As HR professionals around the world celebrate International HR Day on May 20, they are reminded of the evolving complexity and global reach of the profession. No longer confined to managing employees within a single jurisdiction, HR leaders today are operating across borders, cultures, and legal systems. With this expansion comes a host of challenges — particularly in the realm of international employment law.
When multinational companies manage offices across borders, the biggest challenge they face is “resolving the ‘uniformity versus diversity’ challenge,” said Donald Dowling, an attorney at Littler in New York City. It is natural for a company to want to align its employment practices and policies on a global basis for the sake of consistency.
However, countries are “stubbornly local, imposing roadblocks” at every turn, posing compliance challenges to a global HR structure, Dowling said. He added that along with managing different languages, cultures, and values, HR has to negotiate differences in pay rates, employment laws, and employee expectations.
To handle differing labor standards, HR teams need to have a strategy in place. This may mean “homogenizing the policy, or watering it down, or making local country-by-country tweaks,” Dowling said. For example, when a company decides to launch an AI policy, it likely will need to compromise or alter the policy so that it works across borders. Dowling noted that this may involve “compromises or...
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