Panama City is hot and very humid. Now before you castigate me for writing the obvious let me at least clarify my statement. The humidity in Panama was very different from the humidity here in Miami which in turn made any time spent outside a bit uncomfortable. However, humidity being well…it still felt the same and it’s comforting to know that the feeling is the same across the tropics.
However, you don’t really care much for a thesis on humidity, I mean I should be writing about HR stuff so here goes: Using my humidity example above, I’m going to venture to say that the same thing can be said about the issues that we face as HR professionals here in the U.S. are close to the same ones that we face on an international level.
See we were in country for 72 hours and in that time frame I spoke to about 30 HR professionals and during the course of our conversations they shared with me their concerns. At the top of their list, the ability to recruit talent within the country and from the local Universities, coming in second was retention of top performers and rounding out the third concern was keeping their people engaged.
1100 miles away and the problems were the same. I was amazed.
How many times do we stop to think about the global community (Let me clarify, by global community I mean countries where English is not the predominant language)? Should we even care? Are the problems and solutions we’re discussing in the space global solutions or just chatter in the echo chamber? As world class, world leading talent professionals do we have a responsibility to think about how our actions affect business on a global scale?
Exciting stuff, now if you’ll excuse me I need to check that my A/C’s working.
Photo credit: http://www.costaricapages.com/panama/
