Recently we featured Kim Boland, CPO of Chrysos Corporation, in a webinar about 3 risks of hiring remote workers internationally (and how to avoid them). Take a read of an excerpt below.
Whenever we’re talking about a new country, we start with labour laws as step one. The next focus, we call it the culture – we seek to understand the culture and the local ways of being, and their belief systems. The way that the local society operates may be unique.
From the way that we set up our business at Chrysos, we don’t operate in your standard hierarchy kind of model. We don’t like hierarchy at all. We definitely have instructions in line around the formal side of the Delegation of Authority and who can make decisions. But if a maintenance engineer is operating on site, they don’t need to go through a hierarchy for assistance. They can pick up the phone and call the CEO, if it means that we’re enabling something for the customer.
There are definitely cultures where that would just seem unfathomable to the person on the ground – it’s culturally ingrained that there is a hierarchy that I must work through and if I’m calling the CEO, I’m disrespecting my line of report. So we tend to have our Chrysos culture, but we look for those commonalities and where we’re different so that we can manage the difference.
Sometimes it’s just about explaining, and sometimes it means that we need to go about things differently. Our approach might be different in one country to another, but we don’t stray too far away from our core values. We’re very clear on what we value.
This is the type of dynamic we want in our business. How do we facilitate that? Well, it’s about respecting the local customs, and finding how we meet them where they’re at. And it does mean that we have different benefits around the world – we have different benefits or different practises.
In Africa, when a family member of a team member passes away it’s quite common that the business sends two representatives to the funeral. And it’s customary that when that person comes back, the whole team is there to greet them and support them on that process. That’s not something that is as globally applicable, but it’s one of those local nuances that if we didn’t enable our people to do that, we wouldn’t be supporting that local culture custom.
So that phase is actually quite a deep one and it requires us connecting with partners. It requires us connecting with people on the ground in those locations and really starting to build out our cultural awareness and understanding before we can get to that point of defining the local practises. Sometimes we learn them six or eight months into the employment relationship.
It is by having that kind of psychologically safe space that people can talk about it and say, hey, actually, this is kind of a local thing here that is a given for us. And it’s our way of being open – can we make that happen? We want to respect who you are. That it’s something the Australian team don’t do or it’s something the US or Canada team don’t do, but we’re happy for you to do that there.
Even in those instances sometimes it is learning, as you build learning on the fly – which I find in HR, we do quite a bit. It’s not always written down somewhere. There’s no Playbook to say “These are all the exact things that you need to look out for in every single country”.
Looking to expand globally or hire talent internationally and not sure how to go about it? Here’s our three top tips:
