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
I agree with you, it is very difficult to establish a culture across national borders and time zones. I think a real management effort has to be made in order to implement this culture across all subsidiaries and still, every subsidiary will always have a little bit of its own culture.
ReplyDeleteA big management effort has to be made to spread the values to all employees and to ensure that they are stuck to all around the globe.
I find it very hard to believe the story about the donkey-ears, this sounds like a manager unable to manage rather than a problem of culture. In my opinion managers that need that kind of measures to encourage their subordinates and co-workers should receive a management trainig rather than training on corporate culture, or they should even be let go because I don't think that any company's culture supports measures like that.
I think that no matter if the cultures are different in subsidiaries you can change the leadership style according to your employees or to work practices in a specific country, however you can under no circumstances start to disrespect your employees and make them treated inhumanly (as it seems in this case)! Keeping the respect (in both ways) is the key to establishing an employer-employee-company relationship that is a win-win situation for all the involved parties. And this is what should be the goal for every business out there.
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