International businesses are facing new challenges to their internal communication structures due to major reforms brought about through internationalization, downsizing, mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures.

Lack of investment in cross cultural training and language tuition often leads to deficient internal cohesion. The loss of clients/customers, poor staff retention, lack of competitive edge, internal conflicts/power struggles, poor working relations, misunderstandings, stress, poor productivity and lack of co-operation are all by-products of poor cross cultural communication.

Cross cultural communications consultants work with international companies to minimise above consequences of poor cross cultural awareness. Through such cooperation, consultancies like Kwintessential have recognised common hurdles to effective cross cultural communication within companies.

Here we outline a few examples of these obstacles to cross cultural co-operation:

Lack of Communication

It may seem obvious to state that non-communication is probably biggest contributor to poor communication. Yet it continues to prove itself as major problem within most companies.

Lack of communication with staff is not solely due to lack of spoken dialogue. Rather it relates to access to information.

For example, not giving feedback (negative or positive), informing staff of decisions and actions that will affect their roles or failure to properly communicate expectations are all ways in which information can be withheld from staff. This will eventually result in an alienated staff base that feels divided from management and superiors.

If managers are too selective in providing information, this can cause suspicion and jealousy among staff and will eventually result in internal strife instead of cohesion.

A management which does not and will not communicate and interact physically with staff demonstrates a lack of interest, trust and respect.

In West it is often case that communication lines are vertical. Staff report up to managers and managers up to senior levels and so on. Ideally lines of communication should run both ways. Those with a subordinate place in communication process tend to feel estranged, indifferent and possibly even belligerent.

Lack of communication in all its forms is unhealthy. Companies and managers must be aware of how, what and to whom they are communicating.

Language

Communication difficulties through language come in two forms:

Use of inappropriate language

Finding ways to create new revenue streams and to decrease current costs is imperative to success of companies caught in this cycle. They need to be thinking on their feet, thinking ahead and thinking creatively, all at same time. This can be a daunting task, as any software executive will tell you.

Despite all of challenges that face mid-sized software market, there are several ways to create these much needed revenue streams and to decrease current costs. New advancements in technology and its use in training and development make generating these revenue streams possible.

Setting Stage

It is almost taken for granted that when an organization purchases a software package from a reputable vendor, a certain amount of end-user, customer training will be either bundled into purchase price or made available to them for an additional cost. If training isn’t available to end-user customer, learning curve on new software package is going to be fairly steep, depending on complexity of software.

Typical training expense categories associated with most mid-sized software companies include:

1.The salaries of offline trainers 2.The travel expenses of offline trainers 3.The costs of producing hard-copy training manuals 4.The time involved in offline, onsite customer training

These expenses should be under a watchful eye and should be consistently viewed as expenses that could be alleviated to some degree to not only improve company’s attractiveness in competitive bid situations but to increase profit margins of supplemental training services provided by company.

At same time, in background, mid-sized software companies should be looking for ways to create new revenue streams that they aren’t currently capitalizing on to work in collaboration with their cost-reduction initiative.

Step 1: Lowering Training Costs Using Custom e-Learning Content

The first step to any well laid-out cost-reduction plan is to decrease costs organization currently incurs in order to get a better handle on profit potential from sheer cost savings. Previously we outlined what our target cost categories are…now we’re going to lower costs associated with those categories by leveraging custom e-Learning content.

Take this scenario: A mid-sized software company that develops intranet portal systems currently employs 3 trainers that are onsite with clients for end-user training 3 days per engagement and they each average approximately 50 engagements per year for a grand total of 150 days on road per trainer or 450 days on road collectively.

For these trainers, onsite training program for end-user customer may look something like following:

Day 1:Software Introduction and Primary Functions Day 2:Functional Use and Administrative Actions Day 3:Real-World Functions and Labs

Lowering costs: By leveraging custom e-Learning content, company used in above scenario, can effectively reduce onsite time required for each trainer, thereby reducing all costs associated with training program across board.

By using a professionally designed, self-paced, custom e-Learning module to focus on Software Introduction and Primary Functions training that normally occurs on Day 1 and then delivering that learning module online to their end-user customers at time of purchase through an e-Learning Management System (LMS), this company could decrease travel time for all 3 trainers by 1 day per engagement. This would decrease travel time for each trainer by 50 days per year, or 150 days collectively during year. In addition end-user customers will already be familiar with software package before trainers ever set foot in front door.

This would successfully: 1.Decrease costs associated with those 150 days of travel that are now being saved.

2.Enable company’s trainers to perform more training engagements OR enable company to decrease number of in-house trainers it employs. 3.Decrease costs associated with creating and publishing sections of hard-copy training manuals that deal with Software Introduction and Primary Functions training session that normally occurs in-person on Day 1 of training engagement.