Cross Cultural Training
Country Specific Pre-Departure Training
Our Pre-Departure Training programmes are designed to help individuals feel more confident and prepared for their journey, and to minimize any potential risks or cultural challenges they may encounter.
Starting any new job can be stressful for both the new employee and any family members who may also be relocating. Moving to a different continent with different weather, architecture, food and language can increase the stress load significantly, even before considering cultural behaviours and complex belief systems inherent in Southeast Asia.
Our Pre-Departure prepare new employees and their families for their new assignment by establishing a proactive understanding of the host country and its people, history, communications systems and deep insight into the country’s cultural traits, beliefs and faith systems. One to three days depending on client needs. Can be delivered in the participant’s original home country or their new work location.
In-Company On-Boarding Programmes:
Many organisations deliver new hire onboarding, often discussing the organisation’s protocols and practices etc., such as email protocols and intellectual property regulations.
However, within a multinational context, an insight into the host nation’s people and culture should be within the onboarding programme as a minimum, yet this is rarely done by many multinationals, schools or universities who welcome expatriates to their organisations.
Olive Training Consultants can design culturally specific programmes to either slot seamlessly into your current onboarding programme or stand alone as a separate event. We can run them for you or train your HR or training teams to deliver themselves, of course with continuing support.
“Olive Training Consultants designed and delivered our pre-service Cross-Cultural Communications induction for all our expat new hires coming to work in Papua, Indonesia. Olive’s team then trained our trainers on its delivery. In such a culturally complex environment, this induction has proven to be critical for improving relationships with host nationals and allows then to adjust more rapidly to a new and complex culture.”
Michael Searle – Senior Project Manager
RUC Cementation, Freeport Indonesia
Cross-Cultural Communications Skills – For multicultural teams.
In today’s globalized workplace, effective communication among culturally diverse teams is paramount in maintaining a harmonious work environment. Yet the barriers to effective communication are many and often subtle and often bewildering to westerners working within a Southeast Asian context.
Our cross-cultural communications courses are far more than dos and don’ts. We look beyond this and reflect on what lies behind cultural traits, behaviours and belief systems. As well as being extremely helpful and pragmatic, our cultural awareness programmes are highly interactive and very interesting; no trust falls, blindfolds or gimmicky activities; we use your precious time efficiently and effectively within a professional learning context.
Our programmes are designed specifically to foster better working relations and empathy within diverse workgroups and build greater respect and empathy among your teams.
Being licensed partners with the UK’s CultureActive team, we are able to incorporate their unique profiling tool which allows us to compare participants’ own cultural outlines with that of the target country’s culture, while also identifying communication patterns among team members, and much more.
Olive Trainers programmes are based on the groundbreaking Lewis Model for describing national cultures, as designed by Richard D. Lewis in his groundbreaking book “When Cultures Collide 4th Edition” (Nicholas Brealey International 2018).
Our trainers are graduates of the Richard Lewis Communications Train the Trainer programme and incorporate modern facilitation techniques and activities, while anecdotal situations are explored in depth, ensuring all our programmes are highly stimulating.
We may also incorporate The Cross-Cultural Dialogue mat, a unique learning aid for learning about cross-cultural themes in a professional context, through interactive discussion.
The premise is that adults retain information best when they have been able to engage in dialogue. The Cross-Cultural Dialogue Mat aims to develop cross-cultural competence by:
- Engaging session participants in a structured discussion about what culture is, and why it is important for their work.
- Leading them through short case-studies on presentation, meetings, negotiation, leadership, teams and trust.
- Getting them to apply the learning to their real-life work situation and commit to making some personal changes.
Please email us for the full course outline and more information on all our cross-cultural programmes. We deliver programmes specific to other countries, including Indonesia and Laos.