In an age in which it might have never been more customary for an organisation’s personnel to routinely work across international borders, it can also barely be emphasised enough, just how crucial it is for organisations to invest time and effort into their global workforce planning.
Taking the best-judged steps with your company’s international workforce planning will go a long way to ensuring you consistently have the right personnel in the right places to achieve your business goals.
Effective international workforce planning will help ensure your business isn’t either understaffed or overstaffed at any given time. All the while, it will support your efforts to maximise employee morale, recruitment, and retention, and it will help give your organisation a competitive advantage in a corporate world that is exactly that – a world.
But are you making the best possible decisions with the planning of your own workforce that might be active across multiple territories?
Below are some of the steps your organisation is best advised to take in order to get the most out of its talent based in various countries, cultures, and time zones.
Embracing and developing a strong understanding of cultural diversity
In today’s world in which it might occasionally seem that “we’re all the same”, organisations can still sometimes fail to acknowledge the sheer extent of cultural diversity across different parts of the globe.
So, the differences and nuances – including in relation to cultural and societal values, customs, work practices, and languages – should be accounted for in any business strategy.
The more inclusive and collaborative an environment your company can cultivate for workers of yours across different ethnic and religious groups, the better-placed you will be to extract the best of their talents.
You might seek to bridge gaps between workers of different cultures by, for example, running cultural training programs, as well as simply encouraging cross-cultural awareness across every aspect of your operations.
Making sure you are in compliance with local laws and regulations
This can be an extremely challenging priority to fulfil, particularly if you are increasingly looking to take on staff from multiple areas of the world where you may have little familiarity with the local legal and regulatory picture.
Let’s face it – the rules to which you will need to adhere in different countries can be fiendishly complex, even before you account for such factors as language barriers and different currencies.
Unfortunately, falling out of line with the most recently implemented rules in the jurisdictions where some of your team members are based could lead to punishing penalties, fines, lawsuits, and reputational damage.
So, it is important that your company’s international workforce planning approach includes solutions for dealing with the aforementioned risks.
One sensible course of action could be to join forces with a reputable Employer of Record (EOR) such as Aspirock, which – as the legal employer of your staff based overseas – would assume responsibility for compliance with employment regulations in relation to these team members.
This would take much of the risk associated with international workforce planning off your own organisation’s hands.
Giving your workers the flexibility they require to thrive
There are, of course, the inevitable differences in time zones helping to make clear why a degree of flexibility will be required in the policies your organisation sets for workers based in a different territory or jurisdiction.
But even beyond this, workers do differ markedly in their work-life balance preferences, as well as certain day-to-day practical needs. The aforementioned cultural differences are likely to factor into this, too.
If your company’s policies on flexible hours, remote work options, and time off isn’t aligned with the practices and customs in the parts of the world where you are looking to hire staff, you will suffer with regard to recruitment, retention, and all-round workforce management.
Getting your policies in this area right, however, could deliver your company major benefits when it comes to employee satisfaction, productivity, and loyalty to your organisation.
Well-optimised international workforce planning is only set to become more – rather than less – critical to the durability and success of organisations like yours over the years ahead. For a detailed discussion of how selecting Aspirock as your brand’s EOR could assist in making your organisation’s strategies in this regard “fit for the future”, please contact us.