Companies that do business internationally or have diverse workforces face a number of challenges. Typical challenges organizations face in this diverse world include:
- Difficulties training individuals to be able to adapt to foreign people and their customs and practices. Training is expensive and can be time-consuming. The key might be to have a way to recruit new employees who already have the competencies and attitudes that will facilitate adaptation. But how do you select them?
- C-suite executives want to make sure they are grooming the next generation of executives to take their places when the time comes. They know that means promoting those who are broad-minded, oriented toward global thinking, can easily adapt and change as the environment changes. How do they go about measuring those things?
- Quality control problems at the foreign manufacturing site you just built. It probably will take about 3-6 months for a good technician to do the necessary problem-solving and training. Who would be the best person to go?
- Your firm pulling from the local community for its employees. This means you’ve got some Latino, Caucasian, African-American, and even some Middle Eastern employees. You’ve seen from your own experience that they do not all share similar values and attitudes toward work. They tend to not mix that much with each other. In order to work most efficiently and effectively, you need to get them to work as a well-oiled unit. What could you do to help that?
Using Assessments for Workplace Challenges
Kozai Group has developed two assessments for workplace challenges that are designed specifically to gauge an individuals’ strengths and weaknesses to adapt to work practices, customs, beliefs and attitudes that are different—sometimes very different—from their own.
The Global Competency Inventory (GCI) assesses individuals’ strengths and weaknesses on 16 relevant dimensions—all related to either how quickly the individual can and wants to learn, how easily they will be able to develop new relationships, and how well they will be able to manage their emotional selves. When you consider how much is at stake if you don’t hire the right people in the first place or if you need to send existing employees to a foreign country, the training costs, revenue and relocation are gigantic, compared to the cost of using the GCI to do most of that work for you.
Similarly, the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES) can assess the basic characteristics an individual has to manage those three areas. It measures 6 of the 16 competencies the GCI measures. Although it is not as comprehensive, this can be a more cost-effective way to measure individuals’ strengths and weaknesses to adapt to others. Whereas the GCI is probably more appropriate for middle-level to high-level executives, where possibly more is at stake, the cost of the IES makes it more accessible for a larger number of employees.