Introduction
Greenway’s hotels are budget hotels that provide comfortable accommodations for customers. They are situated in downtown locations that allow them to be more accessible to potential clients. There are more than sixty branches of the company in the United Kingdom. The company plans to own 300 hotels across the Europe, but the management needs to decide what cultural differences should be taken into account and how they will correspond with their HR practices.
Cultural Differences
As the company plans to use their staff from the UK to manage the business in Germany, where they plan to open new hotels, it is necessary for the company to understand the cultural differences between these countries. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory is useful for evaluating the differences between Germany and the UK; the theory includes such dimensions as uncertainty avoidance index, long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation, individualism vs. collectivism, and others (Hofstede, 2011). Thus, citizens of the UK are prone to emphasize the achievement of the individual, while citizens of Germany put an emphasis on group achievements.
Moreover, Germans also tend to prefer the deductive approach to the inductive one, both in thinking and planning. As to indulgence, UK citizens like to enjoy life and have a concentrated balance of work and entertainment in their life. German citizens, however, often tend to experience stress during work; their culture could be labeled as restrained in its nature. It should be noted, however, that overgeneralization and stereotypic approaches should be avoided, and one should be aware that exceptions to the norms exist (Brewster, Sparrow, Vernon, & Houldsworth, 2011). As to work goals, opportunity to learn is more expected by German workers, while job security is slightly more significant for the UK citizens. Germans also find working conditions important; interpersonal relationships are important for both countries, although not as much as other goals.
HR Practices
The problems that Greenway’s hotels might face when establishing new hotels in Germany are the language barrier, high turnover, escalating operating costs, global uncertainty about safety issues, and others. Thus, certain HR practices need to be implemented to ensure that the functioning of hotels will be successful. It is advisable to develop a risk management plan (i.e., to perform a risk analysis to understand what risky activities are to be avoided and what activities are able to bring benefits) (Glendon, Clarke, & McKenna, 2016). Moreover, the risks evaluated in the plan need to be covered by insurance to ensure that injuries or damage will be compensated.
Other HR practices that should not be underrated are effective communication and reporting; during evaluation of the risks, it is essential to communicate the objectives of the risk management, the findings, and the actions that will help avoid the risks or handle them correctly (Haimes, 2015). Effective communication will reduce the number of possible misunderstandings and provide the management with all the needed information about the risks. The progress that was made or any other findings and outcomes should be reported in a proper manner to provide a clear picture of the risk assessment to the management. Reporting will help identify problems quickly and in the early stages. Quality reports depend on the communication between managers and their cooperation. Identification of the risks is made with the help of risk assessment and plans developed during it. The probabilities of certain risks need to be reported, supported by either qualitative or quantitative data (or both). This approach will make the reports more precise.
References
Brewster, C., Sparrow, P., Vernon, G., & Houldsworth, E. (2011). International human resource management. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Glendon, A. I., Clarke, S., & McKenna, E. (2016). Human safety and risk management. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Haimes, Y. Y. (2015). Risk modeling, assessment, and management. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 1-23.