I have been honored to be selected to be among the many dignitaries to appear on The Bill Kutik Radio Show® to talk about going global with HR and HR technology.  Bill Kutik himself is quite the globalist… having traveled to such exotic places as the Arctic, Labrador, Galapagos… you get the idea… really nice vacation spots where they all speak English!  A true “globalist” in the making!

Not surprisingly, Bill starts off with his contrarian view asking just how global is the world anyway and aren’t I biased since all I see and work with are global companies. And indeed, according to a Harvard Business Review survey a couple of years ago, it is certainly the case that less than 30% of business interactions and communications take place globally.  So I prefer to use Pankaj Ghemawat’s term “semi-globalized” when thinking about the world of global HR.  While there are many commonalities around the world, there is also a lot of diversity in business practices, customs, cultures, languages, legislation, and regulations.

Working effectively in the semi-globalized world means balancing the often conflicting demands of multiple worlds: corporate headquarters, regional leadership, business unit leaders, and country management. Often the needs of these different groups can be diametrically opposed. So I often suggest to organizations to focus on being “as global as possible, as local as necessary.”

But the fact is that the vast majority of the Fortune 1000 companies do have some amount of global operations. So just how global the world really is depends on how you define “global.”  Global can mean the company has 500 people in two or three countries or 30,000 people across 20 countries or 300,000 employees across 170 countries.

But no matter how many people and how many countries, Corporate HR still wants to be able to get a global headcount report, to understand where there top-performers are for succession planning purposes, and to have some degree of standardization and oversight into hiring and staffing practices around the world. So my answer is that every company needs a global strategy for their HR service delivery, operations, and infrastructure.

So whether you work for a 3,000 or 300,000 person organization or are globe-trotter like Bill, check out our fun and informative discussion about going global in HR today, Wednesday, December 9, 2009, at 9:00 Pacific, 12pm Eastern, 6pm Central European Time.  As with all shows, it will be recorded so you can listen to it anytime that’s convenient for you.