Find out which factors will be crucial in the future to attract and retain the best talent. Here, you will receive impulses to further develop your HR strategy. Stay future-ready and one step ahead of competitors!
Innovative Global Talent Management
Your Competitive Advantage: The right talent in the right place, at the right time.
definition
What is Global Talent Management?
In times of skills shortage and recession, building and retaining a strong workforce can be challenging. An attractive employer brand and a comprehensive HR strategy are more important than ever for companies to avoid setbacks. Many technical terms and buzzwords are circulating – time for clarification:
A Global Workforce refers to an international team of employees with different nationalities. Often, these professionals work from different locations and therefore use common virtual collaboration tools.
In Global Talent Management, companies focus on how they can find, develop, and retain the best skilled employees worldwide for the long term.
Inspiration
According to a Korn Ferry study, Germany is expected to face a deficit of 4.9 million workers by 2030, making it the European country with the greatest need for skilled workers. Across Europe, in addition to Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands are particularly affected by a massive shortage of skilled workers. Looking at the global situation, the study predicts significant losses especially for Australia, Japan, and the United States.
We all know: a company's most important resource is its employees. Only with the right team can companies evolve. So, how do we manage to find top talent worldwide and, at the same time, truly integrate employees into the new country?
For example, 80% of all skilled workers coming from Africa to the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) leave after two years. How can we promote diversity across Europe through inclusive leadership and leverage our differences as strengths?
Innovation in Global Talent Management has become indispensable: successful companies proactively promote New Work, Future Skills, DE&I, and flexible work concepts such as Work From Anywhere to remain fit for the future. With this year's Christmas booklet, we aim to inspire you and provide you with new ideas because: Customer Centricity is Key."
– Dr. Fritz Audebert, CEO & Founder of the ICUnet.Group
Process
Building a Global Workforce
"The question of deploying talents in companies internationally is no longer solely driven by movements from corporate headquarters as part of traditional expatriation abroad, but increasingly by the shortage of skilled workers. Companies are required to recruit internationally and need to be able to have cultural sensitivity front and center during talent onboarding.
In building a Global Workforce, besides filling local talent gaps with foreign local hires, it can also be helpful to follow specific steps such as Planning, Attracting, Developing, Retaining, and Transitioning. For each of these steps, it is crucial to consider concrete actions."
– Matthias Würth, Managing Director ICUnet Austria
INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCIES
1. Identify Cultural Strengths & Utilize Them for Business Success
Different cultures value different skills. This can be quite evident in country-specific education systems. For instance, dictation, in which the goal is to reproduce a given sentence, might be considered paramount in a country. This may favor the development of other cultural attributes in the long run, such as the expectation to always be creative and come up with your own ideas.
More about intercultural qualification
With the help of suitable tools, HR managers can explore intercultural competencies and potential culture-specific or personality-related preferences of candidates. This enables HR to make data-driven decisions for filling a position or project with an intercultural focus. At the same time, employees can be coached accordingly once their skills and work- as well as culture-specific preferences have been identified. This way, employees can unfold their potential optimally and contribute to the company in the best possible way.
What strengths do you attribute to your culture that you can apply to your business success?
PROCESS OPTIMIZATION
2. Guaranteeing digitalisation and compliance in HR processes and Global Mobility
Once the most qualified employee has been identified, it is important that they arrive at the right place at the right time, whether it's recruiting candidates from abroad (Foreign Local Hires), a traditional expatriate assignment, or a short-term business trip.
Global mobility processes are complex: from visas, work permits, moving with the entire family, looking for schools, or obtaining an A1 certificate for work from within Europe. All these requirements come with a flood of documents and numerous bureaucratic processes that involve many stakeholders.
With the right workforce planning tools, the administrative burden of HR can be reduced by up to 70%, while simultaneously optimizing process quality and ensuring 100% compliance. Communication and coordination between HR, traveling employees, and external service providers can be significantly simplified with intelligent software, and providing all stakeholders with access to the data relevant to them. Your talent can focus on their professional mission and feel secure, which is highly relevant for the employer brand.
Are you still relying on traditional Excel spreadsheets for managing your global mobility processes, or have you already switched to an automated solution?
New Work
3. Foster Future Skills and Strengthen International and Virtual Collaboration
Amidst all the global endeavors and increasingly virtual collaboration among more diverse teams, fostering Future Skills is essential.
Future Skills prepare the workforce of a globalized and digitized workplace for cultural diversity and different communication styles. They are necessary for solving complex problems, empower teams to act successfully in a self-organized manner, promote respectful and effective collaboration, and enable companies to benefit from the cultural diversity of their workforce.
Actively promoting Future Skills not only increases employee retention but also enhances employee productivity. For example, based on a McKinsey survey, over 800 companies stated that Future Skills are essential for achieving their business goals.
Did you know that there are up to 30 Future Skills (Spiegel et al., 2021)? These are categorized into the following areas:
Global Collaboration
Cultural Sensitivity
Communication Skills
Diversity and Inclusion
Conflict Resolution
DE&I
4. Embrace Diversity and Unleash Potential in the best way possible
After onboarding talent in their destination, companies are faced with further challenges: What needs to happen for people from different cultures to feel comfortable in the new country in the long term? And how can strengths in diversity be truly utilized for the benefit of the company?
THE KEYWORD IS "INCLUSION"
Diversity without inclusion is worthless because it's about cultural change!
Numerous studies show that diverse companies are up to 25% more likely to be profitable above average (e.g., McKinsey, 2020). Diversity encompasses the complex variety of people with different identities and perspectives, the interaction of different ways of thinking, abilities, cultural influences, experiences, and competencies. In addition to demographic characteristics such as origin, gender identity, or age, it also involves different personality traits, values, skills, and problem-solving styles.
In a diverse environment, making decisions may be more challenging, but the effort pays off. Practicing DE&I is a win-win for both employees and employers: The result is an increase in innovation, creativity, resilience, and ultimately profitability.
However, the crucial value for a company does not lie in the degree of diversity, but rather in its ability to create conditions for inclusion. This means a cultural shift towards an inclusive culture that is characterized by trust, respect, engagement, collaboration, appreciation, and cohesion. Practiced DE&I makes measurable contributions to corporate goals, such as a 75% increased likelihood of ideas being implemented (Korn Ferry, 2022) and up to 29% increased teamwork (Deloitte, 2018).
Areas of Global Workforce Management
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What are your priorities for your Global Workforce Strategy?
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Get in touch
Jannik Heckenhahn
Manager Global Talent Strategy
jannik.heckenhahn@icunet.group