Short-Term Assignments: Training on the Fly

According to a 2008 survey by Worldwide ERC and Cartus, the number of short-term job assignments for employees is on the rise. For many multinational firms, these temporary jobs are scattered across countries throughout the world.

As a result, a main challenge for learning executives managing temporary workers involves training on the cultural, linguistic and other nuances that most affect this segment of the workforce.

Understanding Cultural Differences

To get an idea of the importance of cultural understanding for short-term employees, consider the following scenario.

In July 1995, House Intelligence Committee member Bill Richardson was scheduled to meet with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The meeting was almost called off after Richardson unwittingly insulted the president by crossing his legs and thereby showing the soles of his shoes — a great affront in the Middle East. A similar scenario played out more recently when some Israelis were insulted by a press photo that depicted President Barack Obama speaking on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — with his feet up on his desk.

Cultural differences exist everywhere — from Europe to Asia, from Africa to Australia. In Japan, there is a protocol to give and accept business cards, and not doing it properly insults the host. In Germany, it is common to serve fruit at the end of the meal. When Microsoft came out with Windows 95, the package jacket in India outlined eight areas of Kashmiri in green, indicating land under question of sovereignty. The Indian government was incensed, and Microsoft removed 200,000 copies of Windows 95 from the shelves.

These types of situations occur routinely in today’s international business world, and without proper training around cultural protocol, professional relationships could be seriously — even irreparably — damaged.

Researcher Geert Hofstede developed a theory to address the effect of culture on the management process. After studying 116,000 IBM employees across the world, he published a study titled “Motivation, Leadership and Organization: Do American Theories Apply Abroad?” In it, he presented a set of five cultural aspects by which societies could be categorized:

1. Power distance, which refers to the degree to which people in a society accept centralized power and depend on superiors for structure and direction.
2. Uncertainty avoidance, which refers to the extent to which a people in a society tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity.
3. Individualism, which denotes the degree to which people in a society look after their own interests or belong to and depend on groups.
4. Masculinity, which denotes the degree to which people in a society stress material success and assertiveness and assign different roles to males and females.
5. Confucian dynamism, which is a system of practical ethics based on a set of pragmatic rules for daily life — derived from experience.