The Challenges of International Human Resource Management

There has been an ever increasing in the number of organizations that have internationalized their operations. This trend has made the role of HRM professionals complex because the future of global workforce is ever changing due to diverse nature of employees. International human resource management calls upon the HR managers to understand the societal, demographic and technological differences that may affect the ability to do work for employees in foreign countries (Benson and Scroggins, 2011). Complexities in international economic positions also make the work of international human resource management challenging.

In an international perspective, the demographics surrounding the workforce is usually different from those of the company’s parent country. The biggest challenge, in this case, is the differences in the motivations and expectations of the employees in the firm’s foreign branches. HR managers usually experience difficulties in trying to understand what is valued by the international workforce (Latukha, 2014). When it comes to issues of wages and salaries, there are a number of autonomies that presents to the HR personnel in regard to compensation of foreign nationals. In terms of policies of pay and incentives, an expatriate employee may call upon the HR manager to adopt a different strategy so as to ensure that the employee is fully satisfied.

Since it is not enough for an HR to recruit an employee, the company has to come up with measures to ensure that foreign employees are committed to their work. Our role as human resource professionals, therefore, is to ensure that the productivity of expatriates is improved by coming out with appropriate measures to prevent the employees from leaving after a short time (Dowling, Festing and Engle, 2013). This can be challenging because it may mean that the company has to incur extra costs to pay the expatriates cost for retaining the employee. Other challenges that also present themselves in international human resource management involves issues to do with clarification of taxation matters and the logistics of coordinating foreign currencies and exchange rates for international workers.

References

Benson, P. and Scroggins, W. (2011). The theoretical grounding of international human resource management: Advancing practice by advancing conceptualization. Human Resource Management Review, 21(3), pp.159-161.

Dowling, P., Festing, M. and Engle, A. (2013). International human resource management. Australia: Cengage Learning.

Latukha, M. (2014). Talent management in Russian companies: domestic challenges and international experience. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 26(8), pp.1051-1075.