17 September 2007
Work Is Changing as U.S. Companies Go Global
Workers adapt to need for flexibility, collaboration across continents
Washington -- “Research and development” is a term that has been displaced at Procter and Gamble Company (P&G). “Connect and develop” is the new mantra, as P&G, a company that makes a wide range of consumer products, seeks ideas from entrepreneurs worldwide.
So says Jodi Starkman, a talent-management expert for Organization Resources Counselors (ORC), which works with Fortune 500 companies. Work is changing for Americans who clock in at global companies, she said, whether those companies are multinationals or high-tech startups.
U.S. firms tap into a world talent pool and increasingly manage those workers with technology. They operate with fewer employees and facilities -- many workers do not report to offices, do not keep set hours or are not governed by a companywide vacation policy.
Experts interviewed by USINFO say other changes are in the offing, due to the increasing global nature of business: U.S. businesses will be led by foreign nationals, and even the notion of “U.S. headquarters” will fade.
Navi Radjou, of Forrester Research, cites International Business Machines' (IBM) move from its traditional focus on activities in the United States. Today, the company’s Bangalore, India, unit designs business models with the aid of logistics experts in Switzerland and software engineers in Japan.
A global work force and the Internet mean manufacturers can make design changes on 3-D product models in 24 hours. Engineers on one continent make initial changes, others several time zones away offer feedback and a third group makes fixes.
Short product lifecycles put a premium on innovation. Projects get under way quickly, so companies want a nimble work force.
“Jobs are short-term,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley, California, technology expert and professor at Stanford University. More than half of IBM employees have been with the company less than five years.
Companies increasingly compensate with cash, rather than benefits, said Dallas Salisbury of Employee Benefit Research Institute -- they do not want people to stay for decades.
Salisbury said U.S. companies -- like IBM, General Electric Company and Emerson Electric Company -- have begun to push “for redesigns of benefit programs and laws in other countries as readily as they’ve done that historically in the United States.”
There is a flip side as foreign workers “ask for mentoring programs like we have here,” said Elizabeth MacGillivray of ORC. “Gays and lesbians in conservative parts of the world ask for support groups in the workplace. Their bosses are surprised.”
Day-to-day operations at IBM are changing, according to spokesman Clint Roswell, who said 40 percent of employees are “mobile” -- they do not report to an office. No one at the company abides by a set vacation policy; they take time off when needed. “Employees don’t have to be a certain place at a certain time; it allows us to be much more flexible,” Roswell said.
Sun Microsystems Inc. has a similar proportion of mobile staffers. It is not all free time -- workers join conference calls at 5 a.m. They are available to colleagues across continents via e-mail, instant messaging and “electronic team rooms,” password-protected Web sites that allow document sharing.
“We do a lot of collaboration with [instant-messaging] type systems,” said Roswell. And with employees in 170 countries, conference calls are “world calls,” he said. “We can do three or four continents most times.”
Starkman, who formerly worked at IBM, said that company’s database of employees’ expertise helps. When Starkman once was at a client’s workplace, a problem arose with another vendor’s product. Using the database, she found IBM employees in Europe and Asia with experience with the application and e-mailed them. “The next morning, two of them made themselves available to speak with the client.”
Cable and wireless Internet connections are spreading, making collaboration easier. Soon, hand-held devices will be used by workers, who will be on the Internet as they walk down the street.
U.S. companies are grooming foreign employees for leadership because the alternative is expensive; moving one American worker to China costs $600,000 per year, according to Boston University economist Fred Foulkes. “The multinationals -- Procter & Gamble, Colgate Palmolive, GE -- are working to make sure they have non-Americans ready to move into executive positions. They don’t want leadership that has spent their whole careers in [New York],” he said. He holds up Swiss food company Nestle as a model: 35 of 100 executives are not Swiss.
As India and China become centers of innovation, it makes sense for P&G’s chief executive, A.G. Lafley, to set a goal of finding half of new-product innovations from worldwide entrepreneurs, outside the traditional P&G labs. Radjou reports that Lafley said, “We want P&G to be known as the company that collaborates.”
It is a cultural shift, but one that is paying off in product “hits,” Radjou says.
As U.S. companies become borderless -- in staffing, hours and strategies -- “they will have no meaningful geographic nexus, no headquarters,” Saffo predicts. Nokia, a Finnish company, has a chief executive in Helsinki, Finland, and a chief financial officer in New York.
For U.S. consumer companies, it is not just about managing workers and product innovations -- it is about selling. “Probably after I’m dead, but not long after, the major consumer market will be in India or China or both,” said Martha Farnsworth Riche, who headed the Census Bureau in the 1990s and writes about how demographic changes affect businesses and products.
