a chance to communicate with people with different backgrounds and from different countries”.

“I believe that real engagement is: - Being involved in many processes of different departments and keeping up to date with all the changes. Working with international colleagues to provide top quality service for international clients.”

And finally, the most important - try to be honest. The ability to tell the truth and be aware of mistakes enhances employees' trust and acts as an indicator of individual and corporate success.

References:

AkzoNobel Report (2016), Annual report, Available: https://84e1202b204d21a1cb9b-0e1ab5244fd095dbeb138ed6f973369e.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/akzonobel_report_2016_07.pdf Last accessed 02/27/2018.

Gratton L. (2011). Workplace 2025 - What will it look like. Deepdyve. 40 (4), 246-254. Available at: https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/workplace-2025-what-will-it-look-like-9aOUHDXo8K 

Hahn, M., and Molinsky. A. (2016). Having a Difficult Conversation with Someone from a Different Culture. Available: https://hbr.org/2016/03/having-a-difficult-conversation-with-someone-from-a-different-culture  Last accessed 02/27/2018

Hickman, A. & Fredstrom, T. (2018). How to Build Trust With Remote Employees. Available: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/226553/build-trust-remote-employees.aspx Last accessed 02/27/2018.

Knight, R. (2015). How to Run a Meeting of People from Different Cultures. Available: https://hbr.org/2015/12/how-to-run-a-meeting-of-people-from-different-cultures Last accessed 02/27/2018.

PayScale survey. (2013). Full List of Most and Least Loyal Employees. Available: https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full-list Last accessed 02/27/2018

Sparrow, P. (2007). Globalization of HR at a functional level: four case studies of the international recruitment, selection, and assessment process. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 18(5) pp.144-166.

Sonenshein, S. (2009). Emergence of Ethical Issues During Strategic Change Implementation. Organization Science. 20 (1), pp. 223–239. Available at: https://econ.au.dk/fileadmin/Economics_Business/Currently/Events/PhDFinance/Kauttu_Emergence_of_Ethical_Issues_During_Strategic_Change_Implementation.pdf

Timms, P., (2017) An HR Metamorphosis for a Changing World of Work, Presented at: HR summit 2017, Amsterdam.