As companies build distributed teams across borders and time zones, they’re faced with the challenge of maintaining a unified company culture while also respecting regional differences.
On the one hand, there’s a desire to create uniform HR policies and apply them consistently across geographies to ensure alignment with a company’s principles and values. It ensures a fair and consistent brand identity as a global organization. On the other hand, workplace norms, labor laws, and employee expectations vary widely across cultures, so it becomes necessary to tailor HR policies and practices to align with the cultural, legal, economic, and operational needs of specific countries or regions.
Given these inherent tensions, how can People leaders at distributed organizations ensure a company-wide, globally consistent employee experience while also allowing for local flexibility?
That’s what we explored in a recent webinar with People and culture experts Eryn Marshall, VP of People at Oyster, and Kopal Jhalani, Senior People Scientist at Culture Amp. Eryn and Kopal discussed the challenges of managing multinational teams and shared strategies and best practices for maintaining a consistent company culture for a global workforce while also meeting local requirements and expectations.
Below are Eryn and Kopal’s top tips and strategies to help distributed companies strike a balance between global standards and local needs.
Start with global standards, then localize
To attract and retain talent worldwide, it’s crucial to build a strong employer brand and a consistent employee experience. This means establishing global standards early on, says Eryn. However, you then need to tailor your HR practices to each country, so you don’t risk alienating people or being non-compliant.
For instance, based on your company values, you might set global HR policies around equitable pay, diversity and inclusion, ethical practices, and more. Setting a global standard on important issues ensures that these principles are universally upheld, even when you empower local teams to adapt in response to local needs. According to Eryn, companies that build a strong employer brand while also localizing as needed are the ones that will be most successful in terms of engagement and high performance globally.
To take a different example, suppose innovation is one of your values as a company. Kopal explains that there may be cultural or regional nuances to how innovation is understood and embodied. In some cultures, it might mean failing fast and disrupting the status quo, whereas in other cultures, it might suggest a continuous and incremental process of improvement. In other words, there may be local differences in how a company-wide core value is operationalized.
Understand local differences and design equitable global policies
When designing global policies, it’s also necessary to be fully cognizant of local differences among the countries where you have employees. Eryn cautions that even the fundamentals, like health benefits, time off, and payroll can vary significantly across countries and cultures due to local labor laws, tax regulations, and more.
To illustrate her point, Eryn offers the example of hiring talent in the United States versus Germany. In the U.S., employees expect comprehensive, employer-sponsored health insurance because the gaps in the public healthcare system puts the onus on employers to take care of their employees. German employees, on the other hand, don’t place as much weight on health benefits as part of their compensation package because they have universal healthcare. So, a benefit that’s essential in one country might not be particularly important in another—something to keep in mind as you design your global policies.
Next, consider how paid time off differs between these two countries. In Germany, employees are legally entitled to 20 days of paid vacation, plus all their statutory holidays, but many companies offer upwards of 30 days in order to be competitive. In the U.S., on the other hand, there is no federal mandate for time off and it’s common for companies to offer only two weeks. If you were to simply localize your policies to each country, it would create significant inequities in the employee experience. This means that as a global employer, you need to design global policies that strive for fairness and equitability.
The importance of strong leadership and internal communications
For companies with globally distributed teams, leadership has a particularly important role to play when it comes to balancing a globally unified culture with local nuances across regions. Both Kopal and Eryn stressed the importance of effective leadership and internal communications in striking that balance and keeping everyone aligned.
The research shows that employees’ confidence in leadership is now the top driver of engagement, says Kopal, so leaders need to be transparent and communicate better in order to build trust. When it comes to effective communication, companies need to think about how they cascade information in a way that lands with employees. Since communication styles vary across cultures, your messaging should be highly contextualized, taking local and cultural nuances into account.
Eryn agrees, adding that it’s important to educate leaders on diverse communication styles and cultural norms. The nuances around communication can have a significant impact on the workplace, whether it’s collaborating effectively, managing performance, or even navigating conflict. Leaders who are culturally sensitive and empathic communicators can help ensure clarity and alignment for distributed teams.
Thriving as a globally distributed team
Managing a distributed team is challenging since it involves navigating HR compliance requirements and cultural norms, all while trying to maintain a cohesive organizational culture. The good news is that you don’t have to go it alone. An EOR partner like Oyster can help you deliver a consistent employee experience across 180+ countries, while Culture Amp can help you drive engagement and performance through data-driven insights and tools. With the help of expert partners like Oyster and Culture Amp, you can build HR policies and frameworks that will help your distributed team thrive.
Need help ensuring a seamless employee experience for your global team? Reach out for a personalized consultation to discuss your needs and goals.
About Oyster
Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, engage, pay, manage, develop, and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.
Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world—with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.
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