In the past year, a midsized company has decided to strengthen its global operations. As an initiative to achieve this goal, there has been an increase in hiring in offices across countries. Employees have also been transferred to work in offices in different countries. However, this has caused some difficulties for supervisors at the local headquarters who must manage personnel transferred from foreign countries. In particular, supervisors have found it difficult to conduct performance ratings. Specifically, they have mentioned the difficulty in interpreting how employees transferred from abroad interact with locally hired coworkers, because some behaviors that are considered polite in some cultures may be seen as inappropriate in others. The supervisors have also expressed concerns that they may be seen as intolerant if they happen to rate employees from other countries lower than employees who share the same background as the supervisor. Because of these issues, many supervisors have missed the deadline for submitting the past quarters performance ratings, which was a week ago. This delay has slowed down other corporate operations. An HR manager at the headquarters has been appointed to help the supervisors manage personnel from various backgrounds.

What should the HR manager do first to facilitate better integration of expatriates ie employees transferred from abroad and local employees?