Discuss About The Cross Cultural Management Essential Concept

Recruiting and selecting new employees

Discuss About The Cross Cultural Management Essential Concept?

The term Human Resource Management refers to the process of managing Human resource of an organization. The chief role of this department is to maximize the performance of the employees so that the strategic objective of the organization can be fulfilled. The HR department manages the staffs, focusing on the systems and policies of an organization. In this report, the HRM practices of Google Inc. have been discussed. This report includes the recruitment method of the mentioned organization, method used by Google to achieve high performance and effective commitment from the employees, Potential issues of the organization on cross cultural management and other challenges faced by Google. Apart from analyzing the current HR practices of Google, effective suggestions for improvement of the HRM practice have also been provided in this report.

Considering the fact that while recruiting an employee, Google focuses more on his talent rather than specific skill sets of the employee. In the past, the HR department of the mentioned organization used to conduct 29 interviews before granting an offer letter to a candidate (Finkle 2012). However, currently, Google conduct 4 to 9 interviews. The current HR practice of Google is provided below:

1. Resume screening: Each and every resume are checked on the basis of educational qualification, experience and technical requirements in order to ensure potential fit. Each year the company receives approximately 1 million resumes.
2. Phone Screening: The selected candidates are contacted through phone calls and the job profile of the position he or she has been selected for is thoroughly explained. If the candidate is an engineer, college GPA and SAT score of the candied is asked.
3. On Site Interview: The duration of the first interview is approximately 45 minutes and it is conducted with 4 to 5 candidates per round. Apart from general intelligence-related questions, candidates are asked to solve technical issues by coding solutions or by white boarding a design (Bal, Kooij and De Jong 2013).
4. Interview feedback: The interview feedback for each and every candidate is submitted and a numerical numbering is assigned.
5. Hiring committee: This committee consists of senior directors, managers and experienced staffs from the domain. They follow the mission of Google to appoint suitable employee for a specific position. The responsibility of this committee includes reviewing the resume, feedback and work experience of each employee before short listing.
6. Executive review: After the above mentioned review, senior level management of Google reviews every resume.
7. Compensation Committee: This committee determines whether the job role should be offered to the selected candidates or not.
8. Final executive review: In this step, the top executives go through all the offer letters before employing the candidates.
9. Offer Letter: Finally, offer letters stating all details related to the job profile are sent to the selected candidates.

In order to enhance the productivity and performance of the newly appointed employees, Google provides special training and performance management programs. In order to design an ideal training program, the company analyzes specific needs of each employee in order to support an innovative workforce. The results of the training programs are evaluated on a daily basis to ensure that the requirement of the human resource is met properly. In addition to the training, the above mentioned organization also has effective performance management practices which directly fulfil the HRM corporate objectives.

In order to analyze the needs of the new employees, the HR professionals undergo work analysis, cost-benefit analysis and organizational analysis. While work analysis deals with capability and efficiency of the new employees to fulfil the job role assigned to each of them, cost benefit analysis determines the practicality of the training activities (Chun et al.2013). The organizational analysis includes analysis of the human resource requirements for conducting an effective training session.

 The HR management of Google uses both result oriented approach and relational model for designing an effective training program. While the chief focus of the relational model is the relationship of the employees with the company, the result oriented approach focuses on the training outcomes. In order to enhance the participation of the employees in innovative and creative processes, Google maintains a strong and positive internal relation. For instance, while implementing a training program, the approach used by the mentioned company is ‘providing learning faction to the employees’. This approach ensures better employee-company relationship.

The company delivers training to its new employees in various ways like simulations, discussion and on-job-training. Discussion helps the HR management to maintain effective communication with the staffs. Rich communication, in turn, ensures maximum feedbacks from the trainees. Simulation is used by Google to empower the new employees to understand their projects, products and work tasks efficiently (Yan and Chan 2012). Finally, on the job training is provided to ensure that maximum knowledge is transferred to the new interns.

Current HR Practices

The work culture of the company is unique and is totally different from the typical corporate culture of its competitors. The Googolplex looks more like an adult’s playground than a workplace and this is considered to the secret behind the huge success of the company (De Dreu et al. 2012). One of the chief reasons behind the commitment of the majority of the employees is the huge number of facilities provided by the company to the employees. Some of the mention-worthy benefits provided by Google to its employees are:

• Free breakfast, lunch and supper
• Free dental and health checkups
• Free dry cleaning
• Free Haircuts
• Subsidized Massages
• Swimming pool and Gym facilities
• Nap Pods
• Video games, ping pong and football playing facilities
• Car subsidies
• On-site physicians
• Death Benefits

Google welcomes its new employees with a warm greeting. According to researchers, heartwarming greeting notes enhance the chance of employee commitment by 15 percent (Steiber and Alänge 2013).  Besides that, Google put more emphasis on informal ways of meeting than conventional ways. The managers conduct meeting in diner booths in place of conference rooms. According to the HR manager of Google, informal environment helps the new employees to show their creativity more efficiently (Leekha and Sharma 2014). These facilities not only act as a major employee retention strategy but also provide the company with major competitive advantage in the global market. Besides that such employee friendly culture and perfect work-life balance makes the employees of Google highly committed to the Company. The HR management of Google believes that commitment of the employees is the key to success. 

In spite of the fact that Google has its name in the list of one of the best place to work, the company has lost hundreds of its employees to its major competitors like Facebook and Microsoft. Several employees have left the organization to start their own business. 

One of the most important factors to achieve success in the global market is effective cross cultural communication. Being a multinational company, Google Inc. needs to engage with partners and consumers around the world and hence require skills to manage intercultural expectation and contexts. Some of the major potential issues on cross cultural management faced by the company include:

• Ambiguity

Considering the fact that Google has several numbers of branches across the world, issues associated with cultural diversity can impose a negative impact on the productivity of the company. The culture of a certain country defines the way of thinking, hearing and looking at a situation of employees who reside in that country. Even if the language is same, the same word carries different meanings in different culture (Fawad 2012). The problem increases when the languages are different and translation is needed. Besides that, when individuals of different cultures come together, being unaware of the difference in cultural values and communicational styles of each other, they tend to assume certain things. Hence situations are created where the listener develops an incorrect perspective about the delivered information. This can happen in the case of Google which will certainly affect the productivity of the organization.

• Inflexible attitude

Some of the employees face difficulties while experiencing and appreciating the culture of the host country. This causes closed mindset and introvert behavior which in turn convey the message to the host country that visitor are not accepting their culture. Google being a multinational company can also face the same issue. If employees of Google are not able to accept the culture of each other, teamwork will be highly hampered (Thomas and Peterson 2017). As a result, the productivity of the company will decrease causing a decrease in the overall revenue of the company. On the other hand, if an effective relationship is not established between the employees and the management, the company will be able to understand the requirements of the consumers of the country. Thus the brand Equity and consumer loyalty of Google will be hampered.

• Ethnocentrism

Achieving high performance from the new employees

Ethnocentrism can be defined the concept of an individual that his culture is superior to other cultures of the world.  Considering the fact that ethnocentrism is an unconscious behavior the cross cultural management of Google may find it difficult to prevent this in advance (Moran, Abramson and Moran 2014).

Apart from the potential issues that Google may face in near future, one of the major challenges faced by Google was a huge number of employee terminations due to recession. Throughout 2008 and 2009, Google laid off approximately 25 percent of its employees along with cutting of 200 positions due to recession. This step was taken to save costs and deal efficiently with the economic crisis during recession.  Google have recorded limited position of supervisors, the changing enterprising spirit and the fact that Google’s competitors are buying the experienced employees of the company by offering them a huge salary and lucrative terms and conditions (Mor, Morris and Joh 2013). Another potential issue that Google may face in near future is employee attrition. Since the majority of employees working in Google are highly talented, a good number of competitors of the company try to hire them by offering lucrative salary and facilities. Moreover, several employees, after gaining experience from Google, leaves the company to start a business of their own (Hancock et al. 2013).

Conclusion

From the above discussion, it can be clearly understood that the HRM practices of Google are highly efficient and hence the company is considered to be one of the best companies to work across the world. The recruitment and selection strategy of Google is strong enough to recruit the best candidates out of millions of application (Vaiman, Scullion and Collings 2012). However, the whole process of recruitment is quite time consuming. Hence, instead of conducting 4 to 9 interviews per candidate, the HR managers of Google should recruit employees by conducting 2 to 3 interview sessions. The strategy of Google to train its new employees is highly effective and that can be clearly understood from the success of the company in the international market. However, when it comes to commitment of the employees and the potential cross cultural issues that can affect the revenue of the company in the near future, Google needs to follow the following recommendations to cope up with the negative consequences of the above mentioned issues.

• Considering the fact that Google recruits highly talented employees who have high demand I the international market, in order to enhance the commitment of the employees, Google must sign a long term contract with the new employees that will hamper the process of leaving the organization due to tempting offers from other organization (Bal, Kooij and De Jong 2013).
• In order to solve the potential issues related to the cross cultural management of Google, the HR manager should implement training session for the employees on understanding and respecting other cultures, before they are transferred to a branch of Google located in a different country (Jiang et al. 2012).

References

Bal, P.M., Kooij, D.T. and De Jong, S.B., 2013. How dodevelopmental and accommodative HRM enhance employee engagement and commitment? The role of psychological contract and SOC strategies. Journal of Management Studies, 50(4), pp.545-572.

Chun, J.S., Shin, Y., Choi, J.N. and Kim, M.S., 2013. How does corporate ethics contribute to firm financial performance? The mediating role of collective organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Management, 39(4), pp.853-877.

De Dreu, C.K., Nijstad, B.A., Baas, M., Wolsink, I. and Roskes, M., 2012. Working memory benefits creative insight, musical improvisation, and original ideation through maintained task-focused attention. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(5), pp.656-669.

Fawad Latif, K., 2012. An integrated model of training effectiveness and satisfaction with employee development interventions. Industrial and Commercial Training, 44(4), pp.211-222.

Finkle, T.A., 2012. Corporate entrepreneurship and innovation in Silicon Valley: The case of Google, Inc. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 36(4), pp.863-884.

Hancock, J.I., Allen, D.G., Bosco, F.A., McDaniel, K.R. and Pierce, C.A., 2013. Meta-analytic review of employee turnover as a predictor of firm performance. Journal of Management, 39(3), pp.573-603.

Jiang, K., Lepak, D.P., Hu, J. and Baer, J.C., 2012. How does human resource management influence organizational outcomes? A meta-analytic investigation of mediating mechanisms. Academy of management Journal, 55(6), pp.1264-1294.

Leekha Chhabra, N. and Sharma, S., 2014. Employer branding: strategy for improving employer attractiveness. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 22(1), pp.48-60.

Mor, S., Morris, M.W. and Joh, J., 2013. Identifying and training adaptive cross-cultural management skills: The crucial role of cultural metacognition. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(3), pp.453-475.

Moran, R.T., Abramson, N.R. and Moran, S.V., 2014. Managing cultural differences. Routledge,pp. 14-19

Steiber, A. and Alänge, S., 2013. A corporate system for continuous innovation: the case of Google Inc. European Journal of Innovation Management, 16(2), pp.243-264.

Thomas, D.C. and Peterson, M.F., 2017. Cross-cultural management: Essential concepts. Sage Publications, pp.12-15

Vaiman, V., Scullion, H. and Collings, D., 2012. Talent management decision making. Management Decision, 50(5), pp.925-941.

Yan Cheung, H. and Chan, A.W., 2012. Increasing the competitive positions of countries through employee training: The competitiveness motive across 33 countries. International Journal of Manpower, 33(2), pp.144-158

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