Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Dubai has attracted many international companies and employees over recent years, as it bids to become a global economic superpower.

Managing the UAE’s HR Environment, a report by Mercer HR Consulting, showed that average salaries for expatriate staff rose by 6% last year. Daily allowances rose by more than 20%, and multinationals now pay an average of about £240 a day for executive expats on short-term assignments in Dubai – one of the seven states that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

These soaring costs are leading companies to be more creative with their HR practices, according to Markus Wiesner, head of Mercer’s UAE operations.

Read more: Dubai 

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins next week. Millions of people from Morocco to Malaysia will fast everyday from sunrise to sunset for 30 days. Among these will be significant numbers of Muslims working in offices in Europe and North America where Ramadan slips past unnoticed. This lack of awareness can and does cause inconvenience, stress and unhappiness to practicing Muslims in the workplace. Kwintessential, a leading cross cultural communication training provider, has released a free guide for employers with Muslim staff to help them better understand the month and what it means to Islam’s adherents.

Depending on the sighting of the moon, the Islamic world will once again begin their annual exercise in spiritual and physical cleansing through fasting and other religious exercises next week. In countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Indonesia where the majority of the population will be fasting, the social cycle changes to accommodate people’s needs. Work may start later due to people praying late into the night, it will certainly finish earlier to allow people to prepare for iftar (breaking of the fast) and the general pace of life drops down a couple of gears, especially for the important last 10 nights.

However, in Europe and North America the pace of life continues as normal. Although many Muslims will be going through the same rigours as people in Syria or Singapore, Ramadan can be that little bit tougher. This is mainly down to the lack of cultural awareness within businesses nowadays. Although people may know who a Muslim is they may not appreciate what a Muslim does. Unawareness of aspects of the religion such as food & drink, interaction between genders, moral obligations, prayers and holidays is widespread.

As a result there are always stories of Muslims being invited to business lunches, not being provided with time or space to break their fasts at sunset or expected to work on the Eid holiday following Ramadan.

“We know of Muslims working in organisations that had no idea what Ramadan was and what it entails. Stories include buffets being set up next to someone’s desk at work who was fasting, a manager insisting on a Muslim colleague attending a working lunch and adequate time not being given at the time to break the fast to drink and eat properly,” explains Kwintessential’s Managing Director, Neil Payne.

Respecting cultural diversity in the workplace is simply best practice. If staff feel that they are being taken care of and understood on a personal level, a business will experience greater retention, morale and ultimately productivity.

In order to provide businesses with access to timely cultural knowledge on Muslims, Islam and the month of Ramadan, Kwintessential have released a free downloadable file that offers employers a summary of the main issues. These include looking at what Ramadan is, what it means to Muslims, the impact it has on their daily lives for a month and how in turn this impacts their working lives.

“The future is culturally diverse and if we are all to have a successful future, then cultural awareness is critical,” adds Payne.

The invaluable guide is available at Muslims, Ramadan and the Workplace – a Guide for HR

eading figures have told Personnel Today how HR teams are allowing a minority of racist line managers to make working life tough for migrant medics.

Their comments come after a General Medical Council (GMC) report showed that doctors trained overseas were twice as likely to face formal disciplinary hearings once a complaint had been made as those who graduated in the UK.

Ramesh Mehta, president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, told Personnel Today: “There is no doubt that bullying of Asian doctors goes on.

“The small minority of racists in the NHS take complaints [about foreign doctors] to HR. HR needs better training in handling these issues.”

Read more: Doctors 

For global corporations, the borderless world offers a glimpse of what’s to come. International success once meant having bodies and factories on the ground from São Paulo to Silicon Valley to Shanghai. Coordinating their activities was a deliberately planned effort handled by headquarters.

The challenge now is to weld these vast, globally dispersed workforces into superfast, efficient organizations. Given the conflicting needs of multinational staff and the swiftly shifting nature of competition brought about by the Internet, that’s an almost impossible task. And getting workers to collaborate instantly—not tomorrow or next week, but now—requires nothing less than a management revolution.

Complicating matters is the fact that the very idea of a company is shifting away from a single outfit with full-time employees and a recognizable hierarchy. It is something much more fluid, with a classic corporation at the center of an ever-shifting network of suppliers and outsourcers, some of whom only join the team for the duration of a single project.

To adapt, multinationals are hiring sociologists to unlock the secrets of teamwork among colleagues who have never met. They’re arming staff with an arsenal of new tech tools to keep them perpetually connected. They include software that helps engineers co-develop 3D prototypes in virtual worlds and services that promote social networking and that track employees and outsiders who have the skills needed to nail a job. Corporations are investing lavishly in posh campuses, crafting leadership training centers, and offering thousands of online courses to develop pipelines of talent.

Read more: Global Teams 

Diversity practitioners are calling for a new professional association to help them to establish industry standards and define proper career paths, according to the Learning and Skills Council (LSC).

A report commissioned by the LSC, due to be published next week, has revealed that despite educational and vocational training, diversity experts feel they cannot carry out their jobs effectively as there is an “unstructured” mix of standards and guidance available to them, through ‘on the job’, formal and informal training.

Read more: Diversity 

The Cartus Emerging Trends in Global Mobility: Policies & Practices Survey shows that an accelerated shift from long-term to short-term international relocation assignments is expected by the end of 2009. China’s popularity as a destination is growing the fastest when compared with the U.S., Great Britain and India.

Cartus, a global mobility management and workforce development consultant, conducted the survey with 184 respondents from companies in 25 major industry segments. The organizations surveyed represent more than 83,000 assignees and have headquarters in 19 different nations.

Cartus also identified why these international assignments fail, regardless of being on a short-term basis. The top three reasons were family adjustment, at 71%; assignee personal style, at 48%; and cultural differences, at 40%.

This is easily remedied with intercultural and language training, which more companies are offering. The survey shows that intercultural training was offered by 55% of companies in 2007, versus the 28% offered in 2004. Meanwhile, 58% of companies offered language services for families, an increase from 30% in 2004.

Read more: Cartus 

Picture it: the CEO of a pharmaceutical company is brainstorming with his staff, and the idea of gift certificates is tossed around. One employee, an accountant and a recent immigrant from Romania, has never heard of a gift certificate, because although she’s fluent in English, gift certificates don’t exist in Romania. She asks, “What’s a gift certificate?” and everyone looks at her like it’s the stupidest question they’ve ever heard.

Unfortunately, this is a true story. It’s just one example cited in Recruiting, Retaining and Promoting Culturally Different Employees by Canadian cross-cultural specialists Don Rutherford and Lionel Laroche.

Although cross-cultural challenges exist in Canadian workplaces, entrepreneurs can employ tactics that help minimize the difficulties to ensure they retain and capitalize on the ideas and skills that culturally diverse employees bring.

Read more: Recruiting, Retaining and Promoting Culturally Different Employees

UK employers are failing to address workplace diversity, despite the country’s long standing equality legislation.

A survey conducted by online recruitment firm Monster, questioning 660 employers, found that six in 10 respondents did not have a diverse workforce or were unaware whether they did.

Four in 10 said diversity is a “big priority”, while 36% said it was not at all, with 15% unsure.

One employer in 10 said was starting to think about it, but was not yet a reality.

Read more: Survey 

As companies conduct cross-border courtships and inter-marry , the one glue needed to hold all the pieces together seems to be missing. Language and communication skills seem to be the one major casualty of the technical education pursued by most managers and coveted by most employers. However successful an organisation, the lack of proper language skills can derail the most audacious merger or turn the most breath-taking innovation into an ordinary process shift.

That’s probably why Astra-Zeneca , Boeing and Citigroup have all hired well-known poet David Whyte to figure out how to conduct conversations within their organisations.

Read more: Whyte 

Employers in Britain are planning to more aggressively recruit gay, disabled, female and Asian workers in 2007 and 2008, a new poll reveals.

More than 215 hiring managers and 500 workers were surveyed for job site CareerBuilder.co.uk by Harris Interactive and 21 per cent said that they planned to enhance their recruitment process for women, 16 per cent for disabled workers, 13 per cent for Asian workers and gay/lesbian workers (eight per cent).

A quarter of employers polled (26 per cent) said that they planned to increase their staff numbers by more in the last six months of 2007 than the first, with nearly 49 per cent of bosses hiring more workers in the first half of the year.

Read more: Recruitment