I think while we are here in Europe and America starting to talk about diversity management it might be a different issue in Asia. Also in Asia the diversity in people might not be like here that there are so many employees from all over the world but mostly from other Asian countries. During my research for some new interesting articles for you guys I found that page and a PPT that very well describes exactly this mentioned topic.

Have fun clicking through the slides!

http://de.slideshare.net/horatjitra/managing-diversity-in-asia-an-intercultural-approach (18.12.2012, 15:50)

Different cultures - changes in profit and loss???

Hey guys,

When I was doing my Practical Training Semester in Spain, I sometimes got really confused with their working habits. I had to enter certain invoices into the system and while doing that I noticed several errors. There were either wrong numbers entered before into the system, or the invoices were not created correctly.
To fix these problems, I asked my boss what to do, and she was just changing the values either on the invoice or in the system, without any thought about how this error might have occured.
As I am really used to the Austrian way of working like focusing on the errors and try to solve them by doublecheck everything you have entered so far into the system, I was really confused by the way the employees in Spain solve these problems...

As the company I worked in, has also subsidiaries in Austria and Germany I think they will often have problems concerning their balance as well as their profit and loss if the subsidiary in Spain is just changing the numbers in the system.

So do you think that working in a multinational company with different cultures could also be a problem concerning the profit and loss??

Who is the donkey?

Over the weekend I already read in several different newspapers that "Der Spiegel" would publish an article about the HR measures used at "Deutsche Telekom" subsidary T-Mobile USA.
Whether this is true or a made up story I need to further investigate. Breaking it down: The controversy spins around the question if T-Mobile USA has forced employees (who failed to reach certain goals) to wear donkey ears during their office hours as kind of punishment.
When I got aware of this issue I had to think about the difficulty of multinationals to practice one common HR leadership model in all its subsidiaries.
At the end of the day a subsidiary differs from the headquarter and has its own culture. Whether this is true or not depends strongly upon the leadership.
What do you think?

Source:chicagotribune: Deutsche Telekom

Home office working

Hi guys,

While I was writing on my Bachelor Paper I this weekend, I realized how much more productive I am, once I have found the perfect place to concentrate... a place where I can choose the volume of noise in the background, the distraction amount as well as the isolation from other people -- which brings me to the topic of home office working.

Now we all have learned the possible advantages and disadvantages about working from home. Here some examples:

• Advantages:

 

- Flexibility about work location can be a motivational Feature

- allows you to recruit top People even if they are across the globe

- allows geographically isolated People to particpate

- reduce Office / Administration / commuting costs

- improve productivity if work in favorite Environment

 

• Disadvantages:

 

- Low face-to-face interaction

- Social exclusion risk - mental health suffers

- Email communication not very efficient

- Build up of social capital is lost

 

 

Now I want to know from you...do you think this concept has a chance of success in a world where students are already trimmed for group working and social competence is a requirement for being hired? Is this really the future? How could a middle-path solution look like?

Diversity Management Report by Hernstein-Institut

Happy Sunday everybody!

I just stumbled upon a very interesting article in yesterday's Presse. It talks about companies, that consider older employees as outdated, young employees as inexperienced and do not take migrants seriously. As a result, the teams in those companies will have troubles finding solutions that will lead to success in the long run.
According to a Diversity Report just published by the Hernstein-Institut and the OGM (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Marketing), managers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland consider the following diversity topics as most relevant:
- Age (64%)
- Gender (58 %)
- Ethnicity (40%)

In Austria alone, however, ethnicity is only considered most relevant by 30% of managers. Why do you think is that?
Which other diversity topics are relevant? And why are age, gender and ethnicity those considered most relevant?

The article furthermore points out, that the awareness of diversity increases with company size but only 19% of managers follow diversity management strategies (Germany: 29%, Switzerland: 18%).
When it comes to qualities and competencies that managers should have in order to be successful in diversity management, the ability to accept other opinions and points of view is considered most important. Additionally, communication skills, the ability to cope with conflits, the ability of self-reflection and knowledge in the field of diversity are considered crucial.

Let me know, do you think that many managers have these skills? What can be done, if they do not have the mentioned skills?

Scared of the Future ? ! ?

Scared  of  the  Future ? ! ?

Having workforce around the world, filling offices with people from many different cultures, asking for skills which you might not be able to cover with native people,… This and many more issues bring up difficulties for managers all around the world.

However, what are the main three issues that emerged in the US and how they should be managed

Globalization is an issue that became a common topic today. Children already get in touch with intercultural training and managers learn how to deal with people from different cultures and with different backgrounds.

Therefore the outcome of a new survey made by BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is even more surprising. For the survey 7,700 executives from 83 countries around the world were asked in order to find out how companies in worldwide handle their people. The survey was held under the name "Creating People Advantage: How to Address HR Challenges Worldwide Through 2015".

What was the main message which was communicated to BCG by the executives is that they actually do feel unprepared to face the massive challenges which will come up in the future.

Out of seventeen issues which were discussed in the survey the three most important/critical ones were chosen by the executives:

·         Managing talent

·         Improving leadership development

·         Managing demographics

Regarding managing talents globally. Ask yourself first: What do you think how many companies do actually already seek for talented people globally?

Answer:

 

50% of asked executives state their company will start searing globally for talented people in the near future.

When it comes to leadership development executives state that they want to start providing financial rewards to enhance improved leadership. Nowadays however there isn’t much done for improved leadership. According to the survey however, many companies will have a reward system implemented by 2015.

Regarding the issue of managing demographics companies will have to employment a new employment option system. Executives state that they will start offering options to semi-retired or retired workers and train employees for new jobs.

If you found interest in this topic please go to BloombergBusiness to read about the survey in more detail.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-07-08/human-resources-the-big-issuesbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice (4.11.2012, 13:11)

However I would like to stop here!

What do you think? What do you think will be most important for companies within the next three years? And what do you think about the issue of finding workforce globaly?

I personally think that finding employees on a global basis requires a very strong management in order to be even able to deal with the diversity and especially NEEDS of the international employees. Which problems do you think will bring this new hiring system with it?

Let me know what you think!! J

Managing Diversity - What Companies Could Learn from Football

Hey everyone,

I just found this Youtube-Video which I really want to share with you. It is about managing diversity and in how far companies could learn something about diversity by having a look at football teams.

As they were saying that teamwork is easy within a team of 11 players, but could be quite complicated within a huge company. Do you also agree? Do you think working as a team is only possible in a limited group of people?

Furthermore they talk about the acceptance of people in a football team and that generally in football people from all over the world are more and more accepted than in companies. Do you think that is right? Do you think there is a difference between diversity in companies and diversity in football games?

I am really interested into your opinions so please feel free to share your thoughts.

Diversity

Hi everyone, 

I stumbled upon this video on Youtube. Now please don’t judge it, because it describes diversity in a very simple way. I believe that this is a great measure to explain the concept of diversity to people of every age, even children. For me, acceptance of uniqueness can never start too early, not even for kids.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNeR4bBUj68&feature=related

So what do you think??

Should diversity management only be a responsibility of companies or should our education system already pick up the topic? 

Because fact is, diversity issues do not only appear in companies, but also in our everyday live and people should be ready to embrace uniqueness and difference whenever they get an opportunity.

Is Intercultural Training necessary?

Hello everybody,

here you find an article from the New York times, talking about doing international business and the intercultural skills needed for that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/global/22chinatrain.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1349807443-WWmX2LaZBm9jnFN7ZzMcVw

Have you experienced any intercultural problems before when cooperating with people from other countries? Do you think that intercultural training should be a "must" for every employee of international companies?

Please feel free to share your thoughts!

GSB Alumni Entrepreneur Bootcamp: Human Resources Issues

Something for today's evening couch session. Enjoy!

Enough people?? Wrong skills? Is the early education at fault?

Enough people?? Wrong skills? Is the early education at fault?

Melanie Holmes is the Vice President, World of Work Solutions, Manpower. She is talking about the changes taking place for workers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=AdNCfyysILU 

I would like to point out a specific matter she mentioned. Change in skills. She is talking about the problems companies have right now. There are people available but they don’t have the skills which are needed.

What do you think: Is the educational system in a country of fault? Do students get the wrong attitude presented? How should education change to enable a better, faster learning and more risk taking work force?

Let us know what you think!! :)

Is working in an international company an advantage??

When I was listening to Alexander Uelsberg, working for Microsoft Germany, I was impressed by the fact that they really try to treat every employee in the same way. No matter if they are from the US, Europe or Asia and they try to handle HR issues in the same way like in other subsidiaries.

Let's take for example the performance evaluation: If every employee at Microsoft does the performance evaluation in the same, efficient way, it could be easier to then evaluate employees from other subsidiaries. Moreover it could be quite useful to hire for example an HR manager of Germany in a subsidiary in the US because of an employee-shortage. Or if any employee at Microsoft in Asia decides one day to go to work in the UK, they just have to exchange the data of the HR department, and an employee could easily take the way to a new experience.

That leads me to the point: "Is working in an international company an advantage?" or could there be disadvantages as well? And what about working in a local SME? Is this automatically a disadvantage when someone wants to gain knowledge all over the world?

Human Resource Development from the Point of View of a Global Player

Hi all,

here we have a video on Human Resource Development from the Point of View of a Global Player:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyhrVE64StA

The speaker is Alexander Uelsberg - a Human Resources Business Partner of Microsoft Germany GmbH. The video is from the 17th Europrofession forum that took place in October 2011 at the European Academy Otzenhausen.

Unfortunately the video is in German - we still wanted to share it because we consider the speech quite interesting! But don't worry English speakers - next time we will have something for you :-)