Managing Multicultural Teams
An Indonesian blogger who works in the IT industry posted some very lucid thoughts on what it means to work on a multicultural team, how this impacts companies who use offshore vendors and how cultural awareness will lead to productivity gains.
“When companies outsource human resources, one of the criteria it looks for is a cultural fit. Often candidates who are capable of topmost positions are often eliminated on the ground of cultural mismatch as they are unable to justify themselves to be adaptable to a different set of cultural attributes.” In other words, technically qualified individuals have not been successful when they lack cultural awareness.
The blogger recommends the following:
“Acclimatize to the different…culture” and “accept the opinion of others gladly. This does not mean that you should hamper your work. You should be able to influence the other person too towards one’s own opinion. You need to understand the language, working style, religion and many more things need to be understood and taken up in order to get the work done.”
Learning culture is not a simple process, but one that takes effort and much observation. “Gain insight into the other culture: This requires an ample of hard work and this will also take time…to gain knowledge of the living and working style.”
How do you feel about the importance of culture in the workplace?
Click here to read the blog post.
Charlene