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Global HR Practices

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Top 7 Global Human Resource Practices

As one of the most crucial operations in an organization, the primary objective of Human Resource Management is to ensure the availability of a competent and willing workforce in the organization.

How Do You Build A Willing Workforce?

Did you know that 74% of employees are willing to get paid less to work at a job they love?

Yes, job satisfaction is the motivational factor for most of your employees. By ensuring they have a seamless experience and when their needs are met at all levels, you can achieve a willing human capital that works towards your vision.

Thus, the answer lies in adopting some of the best global HRM practices.

Albeit there is no defined set of practices to follow, but some universal ones frame the foundation of a successful business.

We have brought to you a comprehensive guide of global HR practices. While some of these are age-old, tested, and proven across industries and periods, some are relatively modern, addressing the shift due to the pandemic.

How Are Global Human Resource Practices Shifting In 2021?

The pandemic has made us rethink several norms we had followed previously.

  • Remote working, a practice viewed with skepticism, became a necessity in 2020.
  • The primary focus of HR shifted to being employee-centric rather than work-centric.
  • Employee mental wellness, another aspect never addressed before, became prominent after the pandemic made us realize its importance in productivity.

Hence, our list encompasses global HRM practices that work best for the post-pandemic world.

HR Practices Vs. HR Activities

In case you’re wondering if there is a difference, yes, there absolutely is. To get clarity, let us distinguish both.

HR practices form the foundational operations of HR and include the overall strategies to achieve our goals. HR activities are everyday tasks designed to implement the practices. Simply put, HR practices answer what the organization wants to achieve and why while HR activities address how.

For example, developing talent and future leadership is a good practice and providing a space for upskilling knowledge is one of the activities to enforce that practice.

Thus, international HR practices are the umbrella encompassing HR activities. For a fully functional HR, both these are crucial.

Let us look at the list of best global HRM practices to follow in 2021.

Global HRM Practices in 2021

1. Hire the Right People

Employees are a company’s asset. The first best practice as an HR is to hire people whose beliefs align with your company. The right employees maximize productivity and frame a fitting work culture and morale. Thus, hiring the right people is one of the crucial global HR practices.

Strategized hiring

Your hiring methods determine the future of your company. Thus, strategizing the hiring procedure is crucial. You can set a fitting persona for each role and screen candidates matching that persona.

Some of the best hiring procedures include:

  • Panel-based interviews: An interview panel consists of experienced leaders in various roles. They bring in different perspectives to determine if the candidate is suitable. Thus, interview panels with the utmost of four members make a good hiring team.
  • Internships: This gives time for the employer to determine the attitude, nature, and quality of work. Similarly, there is ample time for the candidate to understand the work nature and expectations. Thus, it benefits the employer in choosing the right person and the employee, in becoming the right person.

With good hiring practice, you would make no mistake of letting the right candidate walk out.

Global hiring

The right candidate is often not present next door but, why should that limit you?

A global hiring strategy helps you identify and filter suitable people across the world. The wider you search, the more likely you are to find the right candidates.

Additionally, global hiring brings in diversity. Diversity brings along a host of benefits including,

  • Increased productivity
  • Enhanced employee engagement, and
  • Cultural literacy.

Hiring tools

Yes, global hiring is remarkable. However, setting up local entities everywhere you hire would cost you time and money. Thus, you need proper planning and employ effective strategies to utilize its full potential. Else, it gets chaotic.

Using hiring and virtual onboarding EOR (Employee on Record) tools help you hire without having to set up such local entities. You can set up a hassle-free onboarding process.

Thus, using hiring tools for assistance is one of the best hiring practices.

2. Employee Management

After hiring, comes employee management. It is a holistic approach that helps employees perform their best to achieve the set goals.

Manage employee performance

Employees like to get evaluated, get feedback for their work. It makes them understand what is expected of them and shifts their focus towards that.

They boost high performers further to continue working in the same direction at a faster pace. Also, performance evaluation gives a chance for underperformers to rectify their mistakes and perform better.

The stats report from LinkedIn states that nearly 92% of employees agree that even negative feedback when delivered right, helps improve their performance.

Thus, it is a good global Human Resource practice to include performance evaluation through one-on-one meetings and regular performance reviews.

Transparency

A crucial international HRM practice is to be open with the employees, regardless of the success or failure of the business. Companies that foster transparency of communication and feedback make employees feel trusted and respected.

Transparency also promotes participation and engagement. Feeling well-informed, employees volunteer to share ideas and contribute to decision-making. This leads to better and well-informed decisions that help in your company’s growth.

Employee engagement and empowerment

According to Gallup’s meta-analysis, truly engaged employees show an 18% increase in productivity than the rest. Thus, employee engagement is a key HRM practice.

Employee engagement involves open discussions, clear communication and most importantly empowering them.

Employees are no longer interested in mundane work without growth. They are actively on the search for upskilling and updating to face unknown challenges. Organizing programs, professional courses, and seminars helps them cover the skill gap created due to growing technology.

Thus, engagement through empowerment adds value to the organization and is one of the age-old global HR practices that holds good through time.

3. Compensation And Benefits

Compensation, incentives, and benefits make your employees feel acknowledged and appreciated. Thus, it is one of the crucial global HR practices to follow.

Fair compensation

Excellent workers deserve excellent compensation. Fair compensation motivates your employees to continue their good work and to even outdo their performance.

Your compensation plan should keep in mind the performance of the individual, the value they add to the business, and competition in the market. Strategizing compensation packages better than the rest in the market helps you retain talent and thus, supports continued organization growth.

Additional benefits

Benefits make the employee value their employment with you. Thus, another good global HR practice is to design benefit plans that provide value to the employees. Some of them include:

  • Providing health insurance plans
  • Travel concessions
  • Maternity and paternity leaves
  • Enforcing family time
  • Profit-sharing plans

These are some of the best ways to show the employees that you value their work.

Further, your benefits can also focus on setting up a comfortable work culture and space. This can include mentors to guide young talents, open discussions, flexible working hours, etc.

The pandemic gave us an additional array of benefits that could be offered to boost your employees’ trust and help them cope up with the stress. Some of these benefits can include:

  • The option to choose between remote and office working
  • Strategies ensuring work-life balance
  • Health insurance plans covering dependent’s medical expenses due to Covid-19, etc.

4. Create a Safe Workplace

An office is where employees spend most of their day. In fact, on average, an employee spends almost 1/3rd of their life in the office premises. Thus, prioritizing workplace safety is crucial and vouches for a sound global Human Resource practice.

Avoid workplace accidents

Workplace safety is not just a best practice but also a fundamental right of every employee. Thus, as an HR professional, ensuring infrastructure and physical safety is more than a practice. It becomes your duty.

Safety procedures must be strictly followed and in place to ensure a secure workplace. Security checks at vulnerable points must also be deployed. Conducting fire drills, creating awareness of the various safety aspects such as fire, electrical, hardware components, and women safety can be beneficial.

Additionally, due to the pandemic, proper sanitization and screening procedures must be followed to avoid the further spread of the virus.

Avoiding violence and abuse

According to Techjury, every year nearly 2 million people experience some form of workplace violence.

Sadly, workplace violence and abuse, especially against women are becoming common. Thus, there is a compelling need to address them to avoid disasters, and discomfort to all especially, the female workforce.

Dedicated policies and rules must be in place to prevent such workplace abuses and violence. As an HR, you must ensure that these policies are strictly followed and adhered to by all. Anti-ragging policy and policies against misconduct must be included while drafting company laws and policies.

These are some of the ways to evade violence and abuse, and set up a secure workplace.

5. Create An Ethical Workplace

Though an open, casual work culture is widely adapted, it should not be at the expense of ethics. Your workplace must still hold strong ethical codes to maintain office decorum. Good global HR practice is to strike a balance between both.

The ethical aspects encompass a moral code of conduct, professional dress code, effective communication, etc. These aspects define who you are, as an entity.

Thus, to sustain the changing market, make sure your ethics sustains the modern work culture.

6. Risk Management

Risk Management involves assessing potential risks to your business and figuring out the best solutions to handle them. Risk management is crucial irrespective of the business size or industry.

Below are some of the potential risks and how to evade them.

Compliance and regulations

As an HR, you’re well aware of the complicated laws and regulations surrounding employment. As a global recruiter, it just gets more complicated. Thus, it is crucial to follow local labor laws and stay compliant.

All of your HR processes must be regulated and audited to ensure you are as compliant as possible. The laws keep changing and get updated regularly. Thus, an international best HRM practice is to track the revisions in the laws in each country and reflect them in your policies and documents.

Get assistance

Tracking every law posed in all the countries you’re present in is a tedious job. It is easier said than done. To avoid such laborious work you can make use of PEOs (Professional Employer Organizations).

PEOs partner with you to assist in tracking and maintaining compliance with local labor laws and regulations. We, at Multiplier, take care of local compliance in each country and help you save time and effort.

Network and data security

Purplesec’s 2021 cybersecurity stats state that cybercrimes are by a whopping 600% due to the pandemic.

Data thefts and security breaches are, sadly, increasing rapidly. If not addressed immediately, this might be catastrophic to your business.

Network security risk management is about anticipating possible security breaches and avoiding them. You can set up a sound internal hack and security team to identify such weak ends and strengthen your network.

Employee incompetency

Training and competency failures occur when your employees aren’t equipped to face future challenges.

As seen above, the best practice is to provide them with sufficient knowledge and training to upskill themselves to face unanticipated challenges in the future.

The above are some of the possible risks you might face as an HR professional and ways to evade them.

7. Adopt Fair Termination Policies

A good firing policy is as crucial as the hiring policy. However, they require tremendous effort and planning to get right. Wrong strategies will induce a fear of unsettlement among the others and result in overall dissatisfaction.

As an HR professional, a good global HR practice is to give the underperforming employee a chance to change. Except for critical issues such as violating company policies and regulations, discussing your concerns and helping them understand their mistakes is fair play.

Also, our mental stress has shot up due to constant agitation and unsettlement due to the pandemic. Such situational productivity loss should be accepted, and as an employer, you must help them sort it out.

If the employee volunteers to terminate the employment, the best practice is to conduct an exit interview. This gives insight into the reasons behind the termination and helps you plan new strategies to retain other talents.

Conclusion

In many ways, 2021 has added new aspects of focus to the HR department. Accordingly, the best practices to be followed by the Global Human Resource management have also shifted.

These are some of the best global HRM practices that you can follow to set up a streamlined flow and align your workforce towards the company’s mission and vision.

As much as we plan and strategize the best possible practices, the role of HR is broadening. It is getting increasingly difficult to manually follow and measure their effects. Enhanced HR tools such as Multiplier will assist you in such situations.

Multiplier EOR platform provides an array of tools to help you automate global hiring procedures, adhere to laws and compliance, manage employee activities and regulate global payroll. You can now manage all these crucial activities from one platform.

We take care of the complex tasks to help you strategize and simplify your HR activities thereby, employing the best global HR practices. Contact us to learn more.

Employ the best person for job, regardless of location

Employ the best person for job, regardless of location

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