IES partners with London School of Economics to debate International HRM
Duncan Brown 
IES recently organised what it hopes will become an annual discussion and debate in partnership with the London School of Economics, designed to bring together leading-edge thinking and practice on a strategic and topical people management issue, debated in front of an invited senior audience. The theme was ‘International HRM: Culture versus Consistency’, and chaired by Assistant Professor Paul Gollan. The panel consisted of Professor David Marsden from LSE; Massimo Macarti, the European HR Head for Canon; Paul Milliken the VP of HR for Shell covering the UK, Ireland and the Nordics; Tony Hatton-Gore, the Group Reward Director for Arup; and our own HR research and consultancy director Peter Reilly.
While Peter described how his current research in this field has found evidence for a common direction of travel, driven by technology and cost savings, towards greater consistency and standardisation of global HR processes, the notion of any form of supposed ‘best practice’ was rapidly shattered by the panel. Shell, as Milliken described, have moved heavily towards these single global processes, for example in performance management and leadership development. But Canon still very much reflected the decentralised Japanese parented multi-national ethos within European countries. The push for greater standardisation and greater co-ordination is occurring now within the region largely because of their European clients and consumers operating more on a transnational basis.
The number of mavericks and innovators at Arup, as Tony Hatton-Gore described, have worked against standardisation, although HR has developed some common global processes and successfully manage the movement of staff across borders to work on major projects.
David Marsden meanwhile pointed to the inaccuracy of popular cultural stereotypes, with his research for example finding a higher incidence of performance-related pay systems in supposedly corporatist and structured France than the free-market UK.
But an appropriate balance of HR practice to fit the business strategy and secure the benefits of centralisation (such as cost), and decentralisation (such as diversity and innovation), emerged as a key area for HR professionals to diagnose and deliver, with both Canon and Arup deciding that their regions were an appropriate level in their organisation to provide HR policy leadership and to act as the focus point for the integration of national practices.
National and corporate values were a regularly-emerging theme in the subsequent debate, with the often-emphasised feature of national cultures acting as a barrier to global practice receiving perhaps less emphasis from these panel members. This was either because (as in China) supposed national values are in reality so diverse, or because employees (as at Shell) can retain their national values and beliefs yet still behave at work in line with Shell’s global principles. Milliken pointed out how the increasingly global financial system has been pulling countries towards international norms of governance and management in order to access finance.
The importance of internal and external networks also received a strong emphasis during the discussion, whether in the form of global teams to develop new HR practices and integration methods as in Arup, or as a means of learning and transferring practices between different employers and geographies.
Would the international HR models we were discussing prove to be outdated by the rise of the BRIC economies and corporations? This was the challenging final question from one of the delegates. All the panellists concluded that whatever the future shape of economies and corporations, these challenges of running major corporations across geographic borders would continue to be faced, requiring the skills and expertise of educated and well-networked HR professionals to help deliver the strategic business models, at least as much in the future as now. IES of course will be continuing to provide a key network and information source to support this process for many years to come!
Contact Duncan Brown for more information.
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