For employees who are strangers to working in other parts of the world, it is the responsibility of the employer to deliver a consistent and clear message about the organization’s values and identity in the face of growth. To deeply ingrain the culture and goals of the company in the minds of the employees, soft training skills are often employed. The following factors would help companies, which are trying to build, maintain and train a unified team message. Regardless of how far reaching and global a company becomes, here’s how it can foster global learning for all employees:
An organization cannot hope to get the company message across to the employees at the beginning of the job through a single training session. Delivering an effective message entails staying true to that message consistently in every external and internal communication with the employees. It’s a rising fad for Silicon Valley employees to participate actively in the development and nurturing of their workplace culture.
Similarly, every Google employee works to promote a culture of curiosity, creativity, and innovation, and knows what it means to be a part of the company. This culture is so important to employees that Glassdoor.com lists Google as the best place to work, based on employee experience and satisfaction. Companies in other niches should learn from this model by incorporating their values and goals in every aspect of their work- from the technology they employ, to the physical space they create, to the way they treat clients and coworkers.
All the employees of a company should be drilled in the same values, in offices around the world. Even though national cultures, languages, and customs vary from place to place, organizations should encourage a unified message in every office. For instance, walk into an Apple store anywhere in the world, and you would receive the same experience, from the genius bar to the casual and laid back attitude of the employees. Consistency helps an organization achieve uniformity throughout its location. While the native culture should dictate the space, consistency helps a company create the right mental space for its employees.
In addition to adopting a culture of consistent messaging, choosing the best medium for communication and getting the most out of it is also important to consider. If your employees can listen to an hour long mundane training video with their eyes closed, and still extract the same message from it as if they have actually watched it, it leaves you wondering whether a video was really necessary? Whether it is podcast, screenshot, in person training session, or info graphics, make sure the global learning medium you employ conveys your message effectively.
In the current era, video continues to be the most popular training tool to develop and nurture your workforce, since it has the ability to offer real time, critical information to employees. According to a 2013 Bersin by Deloitte report, organizations have solid reasons to incorporate videos in their training and learning regimes, including promoting knowledge sharing and collaboration, and staying abreast of the rapid shifts in the corporate environment.
If organizations are going to invest their resources and time in promoting values and continual messaging, employees would want to know why training matters and what it means for them. If an organization is based on the principles of integrity, its employee have to know why integrity matters, why they are working with integrity, and how can they apply those principles to their work tasks. They need to know how integrity affects the business and what message it exudes to the partner companies and customers. A company may incorporate integrity for myriad reasons; enhancing retention, boosting long term success, improve the way employees treat their clients and coworkers, and a host of other benefits. In order to act upon these principles, employees need to know the reasons and witness them in working action day after day.
Additionally, as more and more organizations are going global, they should strive to reinforce and embrace their own culture in a way that:
- Communicates their message efficiently through the right media
- Sends a consistent message
- As the company expands internationally and gains more reach, it also accepts its responsibility of understanding, honing, and defining its gained voice
- Emphasizes the reasons why unified messages matter to every employee.
