The world has changed significantly in the last few decades. When I was a kid, all of my extended family were in Canada, 5 time zones away. To catch up on news, we would write monthly letters, or twice a year my grandparents actually recorded messages on reel-to reel audio cassette tapes for us to listen to, that took about two weeks to arrive by mail. The idea of companies working in real-time across far greater time zones than that was unimaginable. However, in the last decade, this has become the norm, and at Top Employers, we are seeing this grow each year.
We see it through our research, and we see it when we visit current and prospective participants around the world. Global plans and practices, localised enough to be relevant in each location. With the enormous lunges forward in technology, companies are now able to work in ways that were simply not possible in the past. And it's not just the core business that gets successfully conducted on an intercontinental bases, it's the employee experience too. Organisations know that they need to invest in their people, but that merely investing in benefits, working conditions and other employee perks isn't enough. They need to make sure that the employee experience is consistent, and that the values live and breathe throughout the global business. We see Top Employers implementing multiple ways to communicate with their employees. From a simple facebook group, to messaging systems, e-bulletins, forums for discussion, internet focus groups, e-lounges, employee chat-rooms and imaginative use of videos. We've been to meetings where senior management members have joined us from different countries, the meeting itself scheduled at an optimal time for both parties to be present comfortably. We see companies using shifts to make sure there is an overlap; a daily hand-over. We see telecommuting that has been implemented and facilitated with the sole aim of having the right people in the right roles able to communicate with international colleagues, but without having to be on a weird swing shift away from their homes too late.
With companies going global like this, there are, of course, multiple cultures working together, and we have seen companies helping their people to understand each other and work together well. This might be on a one-to-one basis, using an established methods of personality and attribute assessment, or it might be through company-wide programmes that help to educate groups on the values and beliefs of co-workers in other countries. Increasingly we see companies filling vacancies with multi-lingual team members who are able to converse with different arms of the business around the world.
There are many ways to successfully manage a global business, and I for one get excited when I see creative approaches to new problems. Whereas organisations having offices in different parts of the world isn't a new thing, the way that we do business between those offices is new, mostly down to the amazing technology that we have at our disposal these days. Technology where the once unbelievable, has become normal. It makes me smile to think of trying to conduct business by mailing a reel to reel tape through the post, hoping that it will arrive within two weeks. But then again, when I was a kid, we also pretended that we were able to talk to each other through little TV screens strapped to our wrists, something utterly unimaginable back then. Yet now we all have one of those in our pockets…….
How does your company deal with the intercontinental divide? We love hearing what you're doing.
