Cross-Cultural Awareness Training

Organizations are increasingly finding themselves working across national and cultural boundaries as they strive to hire and maintain the best talent and attain market leadership.

This diversity can create a variety of organizational challenges. For example, all employees must be able to work cooperatively and productively in a multicultural and multilingual workplace. Without essential cross-cultural knowledge, skills, and awareness, this can often be difficult to do.

In addition, leaders within the organization must be able to effectively motivate and manage staff from different cultural backgrounds, which again can be challenging if they lack fundamental knowledge about the impact of cross-cultural differences on employee performance, communication, and behaviours.

In addition to having a cross-cultural workplace, to secure a competitive edge in today's marketplace, organizations are increasingly serving international and multicultural customers. Those who are able to successfully adapt their service delivery to satisfy the ever increasingly diverse consumer market will reap the rewards, while those who cannot will suffer. However, servicing customers from different cultures, and/or who speak different languages than we do, requires skills and abilities that are different from those used in traditional customer service.

Cross-Cultural Training

We offer a variety of different programs designed to:

• Increase general awareness of cross-cultural issues and realities
• Assist managers and Human Resources staff more to effectively carry out their respective roles and responsibilities vis a vis cross-cultural issues and challenges within the workplace
• Help employees from other countries more quickly transition to the North American workplace, ensuring optimal productivity in as short a time as possible
• Provide individualized coaching to employees from other countries to assist:
  • Recent new hires transition to their new jobs, and their new country, as quickly as possible
  • Individuals who are relatively new to Canada or the United States deal with on-going challenges they may be experiencing directly as a result of cultural differences
• Assist the spouses of new employees from other countries to more easily and quickly adapt to their new lives
• Prepare in advance Canadian and American employees whose jobs are taking them to a foreign country, in order to help facilitate a quicker and easier transition

Please note that we also have cross-cultural programs geared to employees from specific countries who deal with North Americans on a regular basis, e.g. Indian call centres.

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Cross-Cultural Training and Awareness

Work environments today have a greater number of employees from different countries than ever before. If employees are not properly prepared for this workplace reality, misunderstandings and tension can occur within the workplace. For example, cultural groups may tend to "stick together," causing others to feel rejected and/or snubbed. Also, different communication styles may lead to misunderstanding and negative assumptions on the part of different cultural groups towards one another.

In order to create an inclusive work environment with minimal tension and misunderstanding, the awareness level of all employees must be raised. This program accomplishes this by focusing on the following:

• What culture is and how it affects everyday interactions with co-workers/clients
• Cultural assumptions and biases
• How culture impacts key issues such as communication style and teamwork
• Nonverbal communication (e.g. eye contact, body language, facial expression, gestures, personal space) between Canadians/Americans and other nationalities, and how these may cause conflict, confusion, etc.
• How to ensure everyone feels at home within their workplace, regardless of their cultural background

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Managing a Multi-Cultural Team

Increasingly, managers are working within environments where there are a large number of employees from different countries.

Employees from different countries and ethnic backgrounds bring their own values and communication styles to the job. How can you foster team and individual effectiveness and drive innovation by creating an atmosphere of understanding and mutual respect and leveraging differences?

Learn how to adapt your managerial style to the unique needs of a multicultural group, motivate your employees, find common ground, and manage conflicts across cultural boundaries. This program will provide you with proven techniques to function as a true team where differences are not challenges but, instead, are opportunities for creativity and productivity.

Specific areas this program will address include:

• Multicultural dynamics to develop a high performing team
• Effective approaches to managing conflict and negotiating agreements in a multicultural work environment
• Techniques for communicating across, and between, cultures
• Cultural influences on verbal and nonverbal communication
• Creating cross-cultural synergy within your team and an inclusive environment for all employees
• Adapting your managerial style to promote cultural differences and similarities
• How culture affects hierarchy and reporting relationships
• Understanding leadership and individual motivation factors
• Differentiate between risk-tolerant and risk-averse employees regarding problem solving and decision making
• Recruiting and retaining talent from a culturally diverse pool
• Overcoming time, distance, and cultural differences to effectively manage offshore and remote teams
• Formulating an action plan to maximize performance for each employee

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Program for Human Resource Professionals

Increasingly, human resource professional are being asked to provide assistance to managers and employees who are struggling with the realities of working within a culturally diverse work environments.    Learn how to help managers foster team and individual effectiveness as well as drive innovation, by creating an atmosphere of understanding and mutual respect.  Provide managers with the knowledge they require to leverage differences between their team and use these differences to ensure optimal effectiveness and productivity in the workplace.  Help both managers and employees come together as a true team, where differences are not challenges but instead are opportunities for creativity and productivity.

Specific areas this program will address include:

• Communication style differences
• Managerial style differences
• Teamwork differences
• Recruitment
• Performance management
• How to identify if a problematic issue is due to cross-cultural factors or instead, communication/interpersonal factors not related to culture (particularly between managers and employees)?
• How to efficiently and effectively assist individuals who are experiencing a cross-cultural issue
• Career management
• Other issues (vacation / bereavement policies, etc.)

Please note that to help ensure that this program is optimally effective and fully understood, participants must be well-grounded in cross-cultural issues as these are key foundation building blocks. Accordingly, as a pre-requisite to this program, we strongly recommend that all participants initially attend our half-day to full day Cross-Cultural Training and Awareness program.

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Specialized Cross Cultural Training Programs

We are also able to create customized cross-cultural training programs geared to a specific cultural group should you have offices in another country. These programs can be geared to Canadians or Americans who will be going to other countries to work, or alternatively, to individuals who work for your company in other countries but must deal with North Americans on a regular basis, e.g., customer call centres in India

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Succeeding in Canada/America

This highly interactive program is geared specifically to new immigrants to Canada or the US. The objective is to help these individuals acclimatize themselves quickly to the Canadian/US culture, enabling them to become optimally effective in their jobs in as short a time as possible. The focus of this program is on the following:

• Cultural differences and the impact they are likely to have on recent immigrants to Canada or the United States, both in their professional and personal activities
• How to modify behaviour to communicate and work more effectively with Canadians or Americans, both in the workplace and outside
• How to prepare oneself for the emotional roller-coaster of living in a new culture
• How to capitalize professionally on cultural differences

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