HR Responses to the GFC: How Australian Subsidiaries are Tackling the Challenges

The unfolding global financial crisis (GFC) is placing unprecedented demands on HR directors in the Australian operations of multinational companies.

Pressures to cut costs are extreme, coming both from parent companies who face falling revenues in key global markets, and from local senior management trying to pre-empt what now seems an inevitable recession in the Australian economy. Just how HR Directors are responding is the subject of this report.

Specifically, the report seeks to investigate three key questions:

1. What cost-containment measures have been taken to date, and/or will be taken in the near future, by the Australian operation?
2. How have these cost-containment measures been received by employees in the local operation?
3. How is the GFC impacting on the HR function itself, in areas such as the relationship with the parent, the level of resources now available to the local HR function, and, perhaps most importantly, the very nature of the HR challenge faced by subsidiary HR directors’.

The report was written by Mike Riddiford, and is based on a confidential survey in early March 2009 of members of the International HR Directors Forum.

To obtain your complimentary copy, please contact:

Toni Jackson
Director of Outsourcing Solutions - APAC
KellyOCG
Phone: +61 2 9246 6750
Email: toni.jackson@kellyocg.com