Global HR: It’s About Connections

I work for a global company. International travel is part of the job because I manage a region. In any given month I travel a few times out of the country to meet with prospects and customers. I like to travel because I get to meet interesting people, visit great companies and sometimes I have a bit of time at night to walk through a city and enjoy the sights.

There are also annoying parts to travel: going through customs and security checks several times a day in various countries that have different rules and procedures. Even at one airport you can make it through one security scan but not the next because of your shoes or a hair clip or such item. It’s also the 5 different currencies I have in my wallet because not every country’s taxi drivers will accept a credit card. And let’s not forget the many outlets for which I bring adapters so I can stay connected and use my gadgets wherever I travel.

Fortunately there are tools to ease these annoyances: my iris scan and my passport chip let me zip through customs that much faster. And I have a nifty toolset that hooks up my electronic gadgets to every outlet in the world.

If you visited the NGA HR booth at one of our recent events, you probably went home with one of these as well. It’s kind of a symbolic gift. Just as this toolset allows you to connect to electricity anywhere on the globe, NGA’s toolset allows you to connect all your local HR solutions to your global HR backbone.

There are many HR solutions that promise to do just that: making sure that your HR data is the same all over the global. But if you’ve ever tried to aggregate HR data on a global scale you know that reality is a bit more unmanageable than that: your global system does not allow for all that local data, jurisdictions have changing local legislation that prevent you from standardizing and you are managing a multitude of payroll vendors that you can’t replace with one global solution. But you still want that data to travel back and forth and be included in reporting.

At HR Tech we gave away adapters and they were in high demand proving that the world has certainly gone global. We gave them away for a reason because we want you to think about your global HR connections. Think of an HR backbone as electricity: ensure you can plug in and connect your local solutions no matter where or how they run: on premise, hosted or in the cloud. Integration and connections are more important than ever before – so when you design your future HR solution, make sure you put this topic front and center. Ultimately, it drives the success of your global HR solution.

Now if only I could find a solution that lets me deal with cash-only taxi drivers…