I am often asked by clients and prospects what is the best way to deliver HR services across the Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) region when employing a shared service center model, either internally or externally. Is an off-shoring or an in-region delivery model better?
Actually, there are two wedding seasons in Europe: the end of December and the full month of May. While the December timeframe is popular for weddings because of the tax benefits that you can gain for the full year, May is a popular month for weddings for the more romantic reasons. While I don’t expect any romantic “business weddings” (better known as Mergers, Acquisitions or Joint Ventures), the market in Europe will see quite an increase in M&A activity in May and in the following months.
April is the month of the changing weather in a lot of Central European countries. At one moment it rains a lot, and at the next moment, the sun shines bright from above. One thing is clear in this month: you cannot count on the weather forecast. There is a saying in Germany: “Im April, da macht das Wetter was es will” – “In April the weather does what it wants.”Likewise, so it appears to be with the European economy these days.
What all multinational corporations are looking for especially those in Europe is one truly global payroll system that provides one engine/database for all local and legislative requirements and all standard payroll setups for all countries they operate in. In addition, the solution needs to be cost effective for all different sizes of country populations. Now wouldn’t that be nice?
Jeitosa is often asked to help companies assess their options when expanding their businesses in developing regions, such as Eastern Europe or Latin America. The following study talks about how the Ukraine has become the most attractive destination for outsourcing in Eastern Europe due to its geographical proximity to Europe, visa-free regime, high level of educational investment, and fast growing software industry.
In this Jeitocast, Karen Beaman interviews Christian Adlung on the subject of what’s changing in the HR landscape in Europe. The top three trends that Christian sees occurring across Europe are: (1) harmonization of talent management practices and policies both on an European regional level and on a global level; (2) movement towards shared services, particularly placing shared service centers in Eastern Europe in countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic; and (3) development of more strategic talent management capabilities, such as performance management, recruiting, and staffing. Christian also talks about the challenges multinational companies face when expanding their business in Europe: (1) the highly regulated and diverse legislative situation making it difficult to standardize practices across countries; (2) the strong cultural differences throughout the 27 different countries of the European Union, confounding the difficulties in harmonization; and (3) the uneven population size of companies in the different countries making it difficult to provide the same high levels of service to everyone.
Prediction is tricky when analyzing the human resource information systems (HRIS) scene in Europe, because of the many conflicting forces the continent is subject to. In general, these forces can be summarized as dialectic of two trends. On the one hand, Europe has many nations, languages, cultures, histories, and nationalistic tendencies that are pushing it in one direction; on the other, there are significant ‘Europeanization’ forces that are pulling it in another, more unified direction with the subsequent emergence of a pan-European business environment.
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