“Xenophobia,” said US comedian Dennis Miller, “doesn’t benefit anybody, unless you’re playing high-stakes Scrabble.”
This remark rings particularly true for those in the corporate world. But while companies are aware of the need to address cultural differences in their ever more diverse workforces, not all know the right way to manage those differences.
For many companies, performance in this area has worsened rather than improved, says Cari Caldwell, a director of Future Considerations, a London-based consultancy.
She argues that in the 1980s, particularly in western Europe, there was a strong focus on cultural preparedness as part of the expatriate packages being given to employees.
“With that came investment in preparation and expat training, which had a knock-on effect of raising the issue,” says Ms Caldwell.
“But,” she adds, “more recently, investments in that sort of training have decreased, as have the big expat packages and there’s a tendency for companies to feel that they’ve already been through the process.”
However, the need for cross-cultural training is ever more urgent, as companies’ operations, particularly those in Europe, span across an increasing number of nations.
Without awareness of cultural distinctions, misunderstandings can arise as a result of, for example, different approaches to negotiation, for which a business can pay heavily.
For employees, this can bring frustrations because of wasted time resulting from miscommunication or simply by not being properly understood. For the business, this means low morale as well as the missed opportunity to benefit from the different contributions of a diverse group of employees.
Some of the cultural barriers relate to language, even for those that speak the same tongue. Local dialects, accents and colloquialisms all offer potential for misunderstandings.
Social norms are another potential stumbling block.
Mary Chapman, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, cites differences in the way women are treated in the corporate world. “Someone who finds it comfortable operating in one part of the world, might find that they’re treated in a very different way in, for example, certain countries in Africa,” she says.
Cultural barriers materialise in more subtle forms, too. And it can be difficult to know how to approach those differences in a practical way. “Managers are often paralysed about what to do,” says Ms Caldwell.
"There may be different concepts of what being on time means. It’s a new complexity"
She illustrates: “If you have a team of eight from different countries, for example, there may be different concepts of what being on time means. So how do you start a meeting and still respect those cultural differences? It’s a new level of complexity.”
When it comes to overseas postings or business trips abroad, simple courses or information packages can help prepare employees for much of what they will encounter.
However, many companies use long-term cultural training programmes to help employees become integrated into an increasingly culturally diverse workplace.
Lehman Brothers, for example, hosts interactive theatre programmes with the help of actors from outside the company. The idea is to bring alive the daily interactions in which unconscious behaviour can exclude others.
“Business teams come together to discuss their reactions to what they observe in a facilitated interaction with the actors,” says Fleur Bothwick, Lehman Brothers’ diversity director.
“This process has given a voice for people to discuss different interpretations of common workplace behaviours and to understand the impact of each other’s perspectives.”
Managers at Accenture, which has 110,000 employees in 48 countries, are constantly dealing with challenges arising from cultural differences, says Kedrick Adkins, the company’s chief diversity officer. “And [cultural training] is not something that you can do in a day,” he says.
Accenture has developed a computer-based cross-cultural awareness tool that discusses issues such as working in different time zones and how to communicate in ways that are clear and leave little room for misunderstanding.
It also covers social issues, such as different cultural attitudes towards gender. “We ask all our managers - particularly those involved in multicultural teams - to take this course,” says Mr Adkins.
More difficult to deal with are the subtler differences in attitudes and working practices that can create obstacles to efficient collaboration for a team made up of different nationalities or members of different ethnic groups.
On-the-job training is the approach advocated by Future Considerations. Ms Caldwell stresses that exercises and interventions in real-time situations are more effective than pulling people out of the workplace for a training programme.
“Real-time learning is where you get most out of the training,” she says. “It’s a case of interrupting the behaviour that’s causing the difficulties and catching them doing it, so they can see how it happens and they can make a different choice next time.”
Addressing the difficulties that can arise when people from different cultures are working together is one thing; many businesses are also trying to find ways of capitalising on those very differences.
To do so, organisations must make structural shifts in the way they operate, argues Ms Chapman. “It’s moving away from the mentality of ‘the centre knows best’ and exporting ideas, also thinking about how to best draw out the ideas and uniqueness of the each of the markets you’re operating in,” she says.
