Human Resources in Kordsa’s “Global Equation”
Years ago, when I first heard the motto “Think Global, Act Local”, it shook my world and opened up a new way of thinking, triggering my own personal enlightenment! I did not really appreciate what it meant, but I did know that it was no mere reinvention. It was obviously a bold claim, and for some reason I liked it! I remember that, in the next few years, I uttered this motto in numerous contexts and dropped it into various conversations, and using that phrase felt so right!
The years passed, I forgot the phrase, and it got buried beneath the clutter of university and life…
Looking back, the Miray of 2021 would tell her younger self that, for a multinational culture, this old mantra is only the tip of the iceberg.
When you become a Kordsa citizen, the first thing you see is how small the world is, and this realization pushes you to embrace a global outlook. You accustom yourself to different time zones, different languages and different cultures. While our company is operating 24/7 around the world, I cannot believe in borders. What happens at one end of the world often reaches us and affects us at the other end at lightning speed; every day, geographic reach expands and distance decreases in meaning.
Operating across geographical boundaries certainly brings challenges, and some companies find it difficult to adapt to and internalize diverse cultures. Yet “culture” is what we experience every day of our lives, shaping how we perceive our working environment, which in turn directly affects how we perform. In other words, culture is bound up with the values of all our employees and inseparable from the values of our company.
Kordsa comprises a spectrum of cultures, starting from the APAC nations of Thailand and Indonesia, on to Turkey and then to the Americas (USA and Brazil). Every HR person working for Kordsa cares passionately about attracting, retaining and engaging talent, establishing fair systems of compensation and benefits, developing soft and technical competencies, ensuring healthy industrial relations, and so much more. As a global firm, we are brought together under a single umbrella, yet we also respect social and cultural differences; achieving a balance between the needs of standardization and localization is crucial.
This is easier said than done, though. How do we really reconcile all these needs and challenges?
The more diverse we become, cultivating a broad global perspective requires us to be all the more sensitive to local cultures, to employees’ values, mentality and behaviors, to people, history and the future.
It means we need to build a learning organization.
And this doesn’t happen overnight.
We need to experience it, see it, listen to it and live it. We need to build relationships, develop new ideas and strategies. We need to follow global trends as well as search for new ways to establish and/or modulate them in local and diverse operations. In that case, sometimes you have to invert the “motto” and “think local, act global”. In order to foster a stronger partnership, we have to understand each other and show how our values affect us within the organization. To do that, we have to learn to listen to each other, to acknowledge every voice and value every opinion.
We cooperate mindful of the fact that this partnership exists. In addition, the relationships we nurture ensure productivity and sustainability in our processes and policies. We are open to adopting all the best practices that the various cultures within our firm have to offer. Establishing flexibility in a learning organization is what keeps us agile.
This is Kordsa’s “Think global, act local” formula. It means applying a “Global Lens” to remain alert to the different aspects of a worldwide operation, at the same time as being responsive to unique and diverse local needs when we act. In fact, this global approach eventually enhances national differences. That is how we can create a learning organization in which people want to do their best, to learn from each other and to learn from the differences among them within a multicultural environment.
Building the right strategy to fulfill our mission is vital in all of Kordsa’s functions, regardless of the department. And Human Resources is a big part of this “Global Equation” at Kordsa. We are more than a support function; we are more than a cost center. At the center of Kordsa is “the human”, and we all know that nurturing this center requires effort and investment.
Do you have your “Global Lenses” on? I am here to help you.
Written by Miray Gönülşen,
Talent and Organizational Development Manager, Kordsa
