The Art of Building a Global Culture

Posted by: Steve Hamm on January 29

As multinational companies turn themselves into global companies, one of the biggest challenges is creating a single global corporate culture but, at the same time, giving local leaders the flexibility to localize the way the company operates in a given country or region. When I was researching for our big package, Managing the Global Workforce, I came across a couple of examples of companies that seem to be handling this balance well. They’re Manpower Inc. and Hewlett-Packard. Both companies are globalizing rapidly and transforming the way they operate in the process.

First, Manpower. Until I spoke to Mara Swan, the company's SVP of global HR, I had never thought of Manpower as a global company. Turns out it has 35,000 regular employees and hires and pays four million temps per year in 4,400 offices in 73 countries. Manpower added 20 countries in the past seven years. Integrating those global operations better has been Swan's task since she came to Manpower from Molson Coors two years ago.

A lot of companies that are revamping their global operations now started off with very loosely linked operations. They were local first and part of a global organization second. With Manpower, it was the opposite. It had a strong top-down culture. That model wasn't working well enough. So Swan shifted things around. She created a framework of operational principles for global operations, rather than a rigid set of rules, which gives local managers a lot of flexibility. For example, the company believes in a performance culture, and required every employee to be evalutated by their supervisor at least once a year, but, since that's not enough in some countries, managers there are allowed to evaluate and adjust pay more often than that. The same flexibility goes for pay and transfer practices.

Interesting angle: Swan found that because of globalization and increased communication between employees in different countries, employees were talking among themselves about their compensation and benefits. This gave rise to some questions about fairness. The company has had to communicate with employees and explain why compensation and benefit packages are different in different countries.

Swan's newest project is coming up with a global framework of guiding principles for supervision practices. In talks with managers from different countries, she learned that what's considered helpful mentoring in one place would be considered meddlesome micromanagement in another.

To help shape a consensus on the framework, she's conducting a series of 10 leadership meetings around the world for the company's top managers. Each session will have a mix of people, about 20 in each location. And CEO Jeff Joerres will speak at the first five session. "It's a cultural change program. We're asking regional leaders to be global leaders," says Swan.

HP is conducting a similar, but much more ambitious, global leadership program. Last year, 4000 managers participated in the program, called Leading for Results, which was crafted by Marcela Perez de Alonso, the executive vice president for HR. It's a two-day program where managers hear about HP's high-level strategy and rules for conducting business, but, in each region, there's flexibility for adapting to local business conditions. CEO Mark Hurd kicked off the program last February, with all the executive vice presidents. Then the program cascaded to each level of management until about one third of the company's managers had been through it. This year, in Leading for Results II, the cascade will start from the top again and about 10,000 managers will participate.

Perez de Alonzo also has launched a global management training program aimed at the bottom of the company's leadership pyramid. A program for inculcating Indian managers with the company's core principles, plus basic skills training, that was launched last year will now be replicated in other emerging markets.

These two HR leaders are still in the experimental phases, but my sense is that a lot of companies haven't even begun their journeys of transformation yet. So it will be interesting to see how well these techniques work, and whether they'll become models for other companies to imitate.

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