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In a useful BusinessWeek report called Managing the Global Workforce we learn that winning the war for talent is a challenge that few corporations are well-equipped to handle.
I wouldn’t call this news, but it’s certainly a macro-trend: as corporations morph from multinationals into transnationals that establish talent centers around the globe, talent management becomes a more strategic skill set for aspiring executives. Some b-schools are starting to teach these skills, but mostly it’s on-the-job training.
The key takeaway for job seekers is that you want to work for a company that doesn’t try to replicate its culture around the globe but instead embraces diversity as strength and not a weakness.
IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, rapidly reinventing Big Blue’s corporate culture to become transnational, talks about global workforce management:
“The big issues for us are: Where do you put them? How do you retain them? How do you develop them? How do you move work to them or them to work?”
According to the article IBM is employing an internal social network called Beehive to help build ties between workers in different countries.
Other companies profiled in the article are applying innovative collaborative solutions, such as EMC, the storage giant, which established internal wikis to promote cross-border collaboration and product development.
The articles also talk about retention strategies such as:
- Putting more workers on a management fast track that includes on-the-job training
- Moving workers between countries to train them to work cross-culturally, exchange best practices and build global connections.
The editors say that the report is timed to relate to Davos, a global conference on economics for world-class schmoozer’s. True, I might feel differently about the World Economic Forum if I were there rubbing elbows with Bono or Richard Branson. Let me know if your company needs to send a cultural ambassador to Davos. I have a bag packed and a Powerpoint presentation ready to go.
These days, CEOs run their companies like chess-players. Their employees are the pieces and pawns that the CEO is quite prepared to sacrifice for a higher objective.
The problem is that most of these press articles are written from the viewpoint of the chess-player, whereas the vast majority of us work as pawns. Through no fault of their own, the employees’ job can be sacrificed because, for example, labour costs are cheaper in another country halfway round the world.
If you’re going to work for a company like that, do so for a couple of years, but don’t develop any loyalty or dependency on the company.
There are plenty of other types of employer — small ones, innovative ones, public sector organisations etc — which offer either short-term excitement and remuneration or long-term stability. Transnationals can end up offering neither, and the CEOs will eventually learn to their cost that they are not getting the best out of their employees.