HR experts to release study of East European workforce

  • 2000-07-13
  • By Darius James Ross
VILNIUS - Two Vilnius-based human resources experts, Audrone Tamulionyte and Woody Sears, have recently completed a 400-page study of the Eastern European work force. Their findings will be published in October under the title "Business Beyond the Curtain: Succeeding in Central and Eastern Europe."

"While the Iron Curtain doesn't exist, there continues to be an economic curtain, which is why we chose the title," said Woody Sears.

Tamulionyte was born in Lithuania just as her parents were leaving the country during World War II and later settled in Detroit. After a long career in human resources, working with Michigan's labor department and in the auto industry, she decided to come to Lithuania in 1991.

Her extensive experience with dislocated workers following the massive downsizing in the United States auto industry during the 1980s was to come in handy. Her first project was an analysis of Lithuania's work force for the burgeoning government. This led to a one-year project as the head of privately run HR Strategies.

"It was their first office outside the U.S. I naively thought I would be here for a year. We didn't even know how to translate human resources consulting into Lithuanian back then," said Tamulionyte.

After successful recruitment contracts with IBM and Philip Morris, the company grew to 20 staff and was eventually purchased by Aon Corp, the second largest insurance brokerage company in the world, and renamed Aon Consulting.

"Most of our money is made outside of Lithuania because of work with large companies, so we're really a Central and Eastern European company, although we are getting more and more business in Lithuania," she said.

The company's greatest strength, according to Tamulionyte, is in assessing workers in privatized plants.

"Foreign companies buy former state-run factories but don't always know what it is that they have bought. We have a methodology for assessing individuals that we have translated into local languages as well as a pool of trained psychologists we use for this task. We can tell a company who their managerial stars are going to be and in whom they should invest training money. These are things you can't necessarily find out from a resume or traditional interview," she said.

Before going into HR, Woody Sears was a U.S. Marine and textbook editor. He even edited the very first anti-guerrilla warfare manual ever published in the United States. He eventually studied large-scale plant change and earned a Ph.D. at George Washington University under Leonard Nadler, the man who coined the term Human Resources Development.

"Human Resources had to be more than a new name for the old personnel function, it was a vision of companies helping people grow so that companies and individuals could contribute to each other's success," Sears said.

A self-employed HR consultant and lecturer for most of his career, Sears came to Slovakia in 1996 as a volunteer and later found himself in Panevezys in 1998 for a one-month stint and hasn't left.

"Neither one of us can count," quipped Tamulionyte.

"Business Beyond the Curtain" is a survey, partly cultural and partly economic, of business development across the region.

"What we found is that the post-Soviet experience is still a large issue for the cultures of the area. We also found a large number of similarities as far as employment goes, as the Soviet experience was so awesome. People are still pulling themselves away from 50 years of routines. Even for young people, parental programming has made them relatively less flexible than in the West. Companies coming here have to realize this. All foreign companies here want more initiative from their employees than they're getting. It's not that the employees are incapable; it's just that initiative is not a part of the culture. There are problems with people participating and sharing information or telling their bosses when something is not right," said Sears.

Tamulionyte believes much of this lack of initiative is due to possible workplace sanctions.

"I know one consultant who came here and wished to teach only one thing: that it's OK to make a mistake. People in Lithuania show initiative in their gardens and homes, but the problem is taking initiative with an authority figure as there's a fear factor. People think that they'll lose their job if they make a mistake," she said.

Sears defends the matter-of-fact tone of the book with an academic sincerity.

"We made every possible effort not to mislead but to be factual in our research. This book is not an indictment. We just want people to know what they're getting into by coming to Eastern Europe," he said. "Lithuania cannot be accurately described as pro-business because of the paperwork requirements, the persistence of under-the-table payments, the lack of a tax structure and the lack of funding for development agencies. However, there are still employees here in certain technologies who can do more for an employer than those in North America. The problem is the resistance to concepts such as collaboration, resource sharing - better, faster, cheaper," he said.

Sears believes that capitalism has not been very kind to many people in Eastern Europe.

"A lot of older people were better off under communism. In Poland we found that 5 percent of the population is doing very well, 15 percent are OK, including all the bureaucrats, and 80 percent are worse off than they were before. That's because the economy there, as vibrant as it is, cannot absorb all of them," he said.

Despite prevailing economic conditions, Tamulionyte thinks that people will survive.

"The shadow economy in Lithuania provides a lot of work here, and no one is really starving. Many people have told me here that they will survive, they did it for 50 years under the Soviets, and they believe that they can survive anything," she said.

The authors have included a business development model tailored to Eastern European conditions.

"We've created a model from 100 years of highlights of business concepts that might hook into the culture here, that people won't find culturally inappropriate. Western business models are done for profit, not because they're nice," said Sears.

Tamulionyte emphasizes the importance of those 100 years for Lithuania.

"The key point is that Lithuania has had only 10 years. Poland had an earlier start. Estonia is always brought up as a model, but it is a smaller country with strong ties to Finland and a protestant work ethic. But who is to say that the U.S. business model is the best for Lithuania?" she said.


"Business Beyond the Curtain" will be published by Gulf Publishing in October and will be available in bookstores and through www.amazon.com