Editor’s Note: It’s a TLNT holiday tradition to count down the most popular posts of the year. This is No. 2 of 2015. Our regular content will return next Monday, Jan. 4, 2016.
HR teams are being asked to do their jobs in a very different organizational environment and do them more quickly than before
The world’s biggest firms are bigger than they’ve ever been, and run by more decentralized decision-making.
Their employees work in more countries than before, often do jobs that are more specialized, must collaborate with each other more than they did five years ago to complete the same task (launch an updated version of a product, say), and – given they work in more dispersed, less centralized and hierarchical structures – must compete harder for promotion opportunities too.
A harder job for HR
This makes life hard for heads of HR and their teams who must attract, engage, and retain employees asked to take-on more decision-making responsibility in a more dispersed organizational structure, develop a wider range of skills, and work with a large array of people that they often don’t know or share a common culture with, and with whom they have no formal reporting or management relationship.