Effective Diversity Management in the Multicultural Workplace - Managing Immigrants and Refugees

If your company hires a large number of immigrants, refugees, or other foreign workers, you have probably tried providing them with English as a Second Language (ESL) training. Or perhaps you have provided training in Spanish or intercultural communication to your managers. Unfortunately, you have probably discovered that the training, despite its high cost, had limited impact and resulted in negligible, if any, improvement in your workplace. That is because these "obvious" training solutions - language and culture training - did not address the actual, underlying issues of your workplace. They were only "band aid" solutions - quick, ineffective fixes to complex problems.

In order to develop effective management strategies for your multicultural workplace, you must begin with two important steps:

Step 1

First, identify your specific workplace issues, going beyond the obvious and simplistic "They don't speak English." For example, identify the specific problems that result from the fact that the workforce doesn't speak English. Perhaps your customers are complaining and you would like to stop their complaints. Or perhaps co-workers are complaining and teamwork is suffering. Perhaps managers are unable to communicate their instructions effectively, so production is suffering or, worse, you are experiencing high management turnover. Although not speaking the same language is certainly part of the problem in all of these situations, it is never the whole problem. In order to dig down and discover the root issues of your multicultural workplace, you will need to conduct a thorough problem definition, the next step in the process.

Step 2

In order to develop a thorough and accurate problem definition, you will need to investigate a wide range of workplace dynamics which underlie your workplace issues (language dynamics, culture dynamics, personal dynamics, job dynamics, organizational dynamics). These dynamics develop in unique ways in each workplace based on how the organizational culture intertwines with the languages and cultures of its individual employees. Often this intertwining results in the emergence of a whole new culture for the whole organization, which is idiosyncratic and depends on many factors, such as type of business the organization is involved in; workforce demographics; customer base; type, frequency and duration of employee/customer interactions; employee job duties and responsibilities; and organizational policies and procedures, to name just a few. Because these factors come together and function in different ways in different organizations, there is no "one size fits all" solution for the multicultural workplace. That is why good problem definition is vital to formulating effective, focused strategies for improving multicultural workplace dynamics.

So stop throwing your company's money away on ineffective or only marginally effective training solutions, and instead invest first in some good problem definition that will lead to focused, effective and targeted solutions.