HR in Asia: Eastern time

While western economies have been rocked by recession and painful debt reduction programmes, many Asian economies have barely paused for breath. Not all of this is circumstantial. Now may be a good time to look east for new ideas – and to stop viewing Asian business practice through an emerging markets filter, or as still learning to attain western best practice. I’ve been involved in a recent CIPD research project, based on interviews with innovative HR leaders in Asia, which found examples in the region that go beyond current best practice, positioning HR as a business function with a leadership role. Despite the different contexts of western and Asian economies – not least the fast pace of change dictated by the region’s turbocharged growth – there is undoubtedly learning for western organisations in what some Asian companies are doing. We share many of the same challenges across the globe, although Asian organisations are dealing with them at greater speed and on a much larger scale.Consider, for example, the challenge of managing “Generation Y” employees, which is familiar to us in the UK. Now think of China, where managers brought up in a highly austere communist culture are trying to deal with what are known as “little emperors” – the only children who are a product of the single child policy, doted on by parents and grandparents, and brought up in a modern, consumerist society – the generational difference in China is dramatic. As for talent management, consider one company we spoke to: it hired 50 graduates only to find, a year into the programme, that it had retained only one. This is a war for talent with an intensity that few of us in the UK have experienced. Commercially too, the rate of change is unparalleled. Companies such as China Mobile, still state owned and largely unknown until recently, have rapidly become some of the world’s largest and most influential organisations.