SEIIC HR
Doing business internationally can be very different from a human resource perspective versus doing business domestically. Each country has its own laws and norms with respect to the labor market. For this reason, human resources is almost always a national function. Companies are limited with respect to what they can do globally. Globally, a company can set basic human resource strategy and principles, though the actual implementation of any general strategy will vary by country. Even generalizing about "EU" or "Asia" is laughably ignorant -- you cannot make labor market generalizations about Canada and the U.S., let alone about the twenty-odd EU countries or 60-something Asian ones.
In the EU, workers can come from any member country, as labor has freedom of movement within the EU. This also makes it nearly impossible to recruit non-EU workers to work in Europe. Labor laws within the EU, however, vary by country. This creates a situation where the choice of countries in which to operate is dictated partially by market considerations and partially by labor considerations, and partially by tax considerations. Whether the company operates, there is usually a need to have training programs in order to build the workforce, unless there is a surplus of workers available in that particular country. Recruiting in nations where there is a shortage of insurance workers will require pulling workers from other countries, who will then need to be trained on the local insurance market, laws, and languages; or locals are hired...
Thus, training is a key element of HR practice in Europe, despite the labor mobility (Costea, 2005).
The culture in the business will be different as well. Local HR professionals will need to be hired to find ways to implement the global strategy in accordance with the local culture and local labor market conditions. It is also worth noting that the EU has a lot of regulation in general, and this probably applies to the insurance business. Each country will have its own particularities, but in general Europe will have more regulation. Also, workers in Europe actually have rights -- the idea of "employment at will" would not work for Europeans. Again, while the company can set out strategy in broad terms (such as paying more than the market rate to poach talent from competitors, or conversely undercutting on wages to offer better spreads on insurance products), every country has different labor laws, and there are significant differences between labor cultures in the north, south and east of Europe.
Asia is an even bigger and more diverse place than Europe, but without the overarching government structure that the EU provides. It is absurd to even contemplate making generalizations about a continent as diverse as Asia -- there is literally nothing similar between, say, Uzbekistan and Japan, or Vietnam and Kuwait. The company at this point can only narrow down its expansion ambitions to a specific country or at best a region before there is even any point to doing research on…
