Benetton's Marylou Ponzi Kay shows newly designed employee materials

HR directors work to create diverse global companies

As Human Resources director for Benetton USA’s operations, Marylou Ponzi Kay has her hands full.

She is grappling with a dogged recession in the United States, the end of a contract earlier this year with a company hired to help it reinvigorate its once-vaulted brand, and the more recent decision to part ways with the multinational’s CEO for the Americas.

There are four “equals” running the operation in the Miami Beach headquarters, with another three dozen employees, plus 60 stores in the United States, relationships in 250 Sears stores in Mexico and operations coming on line in Colombia.

And then there’s culture. She is trying to better understand the culture of the closely held, private Italian company, started by four siblings in the 1960s, a company that became well-known in the 1970 and 1980s for its edgy advertising campaigns and its stylish and comfortable clothing lines but has since fallen off the radar in the United States.

“I have been trying to understand better how they work,” Ponzi Kay said at WorldCity’s HR Connections gathering, which is held for human resources directors at multinationals with offices in South Florida. “They are a family company and they have stayed very familial.

“I’ve worked for French companies. They have a distinctive way. I have worked for a Japanese company. I have worked for an American company,” said Ponzi Kay, who has been with Benetton for 18 months and previously worked for Michelin, American Express, Canon, Sol Melia and others.

In the room with Ponzi Kay during the HR Connections gathering, which is sponsored by the University of Miami’s School of Business and Aflac, were representatives of German, French, Finnish, American, British, Swiss and Japanese companies. Each, according to their human resrouces executives, is finding its way in balancing the need to preserve its core values, which are often rooted in culture, and becoming truly global, which can work at odds with those efforts.

Said Canon’s Human Resources Director Zulay Ciffoni, “It is very much a Japanese company but we’re trying to make it very inclusive.”

Baxter Export’s Rossana Tabares

Said Rossana Tabares, director of Talent Effectiveness for Baxter Export, a U.S. company, “Inclusion. We make it a core issue. While the home office is still male dominated, Anglo, we’re trying to change that.”

Only half in jest, Jason Lennon recounted his time at FedEx in the early years of its Latin America operation in Miami. “I didn’t work for a U.S. company. I worked for a Memphis company,” said Lennon, of the Tennessee town where FedEx is headquartered and who now works for the law firm Kubicki Draper. He worked for FedEx from 1996-2006.

“They did a lot of things really well,” he said. “But it took four to five years for the executives to realize it’s not like dropping a cookie cutter into Iowa. Everyone was screaming at us in the field and we were screaming back at Memphis.”

Felipe Ortega is the HR director for Wilson Learning’s Latin America division, a company founded in the United States but now owned by a Japanese company. “This is the first year since we were bought that there’s an American on the the board,” he said. “They are listening to what the world is saying.”

Marcelo Fumasoni, of Novartis

“If you go to the headquarters in Basil,” said Marcelo Fumasoni, Human Resources director of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, “you feel like you are in the U.N.”

Nokia’s Adriana Andretta

Adriana Andretta, Human Resources manager at Nokia Latin America, understood the stereotypes that might be attached to the cell phone company, Nokia, which was founded near the Nokia River in Finland in the 19th century. “They are cold people because it’s a cold place. They don’t have emotions because of the way they talk.”

But she found them not to be true. “I think I work for a global company. The respect is really there. They really trust me. We have a good balance between men and women at the top. I have talked to several people for Nokia. They all say the same thing. They think they work for a global company.”

For Benetton’s Ponzi Kay, the trick, then, is bringing the enthusiasm the brand once held in the United States to the employees working in the 60 locations.

She has set up a buddy system with each of the 45 Miami Beach employees, pairing them with one of the 60 locations to connect every other week to make sure communication lines are open and stay open. She is working on an employee sales manual, again trying to infuse the Benetton spirit into the employees. She is guiding the store managers to understand the importance of having a Plan B in the sometimes high-transition world of retail.

“Part of this is very strategic,” she told the other group members. “Then there’s the nitty gritty stuff in the stores.

It’s like hygiene — looking for talent — something you do every day, like brushing your teeth,” she said. “We’re making progress but it’s a slow process. Even getting store managers to look for employees on a weekly basis. If they can’t fill a position immediately, why haven’t they planned for it?”