Building a healthy, positive, engaging, and sustainable corporate culture is difficult, even when all of your employees are stateside. Once your organization branches out into new regions, nations, and cultures, the challenge is even greater. A strong, supportive, engaging corporate culture, though difficult, is amazingly beneficial. It improves your company’s chances of hiring the very best, retaining the best, and providing the top-tier customer service, product quality, and market strength you strive for. Here is your guide to creating and sustaining a vibrant corporate culture as your organization grows, thrives, and reaches out to span the globe.
Make Sure Overseas Managers are Sensitive to Both the Company & Their Country
Some companies prefer to train local managers, bringing their local managers back home after the branch offices are running smoothly. Others prefer to leave their managers onsite to communicate and oversee the daily operations. Either way, it is imperative that the managers and higher-ups of your overseas branches and satellite offices are incredibly knowledgeable about and dedicated to your organization’s goals, as well as to the local culture. It is too easy to place someone who is overzealous about the organizational goals, and insensitive to the local climates (economic, political, and social), or to have someone who is completely committed to the local causes, but lacks a grasp of the overall organizational mission. Good hiring practices and strong training initiatives are the keys to achieving this company-local culture balance.
Involve Your Overseas Managers in Day-to-Day Operations at the Highest Level
Even your home team managers, when left abroad for long periods of time, can become disengaged from the corporate culture. Imagine you left your home headquarters, family, and everyday surroundings for a year, or even a decade. No matter how in-tune and dedicated you are to your corporate culture, you’d eventually feel disconnected. Allow your managers abroad to regularly have a hand in key decision-making, boardroom meetings, and other critical business decisions and activities. Work continually and diligently to help them stay engaged with the company, its mission, its goals, and its processes.
Use Only Local, Professional Services for Translating Training Materials & Corporate Literature
Hiring language services can be tricky. There are plenty of people who learn the language without completely understanding the culture — and there are extremely important differences. Consider common American slang. Terms like, “shoot the breeze,” “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and, “rain check”. These are actually confusing, even to other English-speaking cultures, like the British and Australians. When translated literally, some phrases are simply not able to be understood, and others can be downright offensive. Other cultures have similar idioms and slang terminology that can be stumbled upon by accident, causing offense and making foreign workers feel quite alienated. Lean only on experienced linguists who don’t just know the language, but are keenly in tune with the culture where your remote employees are located.
Make Sure All Corporate Literature is Sensitive & Relevant to Your Entire Global Community
Corporate culture is best communicated and fostered with excellent cross-company communications. This means regular newsletters, email updates, website portals for employees, training materials, conferences, presentations, and other content, both in print and online. Fostering a strong, engaging corporate culture means the ability to translate not just the words, but the thoughts, ideas, and voice of the company. For example, if your corporate culture in America is one of enthusiasm over innovation, or excitement about keeping costs low, or commitment to special causes, this sentiment needs to come across as articulately in Japanese, German, or Russian as it does in your English corporate literature.
Recognize & Celebrate Local Milestones Across the Organization
When your branch office in Luxemburg or satellite facility in Portugal reach key milestones, celebrate those achievements company-wide. Make each annex feel as critical and important as your headquarters. Issue email alerts or a special edition of your company newsletter to announce when remote locations reach their 1,000th customer or hire their 100th employee. Send out links to their slick new website. Put pictures of their top sellers in the company mail-out. Feature interviews with their outstanding managers on the company blog. Always find new ways to keep them engaged and make it clear that their success, indeed, is your success.
Make Face-to-Face Communications a Regular Priority
Even with all the modern technologies that allow us to communicate remotely with branch offices around the world, there simply is no substitute for face-to-face contact and encouragement. It is tremendously helpful to morale when C-level execs visit from time to time, not just when something needs to be done, but just to motivate, reward, and encourage the remote workforce.
When it comes to helping promote and protect your corporate culture as your organization branches into new countries and cultures, turn to the pros at TrueLanguage.com. From multilingual eLearning to translating your manuals and corporate documentation into other languages, we’ve got what you need to foster a superior corporate culture across the world. Request a FREE quote today or call us now at 1-888-926-9245
