How aggressively are major Turkish companies expanding outside of Turkey?
How does this affect their human capital challenges? HH: Turkey is a developing economy, so we don’t have too many multinationals and international brands. Businesses in Turkey largely have been structured as conglomerates with diversified operations in many fields. For example, a big local holding company may have operations in banking, durable goods, manufacturing and food production. Up until recently, these local companies focused on the local market only, but during the last decade there have been several successful attempts to become global, or at least regional, organizations. Because it is a new experience for many Turkish companies to work with a foreign workforce, this has been a major challenge for HR. They are in the learning stage of the process. Other challenges include building HR systems able to cover all of their subsidiaries across multiple countries and working with multicountry HR data, particularly for those organizations that have operations in neighboring countri
