How to Make a Successful Multicultural Team

In the working space, a diverse team may give us a lot of benefits. This is because different culture with perspectives accumulates wisdom, inspiration, and creativity. It enables your team to solve issues from various angles and have unique solutions.

Nonetheless, when you have a multicultural team, managing them is a daunting task. Among them are various in expectations, believes, status, cultural, and languages. These are common barriers when working together in a diverse group of international enterprises. If managers cannot jump over those problems, the company will not be successful.

So, how could we make a good multicultural team?

Remove differences in the culture

Think about how the team members behave. You also check your behaviors when working with your team. Are there any problems? Checking behaviors is a key point to find out differences and break them out. It is also crucial to realize that communication styles are not symptomatic of intelligence.

Inherit team-building activities on a regular basis

Because of cultural diversity, some people are not willing to discuss when the company faces a big issue. Perhaps, they feel uncomfortable when someone asks several questions.

Therefore, leaders should give them more chances to improve interpersonal skills by playing games or taking part in team-building activities. When employees understand all together in a company, they can communicate and debate with ease.

As a team leader or a manager, you do not have time to find games or activities for them. We understand that concern, so we have some ideas:

• Silk Road: this is common team-building activities in Vietnam well as in other countries in Asian. It focuses on the trading house of the Orient ancient. Making the ancient Silk Road by several old trading stalls in the street, each team will represent a group of traders on the Silk Road.
• Bean Around The World: your team takes the role of coffee traders in supplying the product to outlets and fickle consumers. The team probably makes money by buying coffee from the manufacturers or suppliers and trading with other people. The team also sells the products to the customers.
• Bot Creation: this is a creative activity as the team has to make a robot for completing a specific task from a myriad of many elements. All teams need to set up many tasks to build the robot.
• Face to Face: each team will answer multiple-choice questions on a central screen. Questions are diverse, so the players cannot prepare a handout. All they need to do is being patient. Each member has one or two minutes to think and choose the final answer.

Reduce the language barrier

Leaders or managers are become the mediators to make sure that all members possibly understand each other or a specific issue. Make the norm asking someone to repeat themselves is fine, particularly when it has a heavy accent. The leader can use stories, databases, and pictures to maintain the conversation. Never use colloquialisms, slang, and other confuse contexts.

Avoid building fake divisions

Do not speak a certain language that other people in the office cannot understand or they are not influent. It is also essential to pay attention to political issues in the workplace or the countries where employees are the native people. This is because your team will know how to discuss world politics in the meeting, for example.

Conclusion

Businesses these days are running faster than ever. This is the reason a company should have multicultural teams to work together. They need someone who can understand the culture and other local points if the enterprise wants to do the business in a market (outside of their headquarters).

Along with taking lots of advantages from an international team, the firm also has other internal problems. Fortunately, if managers or team leaders know how to make a successful multicultural team, the company will get more profits.