Company benefits

Better adaptation of employees to a new cultural environment significantly reduces the risk of employee underperformance and mission failure. Similarly, there are fewer failed negotiations and lost contracts due to cultural missteps with clients.

Training helps to avoid these types of problems, and it also saves the company money, helps it meet its goals and improves its bottom line.

By being culturally aware of  their team’s needs, managers can effectively leverage the diversity of their employees. With their own cultural knowledge, they will also be better able to effectively lead a multicultural team. Moreover, by demonstrating such openness, these managers can motivate and inspire other employees to form successful teams.

In addition, a well-designed program can help reduce expatriate and returnee attrition rates: a culturally diverse workplace is valued by employees and enhances the company’s reputation.

Finally, foreign customers appreciate companies that make an effort to learn their culture and are more likely to work with them.

Employee Benefits

Cross-cultural training helps the employee/manager to be more effective while interacting with colleagues, clients and suppliers from different cultural backgrounds. This helps them to stay productive by a better awareness of their own cultural DNA and how to adapt their communication and managerial style to the cultural differences of others. The result are:

• Build Trust: when people’s barriers are lowered, mutual understanding ensues, which results in greater trust. Once trust is established co-operation is enhanced and conflicts decrease and/or resolved more constructively.

• Motivate: one of the outcomes of cross cultural training is a higher level self-awareness people begin to recognize areas in which they need to improve and become motivated to develop and progress.

• Career Development: cross cultural training enhances people’s skills and therefore future employment opportunities. Having cross cultural awareness gives people a competitive edge over others especially when applying for positions in international companies with a large multi-cultural staff base.

Conclusion

The simple truth is, cross-cultural training is critical to the global success of any business. It stimulates the employee’s or manager’s ability to go beyond their cultural comfort zone and remain open to different  perspectives.

Even though cultural differences are subtle and often invisible, they can have a significant impact on employee performance and business results.

As well the ROI on intercultural training is often subtle and not immediately visible. However, in the medium term it can have a significant impact on workflow, productivity, employee retention and company branding. All of which lead to healthier top and bottom lines!