Author: Charlene Solomon

Ron Mason knows a good job when he sees one. Throughout his 15-year career in human resources, Mason, 45, has taken on one career challenge after another. He started in academia serving as a dean at Syracuse University in New York, moved into industry—first in banking and then in manufacturing—and then went into communications, beginning at NBC and later going to Reader’s Digest.

Two years ago, Mason was recruited to BBDO advertising agency in New York City, landing the enviable position of senior vice president, director of human resources for the $744 million firm. Today, he’s also one of only a handful of senior HR executives who sit on a company’s board of directors.

What has made it possible for Mason to sit at the boardroom table with the CEO and CFO when others haven’t? What career choices did he make to propel him to the top?

Indeed, what does it take for any human resources practitioner to achieve a successful career today? What are company heads looking for in people who will lead HR departments tomorrow? What skills are necessary now and in the future for the smart HR pro? Is financial expertise imperative? Is line management crucial? What about international assignments?

These questions don’t have easy answers. In fact, the answers could differ by industry and even company. If you’re to successfully manage your HR career in context with today’s overall business climate, however, you must give the questions careful consideration.

Evolving business trends forge changes in the HR field.
No one has to tell you, a human resources practitioner, that the HR profession is fundamentally different from just a few years ago, and is still changing. Led by the dramatic pace of change in business, caused in part by downsizings, increased global competition and technological advances, human resources professionals, numbering more than 450,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, face more complex concerns than ever before. In response to societal and workplace changes, the profession itself is in great flux.

“It’s the most frightening time, but also the most exciting time in the field of human resources,” says Jay Jamrog, director of research at the Human Resources Institute at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Certainly there’s lots of good news for the HR practitioner. The number of HR careers are projected to grow 22% by the year 2000, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) based in Alexandria, Virginia. What’s more, salaries continue to advance. According to a 1993 compensation survey by Crete, Illinois-based Abbott, Langer & Associates, the highest ranking HR executives in large companies earn $250,000 annually. And an SHRM study of 226 HR executives indicates that that figure is up 15% from 1992. According to the study, the top 226 HR executives’ average total cash compensation was $174,000 in 1993—a 14% increase—and their base salary grew 8% from $126,000 to $136,000.

What’s interesting is that more than ever, the people filling the HR profession have come into the field from other functions. According to the Personnel Journal 100 (December 1993), fully 28% of senior human resources executives in the top 100 U.S. companies have been in HR only five years or less. They previously worked in finance, information technology or other line functions.

What makes these transplants qualified to head human resources departments? All signs point to the changing nature of the profession. “It isn’t because these areas have anything better to offer than traditional human resources, but because the vision of the human resources responsibility is blurring,” says Beverly King, director of human resources at Los Angeles Water and Power. “For example, we’re bringing technology to bear on day-to-day HR delivery systems, such as training and self-paced learning. We also need people who understand finance because we’re handling compensation and benefits—and that’s big money. If you can’t master technology and finance, color you gone.”

This type of knowledge indeed is necessary for today’s HR professional. But what about tomorrow? What will the changing shape of business require?

Although no one knows entirely what individual HR practitioners are going to need to know as the profession changes, there’s a consensus that human resources practitioners who want upward mobility have a better chance as generalists. Such workplace issues as flexible work arrangements, virtual offices, contingency workers, business collaborations and partnershipping in new ways, such as “lending” and “renting” employees, make work life much more complicated. Consequently, people must be steeped in experiences from a variety of HR specialty areas.

There are other factors as well that point toward the generalist as the key HR player. First-line supervisors are taking greater responsibility for many tasks performed previously by HR, and outsourcing has eliminated almost completely certain jobs within companies. In fact, according to a 1994 study by Helen Axel at The Conference Board, based in New York City, 80% of executives interviewed already have outsourced services, such as 401(k) plan administration and management development programs—or will do so in the near future. In addition, companies such as Workforce Solutions, which was developed by Armonk, New York-based IBM to administer HR functions and operate as a profit center, are transforming the very way HR services are delivered and viewed.

“Given how many changes are coming about, having generalist skills are more important right now than being a specialist,” says Barbara Jack, manager of information services at Saratoga Institute Inc., a Silicon Valley research firm in California. “You might be hired for one area and that function might be outsourced or phased out. People with generalist skills who can move with changes in restructuring and reengineering are likely to achieve greater success.”

There’s no question, says Jack, that it’s no longer good enough to be steeped in one technical area; you have to be knowledgeable about many of them. And, you have to have an understanding of the bigger picture. Companies increasingly want HR departments to demonstrate directly the value they add to the organization. If a business is in high-growth mode, for example, and needs to deliver product to market quickly, HR needs to have hiring practices and training courses in place to get new employees up to speed immediately. This way, it contributes directly to the business solution.

Fred Foulkes, director of the Human Resources Policy Institute in the School of Management at Boston University, confirms that CEOs today are looking for different qualities in the people who will head up their HR function than they have previously. “It depends on their companies’ particular strategies, but clearly, they want people who are strategic thinkers, business partners, counselors who are willing to give the CEO bad news, if necessary, and tell it like it is,” he says. “They want people who can lead an effective function and be key members of the top team.”

Ron Mason embodies this “New HR” executive. He understands his company’s business. He understands the business of HR. And he understands the business of managing his own career development in a volatile marketplace. He synthesizes the qualities CEOs are looking for: business savvy and an appreciation of how to use human resources skills to bring out the best in employees.

Today’s HR professional must be a business partner.
Without question, a human resources practitioner first must be well grounded in the disciplines of the profession: recruitment, employee relations, training and development, benefits, compensation and managing change. But nearly as important is a good business sense.

“The traditional human resources person was a forms processor and a naysayer,” says Mason. “But today a human resources executive needs to be more of a business manager, a successful executive who understands the business complexities of the company and operates with that mindset. Successful HR individuals are able to articulate the HR technologies in the context of business realities.”

Indeed, experts agree: HR practitioners must have a business background. You’re expected to be up to speed on business terminology, understand the way general business functions, comprehend profit and loss, and be able to show a return on investments for programs and policies.

Even more, you need to understand how your individual company works. You have to know the climate in which your business is operating. What are the hot buttons? The key issues? What’s happening with your competitors? What are the potential change points in the business—and what are the non-negotiable items? If you don’t know, says Mason, it’s difficult to be credible and really understand the practicalities of what you can and can’t get done.

For example, at BBDO New York, Mason’s understanding of his company’s business needs is clearly illustrated in the compensation structure that he helped to establish. The company has two competing needs: to pay outside creative talent whatever the market dictates, and to create a compensation structure for regular day-to-day employees. “Most compensation structures try to put people in a specific band,” he says. “They homogenize everyone and dictate that they should be treated the same. That doesn’t recognize the uniqueness of our business.”

To accommodate the unusual nature of the advertising business, Mason had to do several things. First, he sat down with the people in the creative department to determine who the competition really was. Because Mason understands the advertising industry, he helped the creative department determine that it isn’t only large agencies that hire competing talent, but that small boutique agencies nurture new talent as well. Together they then did a market survey to focus on what competitors were paying their talent. After benchmarking the compensation at these agencies, Mason did a market survey against the industry in general to see what creative talent was being paid. Because BBDO wants to be an industry leader, it determined to pay its creative talent sufficiently to attract the brightest and the best. If Mason hadn’t understood his company’s business and goals, he might not have been able to come up with a structure that fit all the parameters.

Alfred Little Jr., vice president of human resources at Philadelphia-based Sun Company Inc., confirms the importance of knowing your business. It’s no longer good enough to be skilled in either one or several HR disciplines, he says: “You’ve got to be able to align that capability to the business interest of the enterprise for which you work.”

One way to do that, he says, is to get out of the corporate office and into the field. Spend time in the business units. Take every opportunity to talk with line people—marketing and operations people—and pick their brains. Ask them how they make the product, how the company makes its money.

Other HR people who have followed this route praise its effectiveness. They will tell you that you have to know the inner workings of your company’s operations if you’re to be respected.

Mason actually goes beyond just knowing the industry in which he works to learn about specific job functions and to gain cross-functional experience. He’s done these things for years.

While he was director of human resources at NBC, he worked as an assignment desk editor for WNBC for 18 weekends during a strike period. Although executives had the option of working or not, he viewed the strike as an important opportunity to go behind the scenes and learn about the work life of his clients. Likewise, when he was at Reader’s Digest, he spent time “living and breathing” sales. He went out on sales calls with the regular staff, trying to understand their daily operations and problems.

“The smartest thing I’ve done relative to my career has been to be continually interested in what my peers are doing outside my functional area,” he says. “I spend a great deal of time without an agenda, going in and asking people, ‘Will you teach me what you’re doing here and why you’re doing it?’ They treat me like a student and I get intimately involved in how these functional areas within the company operate.”

This type of training has additional benefits besides providing a means of gathering information. “The more I learned, the more people trusted me when I told them I might have a solution for one of their problems,” says Mason. Although some managers say that gaining expertise in this way is too complicated to arrange, Mason believes otherwise. You may not be able to work a steady shift at the broadcasting station or on the assembly line, he says, but you can engage in activities such as shadowing executives.

Marie Gambon agrees. As vice president for people at Boulder, Colorado-based Celestial Seasonings Inc., she knows that she has had greater credibility and is more effective by understanding the day-to-day workings of her business’s operations. Like Mason, Gambon has performed alongside her clients. She worked in communications, marketing support and HR during her 17 years at IBM. She later learned about doing business in a regulated company during her two and a half years in HR at USWest. “Cross-functional expertise is important because it makes you sensitive to the customer’s perspective,” she says. “It gives you credibility so you can give counsel.”

Expand your business knowledge to gain a world view.
Along with cross-functional training, HR professionals in today’s global market must get cross-cultural training. “A global mindset and international experience is becoming more and more important to people who want to progress in their careers,” says Foulkes. As a professor of management policy and a noted observer of the HR community, he says that attaining global skills is one of the hottest areas in human resources. “A number of people moving to top HR jobs have had international experience,” he says. They have spent extensive time in Europe or Asia.

It only makes sense. People in global companies need to have an appreciation and respect for different cultures. They must have cross-cultural communication capability and work well with individuals from multinational backgrounds. As many leading companies today view the enormous overseas markets longingly, they’re targeting their high-potential managers and offering them international experience.

Ramona Frazier, corporate manager of human resources for a leading retailer, tells people who ask her for career advice: “For mid-level managers looking to move up, international experience is more important than almost any other experience. Between NAFTA, the European Economic Community and trading with the Pacific Rim, we are in a borderless world.”

Getting that international experience is no small undertaking, she says. It begins with understanding global markets, international compensation and expatriate issues. “You need to understand where the company is going and how global business is going to impact it. The HR person needs to be able to provide input for strategic decisions the company is going to make; to be able to speak intelligently with colleagues.”

Says Jamrog: “Today it’s considered imperative to become aware of cross-cultural differences in the international marketplace. But, in the future it may become less important to go on international assignments if we couple two trends: the growing diversity of the U.S. work force and the interest of managers to become more aware of and value cultural differences.” There may come a time when the entire organization is trained cross-culturally—or at least values multicultural diversity. But it will take years before we see this kind of change.

Preparing for change must be an ongoing process.
HR pros need to adopt an attitude of a continual learner if they’re to succeed within the changing marketplace. Celestial Seasoning’s Gambon insists that continual learning is one crucial component that propels people to the top. For one, she says, “HR professionals must know state-of-the-art human resources issues. You must stay current with legislative issues and general business trends to be seen as a business expert.” She cites health care as an example. She says that HR professionals must know how different plans will affect the business community and your specific organization.

How do you stay current? According to Gambon, continual learning need not be very complicated. Take classes. Look at competitive analysis reports of your industry. Read The Wall Street Journal daily and other business publications regularly. Talk with individuals outside of HR to gain a greater breadth of exposure. It’s a matter of reading and understanding what’s going on in the world at large and the business community specifically. It’s a matter of taking responsibility for your own career development and looking at your own employability.

Gambon practices what she preaches. She takes classes on creativity, statistics, quality—all with an eye toward increasing her own understanding as well as sharing the new knowledge with people around her. “Very few human resources people stay current with business affairs,” she says. “Therefore, they lack business sensibility and very often aren’t taken seriously.”

King agrees that it’s critical to stay on the leading edge. She believes that you have to stay in touch with such issues as futurism and strategic planning if you’re going to pioneer new initiatives for your company.

Networking with people who are cutting-edge thinkers—both inside and outside of her organization—is one of the ways King remains a leader. The perspectives of others help her understand how—and when—new concepts can be made to fit her company.

That’s why she’s also a staunch advocate of mentors. “Have lots of them,” she says. “Have them in different places, not in one center of power because power shifts within an organization. Have them inside and outside of the organization so you have a perspective and have quick access. Have people who are multicultural. For women, have male mentors; for men, have female mentors. Have mentors who are specialists, generalists, rebels.”

King honed many of her interpersonal skills—her ability to relate well to others—through her mentors. An important mentor for King was Muriel Morse, the head of personnel in another department in the city of Los Angeles. Morse was five or six levels above King when she entered the business. “She’s a strong, dynamic, brilliant woman who has a powerful sense of volunteerism,” says King of Morse. The senior HR professional mentored King throughout her career climb, consistently answering questions for her and helping her develop such skills as how to motivate people, work with people who have diverse backgrounds and point people in the right career direction. When Morse retired and became a professor at the University of Southern California, the mentoring and friendship continued.

One of the advantages of having many mentors, especially in a profession that’s in such flux, is the different perspectives they offer. In a field that’s so diverse, in which you need to know so much, access to the opinions and knowledge of other individuals you trust is crucial. For instance, the current CEO of the Department of Water and Power has been another mentor for King. He’s Japanese American, an engineer and is one level above the personnel executive. She picked him as a mentor because he has an excellent sense of timing—knowing when the time is right for exploring particular issues or learning certain skills.

“Timing is everything at the executive level,” says King. “Early in your career, technical application is important. As you move into supervisory levels, interpersonal skills become more important because you’re helping people move toward goals.”

For example, King says that at this level you need to have the ability to form teams, to motivate people to achieve work goals and to work with people who have diverse backgrounds to find common goals within the organization to work toward.

Then, as you progress to managerial levels, King says that “vision is important.” What does she mean by vision? “It’s part timing, part knowledge, part judgment and part luck.”

Successful HR professionals guide their own careers.
King’s vision for her career doesn’t leave much to luck. During her 30 years in HR, she’s taken a thoughtful, deliberate approach to her own development.

For example, in 1976, when she was director of employee development at the utility, she was the highest-ranking woman and the youngest person ever at a section-head level. She already had experience in training, recruitment, wage and salary administration and employee relations. She had experience supervising large numbers of people. She also had a nursing degree.

However, she wasn’t content to rest on these laurels. Instead, King accepted a lateral career opportunity with no pay increase and formed a new section in human resources called occupational health and benefits. The move allowed her to build on her medical interests and nursing degree. A big believer in the benefits of being a generalist, King knew it would enhance her ability to be competitive for higher-level jobs. She was correct. In 1985, when the human resources director retired, King was promoted to the position.

“It isn’t good enough to be technically competent or to be a good manager over an existing situation,” she says. “You have to offer something for the future if you want to move to higher levels. For me, it was a willingness and a past track record of taking leading-edge issues and turning them into programs that served the company.”

For example, she’s been a leading proponent of innovative work/family programs in a male-dominated work environment (78% of the workers at Los Angeles Water and Power are males). Her organization has a reputation of being very progressive. She also helped establish an extensive in-house EAP program that does trauma response, and more recently is investigating the possibility of partnering with health-care providers to achieve better control of health-care dollars.

Mason is another person who has directed his own career. From the time he left academia, he had in mind to move into the number-one HR position at a major company. Each job that he took between leaving the college and joining BBDO New York was one he strategically sought out as a step to reach that goal.

He started out his human resources career as head of corporate EEO at NBC. When he took this position, it was with the understanding that he would eventually move into an HR generalist position. He did within a few years. While there, he learned to work within a highly creative environment. His move to Reader’s Digest, which was going through some cultural change with which he became involved, gave him additional experience that prepared him for his eventual position with BBDO.

Certainly, HR professionals such as Mason face daunting challenges today. These complexities make building a career quite a task. “Individuals have to take responsibility for managing their own careers these days, particularly after they’ve been on an assignment for two or three years,” says Foulkes. “It’s recognizing what the company’s core competencies are and what’s really important in the business.”

Then, says Foulkes, you must find ways to get what you need, whether it’s through formalized training, general guidance or mentors. For example, because of globalization, you ought to be thinking about how to get international experience that will help you in the future. This doesn’t necessarily mean becoming an expatriate. You can travel, be involved in professional organizations with large international components or lead task forces that deal with global issues.

Furthermore, networking is crucial. Not only within the company, but outside as well. It keeps you abreast of trends and maintains crucial contacts. Of course, it becomes more difficult to sustain outside, non-core activities as the daily work situation becomes busier because of restructuring and increasing responsibilities.

Jack believes that today’s environment of constant change requires negotiating through an interesting maze to continue to propel your career forward. “No matter how many changes and restructuring organizations undergo, human assets always will be the most valuable,” she says. “Without them, the company can’t run.

“This really is the time to show how HR can impact the bottom line,” she says. “Every time a business issue surfaces, ask what is the human component of that change. Then ask what human resources can do to affect that component. For example, do we need different training to provide new skills? Do we need to incent people differently via the compensation package to reinforce the business objectives?”

Today, HR pros are expected to learn the business of business as well as the broad spectrum of HR technologies. Moreover, you need to develop an attitude that continues to build confidence in the people whom you support.

Even more, though, the profession is in the process of redefinition. “Aside from problem solving, HR executives need to effectively challenge the status quo and bring new perspectives to the thinking of people in the organization,” explains Sun Company’s Little. Because of this redefinition, he’s very optimistic about the future of human resources. “I believe HR will become substantially more important in the context of all the disciplines that support the business enterprise. Today, capital is relatively easy to obtain; technology generally is readily available; and barriers to entering your market segment aren’t nearly as impenetrable as they once were because of all the different ways in which a company can enter the market.

“So what’s left that distinguishes your company from others?” It’s people. “Today, we know that it’s our people who will propel us forward,” says Little. “We want to create bigger, more complex jobs to release the energy and creativity of individuals. People are the number-one and most sustainable source of competitive advantage, and will continue to be so through the rest of the ’90s and into the 21st century. And, that’s why human resources becomes even more crucial.”

The workplace of the 1990s is a paradox. Cellular phones, portable faxes and pocket-sized computers with wireless modems allow us to work in offices without walls. We fax documents and pick up messages anytime, anywhere. Videoconferencing is commonplace. Virtual offices and universal information access are just an eyeblink away.

But, while that whiz-bang technology hurtles us forward, work/family issues are in a 1980s time warp. At the same time that technology frees us to have greater flexibility and autonomy, when it comes to work/family balance, corporate cultures are largely inflexible.

Sure, there are a lot of new programs, encouraging our experts. Indeed, a handful of visionaries and innovative organizations are setting standards. But systemic change is as rare as an office without computers. Managers still guard employees who are tethered to their desks from nine to five. Millions of employees still break into a sweat when their children have a fever or school is closed because of snow. People still prefer to say they have car trouble rather than child-care problems. Workers still get little support in caring for their elderly parents, school-age children or teens. People don’t believe they can take leave or use flex time without jeopardizing their careers.

Personnel Journal wondered why. We asked: Just how far has corporate America come with regard to work/family issues? Which programs are of greatest value to employees? Which ones benefit companies? How frequently do businesses use specific work/family strategies? What are the obstacles?

We wanted to know if American business is at a crossroads, as some experts suggest. What is the business case for recognizing the impact of personal lives in the workplace? Can organizations empower employees for the benefit of work-related activities and not expect them to want greater personal freedom and autonomy? What responsibilities fall to employees and to the public sector? Are organizations on the cusp of quantum change? Indeed, is human resources even asking the right questions?

To answer some of these questions, Personnel Journal formed a Work/ Family Advisory Board of 13 acknowledged experts, including HR professionals, academics and consultants (see “Who’s Who on Personnel Journal’s Work/Family Advisory Board”). We also spoke with politicians and industry analysts. We developed a report card and asked each expert to grade corporate America—A through F—on a variety of work/family initiatives. The experts graded each initiative on its value to the company and to the employee, and then they graded the frequency with which these options are used.

We compiled their grades and translated them into averages. We then gave them a chance to explain their assessments and speak out on issues. Their scores and ideas serve to benchmark what’s working and what isn’t. The report card serves as a tool to stimulate discussion, and by its very nature is subjective (see, “The Value of Most Programs Far Exceeds Their Use”).

Our initial goal in creating the report card was to determine which programs work best, both in terms of employee satisfaction and return on investment. Our naive theory was that some program or programs work best, and that it would be useful to the HR community to identify them. In fact, experts suggest that some programs do work better than others and many programs have critical value.

Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter as much as we thought it would. Instead, the process of researching this story led to some surprising discoveries. We learned that our initial question, although not wrong, was incomplete. In the interviews that explored the grades that were assigned on the report card, we learned that the prevailing strategy—imposing new programs on old systems—never will be wholly successful. Indeed, the experts suggest that nothing less than a fearless examination of fundamental corporate values—and the societal values they reflect—is called for.

That assertion is unsettling, dramatic and ahead of its time. Some will find it outrageous. Yet the wisdom offered by our panel of experts is hard to ignore. It simply makes sense that if the ways in which employees work—and the very work that employees do—are changing, and families are changing, then the ways in which employees manage their family and life commitments also are changing.

Clearly, then, any meaningful understanding of the issue begins with an understanding of the work force.

Today’s work force requires synchronicity between home- and job-life.
According to New York City-based Catalyst, females make up 45.6% of the working population, and one of the fastest-growing segments of the work force is women who have young children. In fact, 40% of all women in the labor force have children under 18. Looking at it another way, of women who have children younger than 18 years old, 67.2% hold jobs. This is up 20% since 1975. On top of that, the percentage of men who have wives in the workplace has increased dramatically, and single fathers now are among one of the fastest-growing segments of the work force.

At the same time, the population is aging. The Boston-based consulting firm Work/Family Directions Inc. indicates that 16% of workers have elder-care responsibilities, and that figure will escalate during the next three to four years.

The data point to the perennial challenge: A changing work force means organizations must help people manage their multiple responsibilities. But numbers don’t illustrate the urgency. They don’t show the frantic early-morning rush as parents whisk kids out of bed, feed them, and drop them off at school, all the while worrying that a tardy child will make them late for work. Statistics don’t show the split-second timing that workers live with daily—the knotting stomachs from traffic jams that mean their child will be the last one picked up at day care. They don’t depict mothers and fathers who fidget in late afternoon meetings because they can’t get to a phone to be sure their school-age child arrived safely at home, or the ones who lie to their supervisors because the babysitter is late.

Data can’t capture the angst of worrying about an elderly relative, of agonizing over mounds of indecipherable paperwork to receive scant elder-care assistance. Figures don’t portray the anxiety employees encounter in daily conflict between their work and family responsibilities.

The numbers aren’t percentages; they’re human beings. And, as companies search for ways to attract and retain good employees—productive human beings—they must address their concerns.

What’s being done?
As the report card suggests, progressive companies already have begun addressing these issues by implementing programs. Their actions have propelled work/family issues into the mainstream agenda, making them legitimate business concerns. Dependent-care benefits are standard now at many companies, and flexibility policies have grown—most dramatically within the last five years—even as business suffered a downturn. In fact, recent years have shown that family-friendly policies increase during downsizings, mergers and acquisitions.

Ellen Galinsky, co-president of New York City-based Families and Work Institute and a foremost authority in the field, says: “If you think back 10 years ago, it’s amazing that anything is happening because there was such a staunch conviction that family problems should be left at home.”

All you have to do is look at the Corporate Reference Guide to Work/Family Programs by Galinsky and colleagues Dana Friedman and Carol Hernandez to know something is happening. The 1991 study, sponsored by Families and Work Institute, surveyed 188 of the largest companies in 30 industries from aerospace to utilities. In the study, almost all major businesses acknowledge that employees need help to balance work and family responsibilities. Of these companies, 100% offer maternity leave, 88% offer part-time work (70% have written policies), 77% offer flextime (most with a band of one to two hours), 48% have job-sharing arrangements (although formal policies are rare) and 68% said they’re developing or seriously considering new programs.

In addition, an estimated 5,600 employers provide child-care support, and 300 of these provide elder-care support, according to the study. Based on the study’s results, quality child care—not just any child care—is on the agenda.

“These kinds of solutions do matter,” acknowledges Galinsky. “For example, people who have more child-care breakdowns are more stressed; those who pay a higher proportion of their family income for child care have more conflict.”

Just look at the statistics: Twenty-five percent of employees who have children under age 12 experience child-care breakdowns two to five times every three months. This translates into higher absenteeism, tardiness and lower concentration. In fact, according to a survey for Fortune magazine by Galinsky and Diane Hughes, the average worker loses between seven and nine work days a year; approximately half of these absences may be due to family problems. Presumably if companies have more programs that meet the needs of workers and lessen their stress, these drops in productivity will diminish as well.

Work/family initiatives address business as well as employee needs.
Leading advocates know that demonstrating a strong business case for work/family initiatives means forward momentum. Research by Work/Family Directions asserts that spending $1 on family-resource programs yields more than $2 in direct-cost savings. Catalyst’s Marcia Brumit Kropf confirms this. “We found such a direct connection between retaining experienced women and offering reduced-work arrangements that it’s very important for companies to think about,” says Brumit Kropf, who is vice president of research and advisory services.

To establish such facts, some leading companies are participating in research themselves. Thirty percent of the companies making up The Conference Board’s Work and Family Research and Advisory Panel have evaluated their programs to measure the impact on retention of valuable employees, improved productivity, reduced employee stress and increased employee effectiveness. Some of these companies—especially the large companies—have discovered advantages and have responded. In fact, nearly 90% say they’ve increased or improved programs since 1991.

A good example is New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson Co., manufacturer of health-care products and an acknowledged leader in advancing the work/family agenda. The company’s Balancing Work and Family Program consists of a range of 11 programs, including: child- and elder-care resource-and-referral, on-site child-development centers, flexible work schedules and paid time off for short-term emergency care. More significantly, company management devotes resources to teach its family-friendly philosophy to managers and supervisors.

Evaluations in 1990 and 1992 by the company revealed that training and adapting corporate culture makes a big difference. During a financially tough period for Johnson & Johnson—when people were working longer hours and jobs were more demanding because of the economy—employees were more likely to say that company culture and their individual supervisors were understanding of competing needs of their job and family life. People indicated that they felt supervisors were responsive to those issues and supported flexible time arrangements and leave policies. In the 1992 study, 53% indicated that they believed work/family policies improved the day-to-day work environment and that their jobs interfered less with family life. Employees were more loyal to the company, were more satisfied with their jobs, and overall, were less stressed. Furthermore, the programs were important in their decision to stay at Johnson & Johnson.

Marriott International, based in Washington, D.C., is another organization that evaluates work/family issues in a business perspective. The giant in the hospitality industry began implementing core companywide work/family solutions approximately five years ago. Moreover, Marriott’s focus remains unique: delivering services to lower-income workers. The company is creating new alternatives for these employees. “One of the most important things we’ve learned is the complexities that exist in the lives of our field population,” says Donna Klein, director of work/life programs. “Most of the work/family solutions are focused at a fairly sophisticated population in terms of education and ability to pay. Those solutions break down as family income decreases.”

The business case for these field workers is somewhat different from that for higher wage earners. Certainly recruiting and retention is important, but it isn’t as costly as it would be to recruit and retain an engineer. The cost justification is customer service. Corporate staff at headquarters doesn’t directly deliver quality; the people who work in the hotels and restaurants do.

Tackling a new population of workers brings new complications. “It’s different when you’re asking people to pay for child care and it means choosing between putting food on the table and caring for their children,” says Klein. “The most valuable services for these employees are the ones in the community.”

But, to help link employees to community services is an overwhelming task. Each community is different, employees tend to move around, and language is a factor. “This is a whole new realm of work/life issues,” says Klein. “We’re just starting to figure it out. But, certainly, the way we’ve done business in the past needs to be radically changed.”

Businesses need healthy communities to thrive.
Most often, large companies such as Marriott lead the way in developing work/family policies. This doesn’t have to be the case, however. Researchers from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and its Graduate School of Business studied Fel-Pro, Inc., an Illinois-based manufacturer of automotive-sealing products. The company only has approximately 2,000 employees, but provides myriad life-cycle benefits, including on-site child care, summer day camp and college scholarships for employees’ children. (Cost of a work/family benefits package at Fel-Pro is $700 per employee per year.)

Researchers wanted to know if family-responsive policies had any effect on important, non-traditional aspects of performance, such as voluntary behaviors that show initiative and willingness to participate in organizational change. The study verified that employees who use work/family programs have the highest job-performance evaluations—traditional and non-traditional—and the highest commitment to the company. They are good citizens at work who help out co-workers and supervisors and volunteer for activities. The more workers use Fel Pro’s benefits, the more they participate in changes taking place at the company, and the more they support company efforts towards total quality improvement. More importantly, 92% say they appreciate the benefits, recognizing that they make it easier to balance their work and personal lives.

“We characterized it as a culture of mutual commitment between employee and employer. That’s how it’s translated into work performance,” says Susan J. Lambert, principal investigator. The research demonstrates that Fel-Pro’s family-responsive policies send a message about the kind of company it is: Show that people are valued, and in turn people respond, she says.

Lambert says that the programs positively affect work performance, flexibility and openness to organizational change. “All day long, workers make decisions about whether they’re going to go that extra step, whether they’re going to put in that extra effort for a customer,” she says. “[Having the programs] affects how they’ll respond to total quality management, participation in quality circles and submission of suggestions. All that is voluntary.”

As with Fel-Pro, most companies start work/family programs in direct response to an emerging business need. Michael Wheeler of the Conference Board has seen improvement in this area during the last five years. “The work-and-family field is expanding. Programs are taking on a broader focus because companies recognize that these issues go beyond preschoolers. They include elder care, school-age child care and flexibility.”

These are important areas to explore. For instance, there are more than 20 million children between 10 and 15 years old who are woefully underserved. School-age child care is just beginning to be a visible problem. A recent Conference Board survey showed that child care for school-age children is a growing concern for corporate leaders. It may be in the experimental stage, but at least 80% say that the business case for taking care of this need is as compelling as it is for preschool care.

“We’re starting to make headway in child care and elder care. These aren’t perceived as women’s issues anymore,” says Karen Leibold, director of Work/ Family Programs at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based The Stride Rite Corp. She should know. Her company is one of a handful that operate intergenerational centers for seniors and children. The Intergenerational Day Care Center provides 79 day-care slots for children 15 months old to 6 years old and people older than 60; half of the spaces are reserved for low-income elders and children.

But, she adds, “We’re at a crossroads as to how we’re going to respond [to the increasing family needs of workers.] It isn’t even in the hands of individual companies anymore. It’s going to take a national effort.”

Some of that effort is beginning. Collaboration among businesses, non-profit organizations and community agencies is a future trend. Witness the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care, a turning point in collaboration that brings together 137 organizations and funds them with $26.3 million. The partnership will increase quality and supply of infant-, child-, and elder-care services in 25 states. The catalyst was Armonk, New York-based International Business Machines Corp. in consultation with Work/Family Directions. Other leaders of the group include Allstate Insurance Co., American Express Co., Amoco Corp., AT&T Co., Eastman Kodak Co, Exxon Corp., Johnson & Johnson, Motorola Inc., Travelers Cos. and Xerox Corp. Even some very small companies participate. Scitor Corp., a Silicon Valley software company, for example, has only 180 employees.

The partnership is a huge move forward. It creates a community response. After its first year, the impact was immense. The project funded 153 school-age child-care programs, 22 projects for the elderly and 110 programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

“This kind of leadership should be applauded,” says Ellen Gannett, the associate director of the School-age Child-care Project at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women in Wellesley, Massachusetts. “It’s visionary. Although research may not be able to quantify these programs as an effort-equals-output one-to-one correlation, these aren’t altruistic efforts; they’re business issues.”

Gannett says it goes far beyond employee productivity. “A community that’s healthy, where families and children—and employees—are thriving because they feel aided by services, supports business. Where there’s violence, poor education, fear and a sense of helplessness, businesses don’t do well. Healthy communities are where businesses thrive.”

What are the barriers?
If work/ family initiatives improve employee morale, productivity, retention and recruitment, alternatives to help people cope with their multiple roles should be as common—and handy—as cellular phones. Programs should exist for all ages and for people at all income brackets. They should be available in small companies as well as large. But this isn’t so.

And why not? Some companies cite cost as a factor, rationalizing that programs are just too expensive to implement and maintain. But it’s more than cost: It’s culture.

Says Representative Patricia Schroeder (D-Colorado): “There’s an attitude in this country that you shouldn’t have children unless you can afford them; that there should be someone staying home full time to care for them. If you don’t have that [care], then you aren’t supposed to have [children].”

Part of the reason that this attitude prevails, Schroeder says, is because most CEOs and decision makers still have traditional families. “It’s hard to understand these issues if you’ve had a wife in the traditional sense to handle these problems. When [the executives] hear ‘child care,’ they think ‘babysitting.’ It isn’t the same urgency.”

Unfortunately, this parochial attitude is ingrained in our culture. “It’s a deeply held belief that responding to family issues is inconsistent with business results,” says Fran Sussner Rodgers, founder and CEO of Work/Family Directions. “That’s despite the fact that research shows it to be either positive or neutral in terms of business strategy. It’s culturally rooted. We’ve gone about as far as we can go without getting more jugular; without examining our attitudes.”

That examination must begin with a hard look at the gap between the policies and theories and the actual practice. For example, business is exceedingly resistant when it comes to flexibility. Witness a 1993 Work/Family Directions study of 80 top U.S. corporations, employing 2.4 million workers. Although 85% of these companies say they offer flexible work programs, fewer than 2% of employees use telecommuting, job sharing and part-time schedules, and only 24% use flextime. Furthermore, only half of the companies have written policies regarding their flexible work options, and even then, most policies are subject to the discretion of managers.

One essential flaw in the system is the concept of face time: the antiquated notion that productivity and loyalty can be measured by how many hours a day you work at the office. “It’s almost unconscious how people are evaluated,” says Rodgers. “It goes beyond face time. It’s the way people are thought about in terms of ambition and how they’ll be developed in the future.” Appraisal systems, compensation systems and career-management systems all reinforce the old attitudes.

One would think that if companies offer flexible work arrangements and family supports (such as leave) to help employees cope during difficult phases of their lives, people would take advantage of them. However, the system puts pressure on high performers because everyone knows they run the risk of being seen as not serious. As a result, they either don’t take advantage of work/family supports or they’re never developed fully and may eventually leave the company.

This comes out in palpable frustration from employees who want to contribute more at work but can’t because they need help with their dependent care. They need more flexibility and control over the hours and conditions of work, and they need a corporate culture in which they aren’t punished because they have families.

Data on flexibility are so clear that it’s astounding that it isn’t the accepted mode of doing business. Consider Charlotte, North Carolina-based NationsBank’s pilot program launched in 1987 for professionals who wanted to work part time. It was so successful that the next year, the company extended the program throughout the company, renaming part-time to SelectTime. The program retained valuable employees. Two-thirds of the associates said they would have left the bank rather than continue full time, and 70% of them have been at the bank for at least five years. Nearly everyone interviewed reported that the program reduces stress; most associates and their managers stated that they were more efficient and effective than when they worked full time because they were more focused and spent less time on non-work activities.

Although a recent Catalyst study found flexible work arrangements more common and more formalized than they were in 1989, many companies still don’t offer flexible work arrangements at all. Brumit Kropf will tell you that most often effective alternatives depend on a supportive manager. “People are aware of these issues, but they don’t know how to [carry them out],” she says. “They come up against barriers within the structure of the organization that keep them from implementing these things.”

For example, a firm driven on billable hours poses tremendous problems. If the company uses a head-count system instead of a full-time equivalent system, managers look less productive to leadership if they have part-timers. Another culprit? Payroll systems that automatically trigger overtime pay if someone works more than eight hours in one day. In that scenario, an employee and supervisor may agree on a flexible schedule, but can’t work within the system.

Training is imperative for both managers and employees.
Organizational structures aren’t the only obstacles, however. More often, people are. For example, managers aren’t trained to work within flexible arrangements. Neither are workers. Take a look at telecommuting. It’s a classic conflict of reality butting up against tradition. People often are more productive at home than in the office. They have fewer interruptions from co-workers and the freedom to work when energy is highest. However, because most organizations don’t judge employees on performance, traditional underlying fears prevail. Managers wonder how to be sure employees are working if they can’t see them.

“It’s difficult for managers to readjust; to deal with employees who come and go at different times, who might be working at home for some of the time,” says Brumit Kropf. “They have to re-think how to monitor work progress. It isn’t just related to hours in the office. They have to rethink how they share information, how they arrange meetings, how work flows.”

Other real-life questions present themselves, too. How do managers help develop teams at the same time that part of the work force is off site? How do they replicate the casual information exchange over the water cooler? How do they keep people in the loop when they’re out of sight?

It comes back to fundamental change. Flexible work hours have been around for a long time, but traditionally have been used only on a special-case basis. Flexibility has been handed out to the privileged few, to the best people as a perk. That’s different from allowing an entire department flexibility. Moving from an informal to a formal policy causes a lot of anxiety.

“There are still lots of misconceptions about the effectiveness of working at home,” says Karol Rose, principal for Work/Family at Fort Lee, New Jersey-based Kwasha Lipton and author of Work & Family: Program Models and Policies. “Another misconception is that people think they can handle child care while they work at home. They can’t.”

She says that what people really need to deal with is gaining control over their lives. If flexible hours give people control to work in synch with their biological clocks, they accomplish more; if they work better when there aren’t so many distractions, they get more done. Flexibility gives people a sense of control and autonomy.

Rose cautions that workers need to be taught to use flex hours successfully. They need to think through the problems that might arise, how they’re going to organize themselves and where they will work. It requires different discipline. “You’re talking about real culture change when you talk about how work gets done and where people are,” she says. “The programmatic things don’t shake up an organization in the same ways as having people work at home. Flexibility gets at the essence of what the workplace is about,” she says.

Managers already have become more sophisticated, says Barney Olmsted, co-director of San Francisco-based New Ways to Work. She believes they have a greater understanding of the issues because she has seen tremendous strides in the last five years—an acceptance that employees can’t just leave family issues behind when they walk into work. But, she also sees much resistance to flexible work arrangements. “These issues aren’t programmatic; they’re essential to the culture. Programs begin to change the culture, but they aren’t a culture change by themselves. Programs reach only so deep. Flexibility is the next step.”

Olmsted doesn’t see this as strictly a work/family issue, but instead a labor-allocation issue. Work/family is one realm that’s pushing it, but global economics is pushing it as well. Flexible work arrangements mean the ability to reallocate hours of labor without hire/fire ramifications.

Like it or not, it’s probable that flexible work arrangements will be imperative in the future. “Once you celebrate individuals and empower them, rigidity doesn’t fit anymore,” says Susan Seitel, president of Work and Family Connections, a Minnetonka, Minnesota-based consulting firm that publishes Work and Family Newsbrief. “Employees will have to take responsibility, too. They need to be honest about their needs, to assess what home-life problems may arise. They need to stop gossiping and start approaching their supervisors with these issues as they do in other business interactions.”

Everyone has a stake in creating change, says Olmsted. “It starts off with a few true believers who test it out and get data. Then a few more follow. It’s an attitudinal process. It has to get into people’s accepted way of doing things.”

What’s at stake?
The accepted way of doing things—and of thinking about things—must change if we’re to forge ahead. For example, “The numbers look better if you look at the fortunate 500,” says Elizabeth Hirschhorn from the Center on Work and Family at Boston University. But smaller companies are far behind. “Direct services and programs still haven’t penetrated the majority of employers.” Hirschhorn’s words take on deep meaning when you consider that the Small Business Administration says that small businesses employ more than half of all workers in the private sector.

Every segment of society therefore must address the challenges of balancing work and family issues. We must view business’s role in the community, and look at the actual jobs people do and how they spend their time at work. For instance, Galinsky hopes future visionaries will look at what happens at the workplace all day—the negative spillover to home-life. She’s begun to examine the work environment and its effects on family life, child development and marriage.

Some experts say we need to evaluate not only the way people work but the amount of time people work. “The number of working hours has reached a limit that people are finding untenable,” says Juliet B. Schor, Harvard University professor and author of The Overworked American. “People are moving more in the direction of preferring time over money.” If they’re given these options without career suicide, they’ll take time.

Schor believes that family-supportive programs are helpful, but don’t get at underlying core issues, such as the importance of family and non-work relationships. She echoes others when she asks if people really prefer to send their children sick to day-care programs, for example, rather than have the possibility of tending to their ill children themselves.

Although each expert has a different perspective, they agree that the work/ family field remains fragmented. Corporate America is still reacting in a piecemeal way when there’s a crucial need for integration. Everything—policies, programs, benefits, communications and training—should fit together.

“In this country, we’re off the charts in everything you don’t want. We have the highest divorce rate, alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence,” says Representative Schroeder. “A lot of it is because of the stress we put on families. It costs a lot in the workplace—in days off and health-care costs. People can’t be efficient workers if all this is going on around them.” Just look at these numbers. Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck & Company Inc. estimates that losing one exempt employee costs approximately 1.5 times the individual’s salary; nonexempt about .75 times. The average adjustment period for a new employee is approximately 12.5 months. In addition, Corning, New York-based Corning Inc. estimates that it saves $2 million a year through increased employee retention attributable to career and family initiatives.

Clearly, corporate America is at a crossroads. We need to look at work/ family issues as reciprocal, allowing individuals to be clear about personal commitments and giving business tools to get the job done in a way that makes sense.

We need to train managers in new ways to work with employees, to train employees so they have the tools to take responsibility to get work done in new ways. We need to invest in the technology that allows people to work in different ways. And we need to provide more basic support of people throughout their life transitions, regardless of their status as white- or blue-collar workers. The public sector must get involved and help the private sector support people.

Until attitudes change and family-responsive practices are accepted as part of the way business is done, they’ll continue to be treated as a marginal issue. Once they’re totally accepted, many things will change. Flexibility will be mainstream, there will be more money from the private and public sectors for dependent-care resources, and people will be able to move up in the organization unencumbered by old ways of thinking. They’ll be able to give their best to their employer regardless of their family status.

“There’s no way to overstate how challenging it is,” says Klein. “When something is as complex as how to blend and manage work-life and community-life into one workable existence, you’re talking about every segment of society. We can’t look back in history to see how it was done. We’re still just inventing.”

When Kristine Stuart, Manager for Human Resources Planning and Policy for Chevron Overseas Petroleum, Inc. asked a group of employees with experience living overseas to evaluate Chevron’s relocation program, one of the important components listed was the expatriate manual. This simple device is the first step in preparing employees to go abroad.

Even though manuals are valuable, they’re not frequently used. Part of the reason for this, says Laura McMillan of Dallas-based KPMG Peat Marwick, is that many companies don’t have standard policies. Effective expatriate manuals articulate policy clearly. In fact, companies may have individuals who try to circumvent the system that’s in place in order to get better benefits. “You get into a lot of problems when you do everything on a one-time basis, she points out. “You’ll have everyone trying to develop their own personal package.” The manual reflects a strategic policy. This is the first step.

Another key problem, according to Kathryn Devos of Kenilworth, New Jersey-based Schering-Plough, is the mistake of thinking that international relocation is similar to domestic relocation. “Domestic relocation policy is real estate driven. International policy is people driven,” she says.

Effective international relocation policy also must focus on cross-cultural issues and psychological factors that will affect the expatriate’s success. It has to take into account a raft of other financial considerations such as educational expenses, travel expenses and compensation for alterations in the standard of living.

Start by determining the objectives. Obviously, you’re not going to write down specific compensation packages, but the general guidelines of eligibility and level of employee can be included. It’s important to define benefits because most of us are geared to benefits as they apply in the U.S. For example, pension and 401(k) plan participation may be affected by time spent in a foreign company. Vacation policies are different from one country to another.

Other items to address are: compensation packages, tax reimbursement policy, procedures regarding U.S. real estate—sales vs. rentals—through local management agencies.

A detailed, country-specific appendix can list some of the cultural and business

differences as well as the types of premiums for certain countries. For example, firms compensate expatriates going to the desert in Africa with hardship allowances while they may not do that for those going to Paris.

Define who the manual applies to. Will it be for U.S. employees only or for third-country nationals as well? How does it pertain to multinational employees coming to the U.S.? Does the policy apply to short-term assignees?

“A manual avoids people using leverage to cut their own deal, which would create problems with morale in the host locations,” says Per A. Thorsrud of KPMG Peat Marwick. “It’s very important.”

Finally, include information about repatriation. General policies and guidelines are important so expatriates and potential expatriates know they are not forgotten when they’re abroad. All too frequently, expatriates leave the company after they return to the U.S. Often, this is simply due to lack of planning and communication by management.

Veronica and Luis Viada are a success story. They’ve lived in seven countries as varied as Honduras and Hong Kong. They had a baby in El Salvador and a spacious home in Manila. They carpooled kids to school in Caracas and Istanbul. All because Luis worked for Citibank.

Over the 16-year course of their expatriate assignments, the Viadas conducted a normal, albeit exotic, life. They were able to acclimate to each new location, whether it was a four-bedroom home with servants or a dilapidated house in a questionable neighborhood. And Citibank management was delighted every time the family reestablished its routine of schooling, swimming lessons and social engagements. The Viadas’ knack for resuming normal life benefited the company’s bottom line: Luis was able to focus on his work.

But it wasn’t mere luck. Citibank knew what it was doing. The company recruited Luis from a master’s degree program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He spoke four languages, had lived overseas when he was growing up and had an avid interest in international affairs. “They wanted to build up an international staff,” recalls Luis. “They told me, ‘We’re looking for internationalists. Don’t worry, we’ll make you a banker.’ ” They not only taught him the necessary skills, they also provided human resources support in each country.

The Viada’s Citibank experience stands in stark contrast to most corporations. Its success with the Viadas reveals a major contradiction in the way companies approach the global workplace. Ninety percent of the time, businesses select employees for overseas assignments not for their cross-cultural fluency, but for their technical expertise, according to a 1992 survey of 50 Fortune 500 companies by International Orientation Resources (IOR). Companies use previous overseas experience and interest only 20% to 30% of the time, and cultural sensitivity, interpersonal skills, adaptability and flexibility—all traits proven successful in foreign assignments—only 10% of the time. Usually HR isn’t even involved. And, even after the assignments are made, only 58% of companies surveyed by Windham International and the National Foreign Trade Council provide any cross-cultural preparation.

Does this process work? Not really. Most experts agree that 20% to 25% of all assignments fail. Experts define failed assignments as either employees who return to the United States prematurely or expatriates who are unable to achieve business objectives.

Contrary to expectations, however, the majority of these failures have nothing to do with job skills. The IOR survey discovered that about 60% of them fail because of family difficulties. It’s little wonder: Family members often are treated as after-thoughts. The Windham survey revealed that spouses are included in preselection interviews only 21% of the time, and only half of them receive cross-cultural training, even when it’s offered to their partners.

Most current strategies are insufficient.
As we enter the 21st century, HR must question these short-term, provincial tactics. Why aren’t international HR specialists involved in the selection process? Why isn’t HR a partner in the global business strategy of the company? Where are the American-based language and cross-cultural resources that will allow individuals to conduct business internationally; and where is the critical HR support in the host country? Gary M. Wederspahn of Prudential Relocation Intercultural Services in Boulder, Colorado, suggests that international HR professionals aren’t partners in global planning and implementation because they don’t “speak the language of business—dollars gained, saved or lost.” They use anecdotal data and don’t quantify crucial information.

There’s a lot at stake. The dollars-and-cents of an overseas tour rings in at about three times annual base salary. In some countries, the cost is substantially greater. Failed assignments easily add about $100,000 in moving and travel expenses, not counting wasted time and money in pre-assignment site visits, training and replacement. But, it’s more than money. One major faux pas can ruin customer goodwill; ignorant remarks can devastate a firm’s reputation; an international fiasco can wreak havoc on the career of a rising star. These costs are incalculable and jeopardize long-term business opportunities.

Even assignments that succeed are at risk with these primitive methods. Just ask John L. Graham. “HR strategies are about five to 10 years behind business strategies,” says the author of three books on international business negotiations and the associate dean of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Irvine.

“In the U.S., when you hire somebody, you tend to hire someone just like yourself. If you were a Wharton grad, you hire a Wharton grad,” Graham says. Of course, that doesn’t work in the dynamic international arena where diversity reigns. It leads to a lot of failures abroad.

Furthermore, Graham says, because the human resources function is very conservative, it is difficult to change these fundamental procedures. He warns, however, that if we don’t fix HR policies, “… we’re going to come up with brilliant corporate strategies that we can’t implement. Not only will people be unhappy if they’re given [overseas] jobs they can’t perform, but we’ll waste a lot of money.”

“The selection process is fundamentally flawed,” concurs Michael S. Schell, president of Windham International, a New York-based global relocation-management company. “Expatriate assignments rarely fail because the person cannot accommodate to the technical demands of the job. The expatriate selections are made by line managers based on technical competence. They fail because of family and personal issues and lack of cultural skills that haven’t been part of the process.”

Underestimating the importance of cultural differences is dangerous. Compare these proverbs, for example: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” vs. “The pheasant would not be shot but for its crying.” They are two completely opposite approaches to the same situation. Such cultural differences as making eye contact, knowing when to smile and using formal or informal names dramatically affect business negotiations and interpersonal relationships abroad. When expatriates don’t understand cross-cultural issues and can’t speak the language of the country in which they’re doing business, creative solutions to business problems aren’t put on the table; business dealings quickly turn adversarial.

Look at Japan, for example. According to Graham, more than 20,000 Japanese who work in the U.S. speak fluent English. Only 200 Americans working in Japan can claim to speak Japanese fluently when they go over. It’s no wonder that the U.S. has the largest trade deficit with its second largest trading partner. “If we had better language skills, we could do a better job overseas,” he says.

Steve Henry is reminded often of the enormous cultural differences in conducting business abroad. The vice president for sales and support with Milwaukee-based Allen-Bradley Company has lived in Tokyo for almost three years. Every time a colleague from the U.S. visits Japan, he sees the importance of cross-cultural literacy. “After 30 minutes of going around the table and people discussing things 10 times, the Americans are going crazy,” he says. “I tell them it drives me crazy, too, but you have to sit back and listen and listen and listen, even though you know the outcome will be the same. You have to do it so business can proceed. Otherwise, [the Japanese] will become quiet and intimidated because they think you’re moving too fast.”

Graham points out just one of the many paradoxes U.S. businesspeople face. The Japanese seldom like to say, “no.” They may ask a counter question, simply look away or even leave the room. People from the U.S. want to know where they stand in straightforward talk. In order to effectively deal abroad, expatriates have to understand business and cultural practices.

Human resources can’t ignore family issues.
In addition to learning new business or job skills, expatriates must deal with profound personal issues. They must close up living quarters in the United States and find new ones overseas, open bank accounts and get driver’s licenses. If they have children, they must find good international schools and enroll their kids in extracurricular activities. Most expatriates spend their first month abroad in hotel rooms without their household belongings. HR can’t leave employees to struggle alone with these issues.

The demographics explain why. Currently, 90% of expatriates are male, and 78% are married, according to Windham International. Forty-six percent of accompanying spouses leave a career in the U.S. A recent survey of 120 international companies by Windham and the National Foreign Trade Council shows that 88% of companies believe that dual-career issues will become a more acute problem in international assignments. Although the questions remain largely unanswered, HR executives must recognize that there are new questions being asked: How does the company compensate for the lost income of the partner? Can employers intervene with the host country to obtain a work permit for the accompanying spouse? Are educational opportunities and travel benefits for the spouse going to be important in the employee’s benefits package?

Furthermore, the increasing number of women going abroad as expat employees will exacerbate the situation. What will an unemployed male spouse mean for international assignments? How will HR address gender-role conflicts? What about the sexism that employees face when they’re overseas? HR must create educational tools and in-country supports to help employees handle these difficulties.

Even if the spouse wasn’t employed before the assignment, he or she leaves a support network of friends, family and community activities. Children are another complicating factor. They may have special needs or may not adjust easily to a new school and neighborhood. These aren’t insignificant issues. They put a strain on the marriage, which ultimately can generalize to the work arena.

Because of these issues and others, Schell believes that all family members need training and support. Contrary to current practice, he emphasizes the importance of preparing the partner. “The organization needs to acknowledge the spouse and family and help them with cultural preparation,” he says. If the spouse needs to be supportive in order for the employee to be productive and the assignment to succeed, it only stands to reason that the spouse’s needs must be addressed.

“The problems for men and women shouldn’t be much different,” suggests Graham. “Both need cross-cultural training and support. But, there should be special support for the spouse getting settled.” This is where outside agencies are helpful.

Kathyrn Devos agrees. She’s the manager of employee services at Schering-Plough Corporation in Kenilworth, New Jersey. Because the pharmaceutical company has 21,000 employees worldwide (7,000 overseas), Devos has her hands full relocating medical directors, project engineers, and finance and marketing people from the United States to other countries as well as from one overseas location to another. Unlike the majority of companies who ignore preselection criteria, Schering-Plough’s international human resources department administers tests and in-depth interviews to determine a candidate’s potential for success. They relocate about 70 people internationally each year.

Devos says the employee’s family is always a consideration. Often, an assignment depends on the country that potential expats will be going to and the lifestyle acceptable there. “There are some countries—such as Kuwait—to which we wouldn’t want to send a family with small children or a couple with a pregnant wife because medical facilities aren’t up to our standards,” says Devos. One employee was a rising star and was identified for an overseas assignment. The company presented the possibility to the individual. After discussion, everyone agreed that he should turn down the offer because his wife had muscular dystrophy and medical facilities in the potential location were remote. Another family had difficulty because they had a child with learning disabilities.

“Because so many assignments fail due to the family complications, you have to pay more attention to them. This is where predeparture and cross-cultural training comes in,” she says. For example, how will cultural mores affect teenagers? What are the dress codes, and how will children respond? In some countries, even older children can’t wander freely. People must be forewarned about taboos, dangerous places and customs they must respect.

Henry knows this firsthand. His wife and three daughters accompanied him to Tokyo, and he believes that predeparture programs made a difference in their adjustment to their first assignment abroad. As part of Allen-Bradley’s predeparture program, the Henrys spent a week meeting with expats who had lived in Japan, learning the history and culture of Japan from experts, visiting with Japanese who explained how locals might view them and starting to learn the language.

“We talked about what some of the ups and downs might be when we first arrived. They tried to put us at ease and let us know some things might be shocking. It was very helpful, especially for the girls,” says Henry. Nevertheless, they weren’t prepared for the shock of the jammed Tokyo subways, the lack of personal space or the neighbor in the apartment upstairs who sings with his karaoke machine past midnight.

Companies such as Windham International, International Organization Resources, Prudential Relocation Intercultural Services, KPMG Peat Marwick and others help to anticipate some of the families’ needs and integrate those with support in the host country. They can serve as cultural translators when people face confusing situations. They may also help the spouses define and plan some important activities to pursue when first arriving in-country; they give specific information about extracurricular activities for children. One woman traveled with her husband from Canada to Hong Kong. She had been the manager of a museum in Toronto. With the help of counselors, she decided to work closely with schools and museums in Hong Kong and become an expert in Asian art. In this way she could maintain her career path while her family was overseas, even though she wasn’t making an income.

It’s wise for the non-career spouse to develop a plan, also. He or she has to identify the challenges and evaluate options in the local community to avoid becoming isolated at home while the rest of the family moves into a routine. Some couples decide that this is a perfect time to start a family. Others choose this as a period to provide full-time parenting and self-enrichment. Ask successful expat spouses and they’ll tell you that identifying choices is extremely valuable.

Ongoing support is as important as preparation.
Even that isn’t enough, however. “It’s very important to provide an integrated predeparture and destination program,” says Schell. “Even if companies offer excellent preparation programs, they need to follow up with practical host-country support activities.” It’s certainly not acceptable to stop educating the expatriate family about cross-cultural issues. It’s equally dangerous to ignore continuing ties with headquarters.

No one knows this better than Devos, who maintains regular phone contact with expatriates. Her troubleshooting has paid off. She recalls a young couple living in Europe. The wife was pregnant and extremely afraid to have the baby overseas. During a conversation with the employee, Devos remembers: “… something just didn’t feel right.” She had the host-country supervisor check into the matter and became more convinced that the woman was in danger of becoming housebound because of her fear. “We offered the couple an extra trip home,” she says. “It was just a thank-you, not their annual return. But it allowed them to have the baby here and return to their assignment.”

It’s this kind of sensitivity to individuals that makes international HR successful. More often than not, these painful situations won’t even come to light because the employee is reluctant to reveal that he or she is having problems. And assignments are rife with problems. In fact, culture shock is predictable in most normal cycles of adjustment (see “Employees Pass Through a Predictable Pattern of Adjustment”).

Ongoing support also must continue from one assignment to another. This is true for everyone, even employees like Steve Henry, who do well in overseas assignments. He’s now extended his time abroad and will move to Hong Kong. Such a change will require additional cross-cultural training because the culture in Hong Kong is very different from that in Japan. But Henry is supported by a company that strongly believes that people must learn the local culture. For example, Allen-Bradley encourages language lessons for family members before the assignment and after arrival. The company also has an integrated global program that incorporates family members, Milwaukee-based mentors and an annual HR review focusing on expatriates. In Henry’s case, training, personality and attitude combine for a successful package.

If U.S. business is to triumph in this global competition, there must be many more Steve Henrys. Human resources professionals must educate themselves about available resources and what expatriates actually face when they’re overseas. Practitioners must learn about cultural differences and what it actually means to do business abroad. If HR expects to be business partners, they need to learn global dollars-and-cents.

It’s November. A warm tropical storm brews outside Colgate-Palmolive’s three-story building in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as Mary Beth Robles scans her office. It’s not much different from the suites of other American senior executives, she supposes. Except, the plaques on her wall are written in Portuguese, her coffee cup contains a sweet, black espresso, and the speed dial on her phone lists numbers in Manila and Mexico City as well as company headquarters in New York.

As director of marketing for Colgate-Palmolive Co. in Brazil, the New York native moves fluidly from English to Spanish to Portuguese, and speaks a little French to boot. She’s lived in Madrid and D.C., and her stints for the company include Mexico, Uruguay and Atlanta. International in perspective, she doesn’t think twice about sending her managers globe-trotting—as long as there’s a compelling business reason to do so. Indeed, she’s dispatched them countless times: to the Philippines to learn how Colgate markets cosmetics in that country; to Singapore to participate in a seminar on dishwashing detergents; and to Malaysia to fact-find about bar soap.

Robles epitomizes Colgate-Palmolive’s international cadre of workers—the people behind the company’s $7 billion in sales, of which almost 70% come from overseas. And Colgate epitomizes a company that knows how to spot and encourage global talent when it sees it. “From the beginning, everything pointed to a perfect match,” says Robles of her own employment. “I was interested in the global environment from a personal standpoint, and wanted the business challenges that a multinational corporation could offer. [The company] saw in me a professional who would not only work towards the objectives of the company, but would also grow personally and contribute to the country I lived in.”

Companies need to find that “perfect match” to staff the global marketplace, whether they’re in the business of selling soap and shampoo or promoting pharmaceuticals and petroleum. “There’s no doubt that a global work force is becoming a reality in individual careers as well as individual corporations,” says William B. Johnston, author of the Hudson Institute’s Workforce 2000 and Harvard Business Review’s Global Work Force 2000. “Over time, that share of the work force is going to go up substantially. It will be possible to speak of a ‘world middle-class work force’—a great proportion of which will speak English and one other language.”

What’s more, the world’s work force will be increasingly mobile in the 1990s. Workers will be recruited and moved with less regard to national boundaries and country of origin. Eventually, human capital will cross national borders as easily as computer chips and cars do. However, unlike computers and cars that need only minimal adjustments to succeed in a foreign environment, people require great care—and each one is different.

Not only must HR consider the needs of its company’s people as they cross international boarders, it also must ensure that the people meet its company’s needs. As the global marketplace expands and the demand for qualified people grows, HR will have a direct effect on the bottom line. It’s far more than a simple staffing issue. HR must identify and develop global talent to meet business goals.

Decisions must be made. Decisions complicated by the size and scope of the business. For example, how do companies decide to staff overseas operations? When is it most effective to rely on expatriates vs. local nationals? Who’s best to send abroad? What personal and professional qualities lead to success? What about the host country employees? Finally, how do corporations develop a team of global managers?

Business needs dictate staffing solutions.
“In an ideal world, you don’t want to send a lot of expatriates,” says Gary Vose, manager of international HR for the Allen Bradley Co., a $2 billion subsidiary of Rockwell International located in Milwaukee. “It’s costly (at least $200,000 a year), there are cross-cultural issues and there are frequently family complications. From a strategic-staffing standpoint, it’s better to pick and choose where a few expatriates would need to go. You’d want to develop the local nationals to be able to run the business in their country.”

Vose echoes the thoughts of many international HR experts. In general, most companies prefer to develop talent in the host country. It eliminates relocation costs, and local nationals usually understand the domestic marketplace better than an outsider.

There are times when Americans or third country nationals are the best staffing solution, however. For example, Colgate-Palmolive uses expatriates to shorten the delivery time of products-to-market. And AT&T sends Americans on long-term assignments to impart its home-grown corporate culture.

Some multinationals develop a team of managers who can be equally effective anywhere in the world for any amount of time, for such tasks as setting up new operations, troubleshooting or filling in when off-shore locations need their expertise. Other firms send U.S. nationals abroad for brief periods, and only until they can hire and train locals to replace them. Chevron Corp., for example, starts with as few American expatriates as possible and quickly turns the operation over to host-country employees.

Whatever the approach, successful global companies must have global strategic HR plans. Says Dale Smith, an independent HR consultant who helps organizations develop global human resources strategies, “For truly global companies, the whole issue of expatriates—particularly selection, development and repatriation—simply should be an extension of your management development program. It should be built into it, integrated, and not a separate issue.”

Link global business goals to HR staffing strategies.
Colgate-Palmolive has been operating internationally for more than 50 years. Its products, such as Colgate toothpaste, Palmolive soap, Fab detergent and Ajax cleanser, are household names in more than 170 countries.

Fully 60% of the company’s expatriates are from places other than the U.S. And, since 1960, two of its last four CEOs weren’t U.S. nationals. In addition, all of the top executives speak at least two languages, and important meetings routinely take place all over the globe.

The company offers an array of overseas assignments to employees: long-term, short-term, and stop-gap for competency needs. Because of its reputation, it attracts people who want to become globalites—those who want global skills so that they can have international careers anywhere in the world. Colgate makes possible a diverse and fluid environment in which people frequently move in and out of U.S. headquarters.

Colgate understands global complexities, having been in that arena for decades. It doesn’t underestimate the importance of HR and staffing needs for bottom-line results. However, it wasn’t until recently that the company designed a global HR strategy that directly affects staffing.

In 1989, CEO and chairman Reuben Mark expressed the company’s global vision. Part of this vision is to speed products to market by inextricably tying the human aspects and the business aspects together. Mark knew that the company’s profitability rests on its capacity to successfully link a strategic business plan with a global HR strategy.

At the time of Mark’s visionary statement, there was a gap between the business goals and the global HR activities. So, in 1991, a global team of 25 Colgate HR leaders and senior line managers began a year-long quest to develop HR policies that would synchronize with business goals. With Mark’s vision in mind, the group met in teams to develop global criteria for selection, succession planning, coaching and performance management.

The team’s efforts culminated in February 1992 at Colgate’s Global Human Resources conference. At least 200 HR leaders from more than 35 countries attended. The message delivered to them by the chairman, president, COO, and every division president was this: Management and HR must work together for the business to meet its objectives.

Says Brian Smith, director of global staffing and HR strategy: “This global business strategy requires [identifying] a certain type of manager who understands not only the particular niches and communities in which we operate locally, but who also has that global perspective and understands the tremendous benefits of a global product line. It allows managers to move quicker and be more competitive internationally, while it demands that they wear a global hat and take the global perspective. They have to balance the global product needs with local markets.”

Here’s an example of why this strategy is necessary. The company used to roll out one product a year. Because of the push to speed up the launch of new products throughout the world, however, that number is up to five today, and there are plans to double that number soon. Delivering these products to the hands and homes of consumers requires staff. HR must provide Colgate with global managers who understand corporate—as well as local—culture so that they can hit the ground running as new merchandise becomes available.

“Global competencies are the centerpiece of the HR strategy,” says Smith. “They’re grounded in business needs. Armed with competencies that are tiered through the organization, we can target our efforts and be much more effective in bringing the best talent to Colgate.”

These competencies have first a technical/functional focus, then a managerial/ planning focus, and then a leadership/ strategic focus. They’re in place for marketing, finance, manufacturing and sales.

For instance, an entry-level marketing employee will focus on acquiring the necessary skills to be proficient in the functional/technical area. That will include creative excellence, consumer insight and working with technological resources. The person will advance to the management phase where presentation skills, planning and execution are driving forces. This is where communication becomes critical. It involves the global view with local execution. Finally, the individual may move into the leadership stage where the focus is on strategy, vision, teamwork and long-term planning. This is where conceptual creativity and the ability to form and manage routines and global teams become important.

To support worldwide personnel, Mark developed a resource—what Colgate calls a bundle book—for each product. The bundle book describes the complex production process of each product—coordinating raw materials, product formulation, manufacturing, packaging specifications, distribution and key marketing benefits. In other words, everything that managers need to know about any Colgate item is spelled out. Bundle books streamline the process, giving Colgate the capability to roll out many more products in any year. In fact, about 30% of the current product portfolio didn’t even exist five years ago.

Colgate’s Global Marketing Program is another example of the company’s commitment to recruiting and staffing globally. The program takes approximately 15 high-potential recent MBA graduates and rotates them through various departments for 18 to 24 months. Recruits learn about the sales process, experience the global-business development group and get exposed to manufacturing and technology. After their stint at company headquarters, they’re deployed overseas. “The whole objective of the program is to generate that international cadre of management to run the business,” says Smith, who manages the program. “These are the future leaders of the company.”

The Global Marketing Program is a powerful recruiting tool. More than 15,000 people stand in line for the slots every year. Typically, participants have a master’s degree, speak at least one foreign language and, either through past experiences or personal travels, demonstrate an interest in living abroad.

As Colgate moves these people up the global ladder, it looks for individuals who have developed functional competencies, who have developed sensitivity to diverse cultures, and who understand their own expectations of living abroad. The fact that Colgate rotates the individuals early in their careers helps people figure out early-on if they can handle this kind of duty. If they can, it isn’t unheard of for someone in this program to move functionally from finance to marketing to human resources, and move from the Ivory Coast to Panama to Thailand before returning to New York headquarters some dozen years later.

About half the company’s marketing recruitment is through this program. Moreover, it isn’t only a tool for recruiting U.S. nationals. It attracts people from around the world.

Building on the success of the Global Marketing Program, the company has replicated it for finance and human resources personnel. In addition to recent grads, high-potential people early in their careers are encouraged to participate. It gives them exposure and perspective.

Business goals determine needs for expatriates.
The staffing strategy of Colgate is clear. “We only send expatriates if we perceive a gap in competency [at the foreign business unit], if a real business need exists, or if specific professional or technical training needs exist,” says Smith. “We’d also send a high-potential person who needs the exposure as a development opportunity.”

AT&T, on the other hand, has found that using mainly U.S. expatriates fits best with its business plan. Unlike Colgate, AT&T is a new worldwide player. Nevertheless, the company appreciates the urgency of a global vision for its staffing.

It has to. The corporation has experienced exponential growth in overseas markets. At the end of 1986, the U.S. giant had 50 people in 10 countries and only about 1% of its revenue from outside the U.S. At the end of 1992, in large part because of its alliance with NCR, the company had 52,000 overseas employees in 105 countries. Approximately 26% of its revenues currently come from abroad; even without NCR, it would be approximately 19%.

“We’ve been scrambling around trying to get the basics of how to hire people, compensate them, get them in place. It’s a geometric growth pattern,” says Richard Bahner, international HR director.

Consequently, AT&T has turned very entrepreneurial in its approach to staffing abroad. “Although expatriates initially seem to be expensive, they may be the most cost-effective way to accelerate globalization,” says Bahner. “You very quickly get over the hump of the assimilation into the AT&T way to do business,” because expatriates can best transfer the corporate culture to local people, who later can convey it to other local people. This communication is important because corporate culture embodies the way in which the company does business. It’s the way companies act in the marketplace and the way they treat employees.

“If you have every confidence that the local person in Beijing is going to think about a business deal the same way you do—and the same way as the person in Paris and Jakarta—then you have every confidence to give the power and capital to that person to make the decision closest to the customer,” says Bahner. “However, if you don’t have the assurance that business will be handled in a similar way, you’ll be reluctant. You’ll want to put in place all sorts of processes to control what happens.” In that scenario, a company can’t react fast enough to the marketplace, and speed is critical in the competitive market.

AT&T has three different types of assignments. Long-term placement occurs when the company is entering a market and setting up a business. Expatriates get into the country where the business is starting up, establish an infrastructure that can manage the business, hire and train people to work in the organization, and localize the project so that host-country nationals can handle it.

Mid-range assignments can last as long as 24 months. This could be overseeing the building of a plant or handling an installation in a country. Short-term assignments can span to 11 months, and are for supplemental assistance to build up staff in a country or for specific training programs.

Regardless of the assignment, the selection decision usually is made by business-unit managers. Moreover, until June 1990, there were no formalized procedures for choosing people for international positions. This selection process resulted in a crushing 40% of expatriates leaving the company after assignment.

Enter the international HR department with a package called the International Career Development program. The tool helps unit managers with some basic decision support processes, such as guidelines for deciding when to use local people and when to send expatriates, and how expatriates will transfer responsibilities to locally trained individuals. The package also contains a questionnaire that asks the managers to consider the technical, managerial and leadership qualities that the position requires.

The international HR department helps small business units abroad relocate and orient expatriates; provides corporate standards; and manages legal and labor procedures. Larger units, however, often set up their own infrastructures to handle staffing and HR responsibilities.

The use of expatriates is more limited at Chevron Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. than at AT&T. San Francisco-based Chevron typically only sends workers to a foreign locale for their technical and management skills. Its intention is for those expatriates to give the reins to local nationals as soon as possible. Although staffing policies vary for countries as different from each other as the U.K. and the Congo, typically Chevron first sends a management team to review the skills of local employees. “In a developing country, you’ll frequently see a higher proportion of expatriates to local national employees,” says Greg Berruto, HR adviser for Chevron Overseas Petroleum, Inc. “As the operation matures, and as the local national employees are trained, you’ll see a change in the proportion.”

For example, the U.K. is a fairly mature operation. Exploration in the North Sea started in the late 1960s. Today, the ratio is 10 Britons to every one U.S. national. On the other hand, when Chevron does frontier exploration in lesser developed countries, the geologists, engineers and earth scientists will likely tip the ratios the other way.

The unifying strategy for Chevron’s operations within these countries is the commitment to local management. Once up-and-running, managers at operating units abroad have authority to staff and run their business as they see fit to meet the needs of the local business unit.

Dallas-based Texas Instruments Inc. has a long history of being a global business. With 62,000 employees in more than 30 countries, the company known for its semiconductor, defense electronics and information technology affords operating units a great deal of autonomy, wherever they may be located. In fact, sending people overseas usually isn’t an intention when the company hires domestic employees. People are sent on assignment, but it’s usually job-specific.

“Just because we’re a global corporation doesn’t mean we have to staff globally with U.S. citizens. Technology takes away the need for people to physically move and live abroad,” says Dan McMurtrye, manager of corporate placement services. “We take people from all around the world when we’re developing products. They’ll be part of that team. But we don’t relocate them together. We communicate through phone, fax and computers. It’s much more cost-efficient and less disruptive.”

For example, designers from Dallas, Tokyo and Nice work on Macintosh computers to design products. They even can work together in real time. Designers might all view the same product on their computer screens and then teleconference to talk about the design. Technologies that weren’t available 10 years ago make this kind of global network possible today.

In addition to its electronic network, TI sends people on extended travel so that they can meet with cohorts around the world. Different from assignments, these trips are designed to create contacts that facilitate communication when people return to their home bases.

Empower local nationals.
Rockwell International’s Allen Bradley Co. division believes that strong local nationals are key to the strategic-staffing mix. However, says international HR manager Vose, many of the organization’s overseas operations don’t have adequate internal HR support. They need help in determining competitive salaries, proper benefits and even recruiting.

One of the areas of focus is training. “When we hire local nationals, they’re not necessarily totally up-to-speed in all of our products,” says Vose. In that case, the company might bring key local nationals to the States and offer them skills training. They, in turn, transfer those skills to their colleagues when they return to their homelands. “It gives them the technical training they need. Equally important is that it introduces them to the real Allen Bradley in the U.S.” This opportunity gives them a chance to develop relationships and understand the workings of the company. It’s also very expensive, however.

Another alternative is to send people from headquarters to various countries to deliver technical training to larger groups. For instance, Allen Bradley may send a trainer on an Asia-Pacific tour. He or she will conduct classes in India, Taiwan and Japan. When the trainer is in Taiwan, the company will bring in employees from Hong Kong and Korea.

Allen Bradley requires the key personnel in these countries, who will be receiving the training, to know English. Not only does this help them better understand the company, but it also enables them to communicate with headquarters.

The foreign nationals running the company’s operating units abroad also must be able to function independently. “You need a very strong person who knows the local market and knows how to do business in the local market,” says Vose. “Many countries don’t have the same support structure as we do back home.”

HR must supply that support by recruiting the right people for the global job. Whether they recruit from abroad or from within the U.S., HR managers have to approach the situation thoughtfully. A strategy linked to the business plan is the effective way to recruit and hire individuals who will successfully compete in the global marketplace.

Planning is the key to successful overseas assignments. Noel Kreicker, founder of International Orientation Resources (IOR), a Chicago-based firm specializing in cross-cultural management selection and training, suggests that the human resources staff address these questions:

• How is international success defined by the company-from both long- and short-term perspectives?
• What is the expected outcome of this assignment for the company and for the candidate?
• Does the position have a clear list of tasks and stated corporate objectives? If not, how can it be obtained?
• Is there more than one candidate technically skilled for the position? If so, what other criteria are important to consider? If there is only one candidate, how can that person be supported?
• Is the position new or is the candidate replacing another employee? If the latter, how successful was the predecessor?
• Who are the successful individuals overseas? What makes them successful?
• What international skills are valued and promoted by the company?
• Is it possible for the candidate to speak directly to the person he or she will be replacing? What about speaking to his or her supervisor?
• What are the consequences if the candidate declines the offer?
• How will the company ensure that the candidate remains visible and connected to the company during the overseas assignment?
• What kind of career pathing is in place for the employee upon his or her return to the home country?

• How familiar is the candidate with the company’s global objectives?
• What are the candidate’s professional goals and objectives?
• What professional and educational experiences does the candidate bring which will help ensure success in the assignment?
• How motivated is the candidate to go overseas?
• What does the candidate perceive as beneficial in the assignment as it relates to his or her future with the company?
• How eager is the candidate to learn new things?
• How well does the candidate handle ambiguity and tolerate differences?
• How does the candidate deal with failure and mistakes-both his or her own and those of others?
• How did he or she experience previous transfers?

1. The human resources staff will want to explore further:
2. Overblown expectations of career or financial reward
3. Resentful spouse
   Life-stage issues, such as:
• Aging or ill parents
• Teenagers who must remain behind to finish high school
• Pregnancies, especially pregnancies with a first child
• Empty nesters
4. Special needs, such as:
• Health problems
• Special schooling requirements
5. Denial that any concerns or potential problems exist.

• Alcohol and/or chemical dependency
• Marital discord
• Marginal social functioning
• Serious health problems
• Mental illness
• Racism/ethnocentrism

No matter what the corporate culture, for it to be advantageous to the company, the culture must be an outgrowth of a well-conceived global plan. “From a human resources point of view, it’s critical that the company have a clearly articulated business strategy that spells out why it wants to become more international, what it’s trying to achieve, and how it plans to harness senior-level commitment,” says Dale E. Smith, an independent HR consultant located in Wilmington, North Carolina, who specializes in helping organizations develop global strategic plans.

First, you must have a clear mission and vision statement. Then, you need to understand the global environment or the specific region in which you’re attempting to do business-its history, economies, political situations and cultures. Smith suggests that you accomplish this complex task by interviewing key managers and customers, trying to distinguish if it is indeed best for the company to become international. Identify specific product lines and specific countries in which the business will begin to venture out.

“Define what globalization means and how you’re going to approach it,” he says.

Next, HR professionals must identify the key human resources concerns that will support those strategies. Interview managers and customers, analyze data on the work force, relate external changes in the areas of the world into which you’re planning to move specifically to the business plan.

For example, if the business strategy is growth, the company needs sufficient management talent to support international growth. If there are enough managers for this, the next question is, do they have a global perspective? Do they have the competencies required to perform on a global basis?

The same goes for compensation and recognition. The first question asks whether the compensation and recognition system supports the business strategy. Does the bonus system, for example, recognize the appropriate elements for increasing international market share? If so, then HR professionals move to the next level and ask how different reward-and-recognition programs abroad will send the message to employees that the company wants to grow its market share.

Based on a thorough analysis of the business strategy, which is confirmed with management, HR can then develop specific action plans. These plans form the foundation for all other HR supports, including communication strategies, compensation and professional development.

In Organizational Dynamics, David Lei, John Slocum Jr. and Robert Slater suggest that the best way for a company to instill its corporate culture is to ensure that its values are simple and clear, driven from the top, and consistent over time. A carefully defined strategic plan will facilitate these objectives.

It’s midday in Kuwait, but it’s unnaturally dark. As far as the eye can see, blazing oil-field fires spew up tornadoes of black smoke. A blanket of sooty, acid clouds seal in hundreds of miles of desert. On the ground, an army of workers toil amid the heat, providing support activities to the actual fire fighters. They construct roads for the trucks, create pipelines for pumping water, build hospital facilities for the workers, and cook and serve meals to the cadre of smoke-coated personnel.

More than 7,000 miles away from the flames and wreckage of the Gulf War, in a 14th-floor office in San Francisco’s financial district, men and women of Bechtel Corp. sweat over 30,000 employee files and resumes. Culling through 105,000 phone inquiries, the HR staff works frantically to supply the necessary manpower to the Middle-East operation. The debris here isn’t burned rubber and charred metal; it’s fax paper and plastic coffee cups used by the HR staff as it dispatches calls from San Francisco to London to Manila to Bangkok, so that it can hire and assign foreign-contract personnel. Gathering and transferring employee information from headquarters to the ground operations in Kuwait, human resources managers mobilize more than 16,000 Americans, Britons, Filipinos, Australians-people from 37 countries in all-to rectify the Kuwaiti disaster.

“We’re almost nationality-blind,” says Patrick Morgan, human resources manager for special projects at Bechtel, an engineering-construction firm that has offices in more than 70 countries throughout the world. The company has projects that range from restoring postwar Kuwait’s oil-production facilities to building the Channel Tunnel between France and England. The company builds airports, power plants, petroleum pipelines and chemical-waste treatment centers. “A person’s passport is about as meaningful to us as the name of the bank on their savings-account passbooks,” says Morgan.

Call it what you like-global, transnational, international-but when business looks to the entire world for capital and supplies, when there’s an official company language, when human resources professionals become interested in work hours in Seoul and Stockholm, and when fluctuation in exchange rates for yen and deutsche marks becomes meaningful, you’ve entered a global frame of mind.

As noted author and globalist Kenichi Ohmae puts it, free access to information has made this a “borderless world.” Political boundaries between countries may remain, but when it comes to finance, industry and even tourism, geographic borders are blurring continually. Information, music and fashion reach Europeans, Asians and Americans simultaneously. There’s no lag time; we’re all global citizens.

But a borderless world doesn’t mean that corporations are without personality. Indeed, corporate culture is the framework of an effective corporation. It’s the language that communicates the company’s mission and its ways of doing business. It provides guidelines for people to follow and communicates the company’s unique identity. The ability to transplant the corporate culture from one country to another-in some form-is critical to the success of most international businesses. Ultimately, it shows up on the bottom line. No matter what the type of corporate culture, when business goes global, the culture is translated overseas. It mixes with the host-country culture and changes, just as translated language undergoes changes from its origins.

HR managers are the translators. They’re faced with an array of issues:

• Is it helpful to have a strong corporate culture abroad?
• How can HR executives determine and communicate the important elements of the culture in the international arena?
• How do you know if the communication process is working?
• How does the corporate culture change as a result of globalization?

A strong corporate culture is an advantage in the global universe.
“It’s vitally important that the [transnational] company have a strong company culture,” says Calvin Reynolds, senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and senior counselor for New York City-based Organization Resources Counselors. “If you don’t have a strong set of cultural principles from which to function, when people get overseas, they’re so lacking in clarity that no one knows where they’re going.”

Asea Brown Boveri, Inc. (ABB), the electrical-engineering giant, is the quintessential global company. It has a clearly defined mission statement and a culture that supports the mission. Owned jointly by ASEA AB in Sweden and BBC Brown Boveri Ltd. in Switzerland, the enterprise purchased U.S.-based Combustion Engineering and a large division of U.S.-based Westinghouse in 1989, which raised its worldwide employee population to 213,000 and its revenues to about $30 billion a year.

“We think about ABB as a company without any regard to national boundaries,” says Richard P. Randazzo, who, as ABB’s vice president of HR, works out of the company’s Stamford, Connecticut, base and oversees the company’s HR operations in the U.S. “We just operate on a global basis. A lot of other companies see boundaries and barriers, but from a business standpoint, this company is intent on transcending those boundaries.” Indeed, more than 50% of its sales are in Europe, 20% are in North America, 20% in Asia, and the rest are in South America and Africa. The official language is English; the official currency is the dollar.

It’s easiest to think of the ABB Group as a federation of national companies-1,300 in all. ABB uses a matrix structure with worldwide business activities grouped into seven business segments that comprise 65 Business Areas. Some of these business segments include Environmental Control, Transmission and Distribution and Financial Services. Each Business Area is responsible for global strategies, business plans, allocation of manufacturing responsibilities and product development. Then, there are geographic subgroups or companies. In other words, employees are likely to have two supervisors: the local-country supervisor, who’s responsible for employees and customers; and the Business Area supervisor (of which there are 65), who’s responsible for regional profits, research and development, capacity, product design and more.

It’s a highly decentralized business (the U.S. alone has 50 companies, each with its own president). Divisions treat each other as vendors and customers, invoicing one another and maintaining accounts payable and receivable from other divisions.

Characterized by Forbes as a company that has no discernible national identity, ABB’s corporate culture is one of its strong defining features. The company embodies the phrase think globally, act locally.

According to Randazzo, ABB’s culture is focused tightly on making money. Its personality profile is a hands-on, action-oriented, travel-to-the-opportunity kind of business. Each division acts locally in response to customers and employees. But managers are required to think globally about sourcing. For example, if the dollar is strong relative to the Swedish krona, then the company sources more from Sweden because goods and services are cheaper there. When that changes, sourcing also changes.

Corporate culture mixes with the culture of the country in which ABB operates. “There’s no attempt by the corporation to tell us in the U.S. how we should behave relative to our customers or to our employees,” says Randazzo. (Other HR executives oversee ABB’s HR operations in its different business segments and the different countries in which the company operates.) The senior management team is composed largely of Europeans, so at times they give Randazzo quizzical looks when he says that they can’t ask a person’s age or marital status when recruiting. “They don’t understand some of the affirmative-action targets we have, but they don’t attempt to influence any of that. The motivation is that we know more about the U.S. marketplace than the Germans, the Swedes or the Swiss will ever know, and therefore, we’re better able to deal with it.”

Although the U.S. business culture emphasizes such concepts as individual empowerment and the appropriate way to hire and terminate people, the Swedish, Swiss and German HR professionals have their own issues to deal with. For example, Germany and Switzerland have particular HR issues regarding women.

There have been laws passed recently in Sweden and Switzerland that require some dedication and affirmative action with respect to employment of women. Therefore, companies in those countries must dedicate resources to see that they’re complying. American firms can help them understand the new laws.

But cultures aren’t static. They influence each other. For one, HR management plays a much more significant role in the U.S. than it does in Europe. According to Randazzo, this is the arena in which Americans have had significant influence on ABB’s Europeans, addressing such issues as employee involvement, empowerment and total quality. In fact, the U.S. HR staff developed materials for conducting management training, some of which were translated into German.

Likewise, the Europeans have influenced the Americans. They’ve brought a sense of business urgency to the company. They helped with downsizing, lowering the break-even point and getting the organization focused.

Understanding local attitudes helps corporate cultures take root.
Not all corporate cultures transplant well overseas. Companies that try to graft the Stars and Stripes forever in a foreign location will likely encounter resistance. Those that are sensitive to local attitudes and customs are bound to be more successful.

“The HR executives I find most effective do a good job of listening,” says Reynolds. “They take the time to understand local problems and learn why something may or may not work. Having listened, they come up with a fairly clear statement of where they’re going.”

Just ask Shirley Gaufin, vice president of human resources at San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. She oversaw a massive companywide employee-satisfaction survey, administered to 22,000 people worldwide.

In April 1992, Chairman Riley P. Bechtel issued the company’s new strategic plan called Toward 2001. In it, he articulated his global vision and core values, making a commitment to analyze and change the corporate culture within a global context. To be most effective, it was essential to learn about employees’ beliefs and attitudes. Gaufin’s HR staff issued a 102-question survey to 22,000 employees. Questions asked employees about communication, training-and-advancement opportunities, the work environment and the importance of international and domestic field experience to professional development. The staff followed up with more than 200 focus groups at the firm’s domestic and international locations.

In response to the results, each large office developed specific action plans to address employee concerns, which included communication between management and employees and the availability of training programs for people at field locations. Corporatewide priorities address the areas of reward and recognition, training and development and employee participation, among others.

For example, the company is developing a communication plan to disseminate information more effectively throughout all locations, including field operations. It’s reinstating a companywide newsletter that will go to all employees worldwide to help improve communication between the company and its employees. Performance appraisals are being revised to reflect the kind of culture that Bechtel wants to become. Rather than have a report-card-like performance-review form, it will be a tool to increase communication between supervisors and employees, and also help each employee reach his or her objectives. The review promotes better communication because it requires employees to take the initiative to communicate with their managers. It addresses on-the-job and outside training needs.

“The survey is a way of listening to employees. It gives us ways to implement the corporate culture more effectively,” says Gaufin. The 1992 survey is the baseline. Periodic surveys will provide means of measuring progress.

There are a lot of challenges when it comes to implementing some of the changes, says Gaufin. For example, different cultures perceive performance reviews in different ways. “We have to be sure that we’re not going against accepted practices in other parts of the world,” she says. Furthermore, part of the new strategic plan focuses on empowered teams. Gaufin says that that will be a challenge, too.

The 1992 survey wasn’t translated into other languages, but Gaufin says they’ll consider translating the next ones into Spanish and other major languages. There are just too many instances when English doesn’t communicate adequately.

The survey and the desire to translate it into other languages attest to a change in corporate culture at Bechtel. “We’re trying to be more open and communicative-internally as well as externally,” says Morgan. “We need to understand the environment in which we operate.”

In the 20 years since Morgan joined Bechtel, he’s seen dramatic changes. It used to be that the company operated almost as if it were two entities-one group of employees in the U.S., another who worked internationally. Today, that’s totally different. It’s much more integrated. Many more U.S. employees have taken overseas assignments, and foreign nationals frequent the U.S. offices.

“The barrier has come down, and an international assignment is part of the career progression,” he says. People are trying to get overseas as part of their career development. In general, they’re more exposed to the global workplace.

Of course, state-of-the-art telecommunications facilitate the cultural exchange. Many employees have considerable international phone contact with each other. Video conferencing and in-person meetings with foreign colleagues build social relationships. The company also televises major company meetings to Europe.

These are key ways to convey corporate culture. In Bechtel’s case, this is particularly important. As the speedy mobilization to help fight the Kuwaiti fires attests, employees sometimes are called on to move to another location on a few days’ notice. A highly decentralized, flexible structure makes this rapid response possible. Work often is done with project teams. They form to accomplish specific tasks. U.S. expatriates, other expatriates and local nationals do the job and then demobilize. This type of work arrangement, the speed at which the company can respond, and the company’s flexibility also make it imperative that employees fully comprehend the company’s mission.

“Obviously, you have to communicate the company’s purpose and its objectives,” says Morgan. “The culture provides guidance for the employee on how the company wants to achieve those objectives. When you’re given the responsibility to do these kinds of jobs, you have to mobilize very, very quickly and operate quite independently.”

In addition, the HR staff (which includes 45 people in Bechtel’s corporate offices in San Francisco and 340 people in regional and area offices, and many field locations) uses preemployment interviews to communicate some of the company’s culture, particularly when hiring managers. The issue of fit not only involves technical skills and qualifications, but also in knowing that the employee will be comfortable with Bechtel’s way of doing things. For example, all new employees sign a Standard of Conduct agreement.

Training and development are other areas in which Bechtel communicates its goals and values. Morgan, who is Australian and has lived in a variety of off-shore settings, says that international training is heightened when you teach mixed groups of U.S. expatriates and local nationals. The training goes both ways. U.S. expatriates communicate the company’s ideals and personality to local nationals, and the nationals transmit the host culture to the Americans.

Communication helps USAir and British Airways integrate corporate cultures.
You don’t have to speak different languages to need an interpreter. The USAir-British Airways partnership is an example of that. What happens when two English-speaking groups get together and have to learn each other’s way of doing business? Culture shock.

In January 1993, London-based British Airways and Arlington, Virginia-based USAir formed an alliance designed to benefit both companies financially and operationally. USAir wanted an international presence over the long term, but lacked the resources to purchase international routes. The airline was looking for a strategic partner. The alliance allows USAir access to the strong international presence and markets of the British company while giving British Airways entry to the U.S. domestic market, so that it can continue its expansion throughout the world.

Now, the Britons and Americans have to transmit their values and blend their corporate cultures as well as their work forces. “The mission we have essentially is winning the hearts and minds of our employees-at both companies-with respect to the benefit of the alliance,” says Ollie Lawrence Jr., vice president of employee communications at USAir (and previously assistant vice president of employee relations). “We need to develop an understanding of each other’s cultures.”

The companies are in the process of doing that. First, there’s an exchange program in which management personnel from one company shadow a counterpart at the other company to learn how they do business, make decisions and manage employees. For example, an individual from British Airways will work side by side in Washington, D.C. with USAir’s director of employee relations, learning how the company makes key personnel decisions. In turn, the USAir individual will then go to London to spend several weeks at British Airways’ headquarters. It’s one way for people to begin to understand and be sensitive to the internal workings of the other company.

Second, there will be corporate training programs so that key individuals will be able to recognize cultural differences and deal with them. And, third, they’re developing working committees within major departments of both companies, such as operations, marketing and sales, to hammer out programs and procedures by which both carriers can work as partners.

“We recognize there are some cultural differences between the two companies in the way they operate and manage,” says Lawrence. “By recognizing those differences, we’ll be more successful as we work together.”

One of the more surprising differences is language. Although both groups speak English, vocabulary and style can cause problems. Cautions Lawrence, these can be very subtle but can contribute to creating stubborn barriers. For example, he says, the British tend to be more conservative and straightforward than the Americans. They’re deliberate in the way in which they communicate and do business.

“We want to identify those significant cultural differences so they don’t get in the way of our being able to manage this alliance effectively,” he says. “With respect to this partnership, each company has to appreciate that the other has its own culture. We’re not a merger. But we also want to recognize the shared vision that created the alliance and identify mutual values so both groups of employees will rally behind that vision.”

How does the HR staff plan to go about that? Once management establishes a clear vision statement, the staff will create a focused message to communicate with employees. Already, both companies use the weekly employee newsletters and E-mail to tackle corporate-culture issues head-on. Internal company handouts detail the benefits of the USAir-British Airways alliance to passengers, to local communities and to USAir and British Airways workers. A handout of Interesting Facts underscores the independence and interdependence of each carrier in the alliance.

The way in which each enterprise communicates the alliance to its work force is different. “At USAir, we believe this alliance is going to help the long-term future of the airline. Ultimately, by entering into a strategic alliance to be part of a global airline network, it will help with the job security of our employees,” says Lawrence.

British Airways will have to communicate its rationale a little differently since it already is an international carrier. It wants to be a predominant international carrier through the development of partnerships around the world.

In addition to the more-formal communications, the companies are developing a line of apparel for employees that will heighten awareness of the alliance. They’re also cohosting special events, such as fish-and-chip parties.

How does the HR staff know if the cultural communications are working? It measures employee reaction. USAir conducts random telephone interviews and leads focus groups. An outside consultant meets with a cross section of employees to learn about their understanding of the alliance. The feedback provides management with information about where to put more emphasis or provide more explanation.

Equally important, simply by concentrating on these questions, it reinforces the message that management is trying to convey to the workers. In other words, employees know that the company doesn’t measure something that isn’t important.

“I think human resources professionals need to recognize that messages are sent not only through formal communications. They’re sent through management action or inaction-how an organization rewards its employees, what’s rewarded and what isn’t. It’s reinforced through what’s measured,” says Lawrence. “If the company measures productivity, that tells employees that the company is concerned about how many units get out. If it measures service, that tells employees service is important.”

What the HR staff communicates and how it communicates the message builds an understanding of the company mission. That’s one reason these business partners stress personal communication along with the more-formalized ways. Executives have adopted cities that they must visit three or four times a year. They reinforce the alliance, answer questions and explain some of the specifics of the partnership in employee meetings.

Communication and information-sharing can empower employees.
It’s high levels of communication and information-sharing that make the difference. The executives at Pepsi-Cola International know this firsthand.

Pepsi-Cola International is another company in a period of rapid growth and international expansion. It’s becoming involved in more joint-venture positions with businesses around the world. Primarily, though, it operates as a franchise system.

According to John Fulkerson, vice president of organization and management development, the company is trying to ensure that it has plenty of skilled and empowered people in the organization as it expands. It’s emphasizing customer service, innovation and marketing even more than before. Most important, though, is the ability to maintain a consistently high-quality product. This is challenging in an environment in which franchise bottling facilities are as diverse as their locations in Uruguay, Hong Kong and Pakistan.

“How do you go about building a business and a superior organization on the inside that’s customer-focused as opposed to internally focused?” asks Fulkerson. “It’s more complicated when you’re working in the international arena because of cross-cultural differences.”

What do you have to do to make this an effective working arrangement for all? You create HR systems that allow flexibility on a local basis but maintain consistency with the headquarters. Like USAir and British Airways, Pepsi-Cola uses such communication tools as newsletters, video conferencing and internal publications to convey these messages.

“Number one, you have to talk about what it is you’re trying to communicate,” says Fulkerson. “We’re trying to convey how we provide value and the best product in the marketplace. So, we try to transfer knowledge through lots of discussions and personal conversation.”

In addition, every few years, there’s a management conference in which senior employees gather for two to four days. The Pepsi-Cola International Management Institute is another way to disseminate ideas. It’s a place in which employees learn skills and absorb cultural information. The Institute delivers skilled training programs throughout the world.

Every year, there’s a formal meeting for the human resources planning process. At the meeting, the HR staff determines the human resources activities that will support the business plan. Then staff members discuss it with their employees.

“Building trust across borders is very critical to getting things done,” says Fulkerson. “We might have a person spend six months to one-and-a-half years in the U.S. before they ever go back to their native country and start running their operation. Although they might know something about the beverage business, we want to help them understand how we function. We want them to build a network of people they can talk to when they call from Moscow, for example.”

This network is important when there are operational changes. If you want empowered people, then you can’t make all the decisions from headquarters. You have to teach foreign nationals who work in the U.S. the best operational practices and help them understand the Pepsi-Cola way of doing things. You can do this most effectively if the business plan is clear.

“What are you really trying to accomplish?” asks Fulkerson. “What does it take to be successful? You have to be very clear about the strategic advances for the business, and once everyone understands the strategic plan, everybody is pulling in the same direction.”

However, with such a decentralized operating structure, flexibility is crucial. Take a concept like innovation. Being innovative in Argentina is very different from what it is in Norway. “I think we learn a lot from folks who don’t do it the American way,” says Fulkerson. “I don’t care where good ideas come from. In the long run, we all get credit when those things work well.”

Non-U.S. ways of doing things can bring a lot to the home company. For example, the plastic returnable bottle is being used in Europe. Developed outside the U.S., it first hit the market in Europe, and then the company moved it to Latin America. Operational practices can vary widely, too. Not only do they reflect the host culture’s personality, but they offer other alternatives to the parent company.

“Corporate culture isn’t an export,” sums up Bechtel’s Morgan. “It isn’t one-way. Companies don’t realize it, but they’re also importing from overseas.” It penetrates through returning expatriates and senior management from abroad.

Morgan offers an example. When he first came from Australia to the U.S. approximately 20 years ago, he used the English form of spelling-labour instead of labor, checque instead of check, advertizement instead of advertisement. It was frowned upon then, and often corrected. “No one notices anymore,” he says. “It’s just an alternative way of spelling, and now it doesn’t even get retyped.”

When it comes to work, only the Japanese put in longer hours than U.S. workers. According to Juliet Schor, associate professor of economics at Harvard University and author of The Overworked American, Japanese office workers log 225 hours (or six work weeks) more each year than U.S. employees.

The Japanese also suffer from karoshi (death by overwork). Karoshi is a documented ailment in which people develop illnesses and die from high stress and the pressures of overtime work.

The Japanese officially recognized karoshi as a fatal illness in 1989. Its symptoms include high blood pressure and asthmatic-like problems. The first person who died of karoshi (officially) was a 48-year-old man who typically worked 15-hour days at an Osaka-based company. The man had worked at least 100 hours of overtime every month for the past year, and had worked 15 hours for three consecutive days just before he died.

The state recognized the cause of his death as overwork, and awarded his widow an allowance of more than $2,000 per month. More recently, a bank teller died of overwork at age 23, after an acute asthma attack. According to newspaper reports, this type of phenomenon isn’t unexpected, especially in Japan’s banking industry.

Because of intense competition, working conditions have become very pressured. For example, Japanese banks introduced computerized systems to speed up transactions, and simultaneously made dramatic cuts in their number of full-time employees. In 1975, for example, approximately 8,000 women worked at Fuji Bank. Only 4,900 were employed there in 1989.

In 1990, the Labor Ministry received 777 applications for compensation because of karoshi. The problem is becoming more prevalent. Some Japanese doctors say that they’re finding more stress among their female patients. The symptoms of stress include fatigue, eating disorders, skin problems and hair loss.

A recent study conducted by the Fukoku Life Insurance Co. in Japan and cited in the Chicago Tribune stated that a majority of Japanese workers in their prime feel mentally fatigued every day, and many workers are afraid of dropping dead from overwork. It draws a picture of workers who drag themselves to work and are afraid to take vacation time.

The survey included 500 employees who had had more than 15 years’ experience with their respective companies. It found that:

• 80% of Japanese workers want to sleep more
• 70% feel stressed
• 44% feel constant fatigue
• 42% fear death from overwork
• 28% lack creativity and motivation
• 23% feel a frequent desire to call in sick.

The problem hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Bureau of National Affairs Inc. in Washington, D.C., recently reported that Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa has proposed legislation aimed at encouraging the country’s citizens to work less.

For now, Japanese workers still work 10% longer than average U.S. employees. That’s nothing to be proud of, however. U.S. employees work more than 320 hours a year longer than French and German employees, who have much higher rates of productivity and longer vacation times to boot.