Face-to-Face presentations – Effective Intercultural Communication within a French corporation operating in Australia 

(2023 – 2025) Technology Industry

Challenge

The Client has a contract with the Australian government and operates through a local Australian subsidary.

The request is to assist in developing a better understanding of the culturally different communication styles and practices and to recognise behaviour that could have a negative impact on workplace motivation and inclusion. A number of cultural challenging experiences between French management and the Australian multicultural staff have occurred and People and Culture wants to address the communication challenges to enhance effective intercultural communication

After a trial presentation for a selected management group, we were contracted to present to 25 groups of approaximately 30 participants.

• (25) Face-to-Face 2-hour interactive presentations about effective intercultural communication for multicultural staff and management

Interventions and Topics of presentation:

1. Participants complete Training Needs Analysis to identify challenges, experiences, and expectations of participants for each presentation.
2. Mandatory Face-to-Face interactive 2-hour presentations (groups of approximately 30 people)
3. Presentation focus on cultural differences in dealing with language, conflicts, feedback and participation.
4. Participants self-assess preferred way of communicating (Communication type profiler).
5. Participants complete Training Feedback Analysis and reports are shared with the organisation and the contact persons.

Results and Learning outcomes:

Increased Cultural Awareness to recognise and understand the differences

• Building on cultural understanding through multiple perspective taking – dealing with cultural bias, stereotyping, and ethnocentrism
• Positioning the visible and invisible parts of culture
• Critical thinking exercises to recognise the impact of cultural behaviour at work
• Mapping culturally diverse practices and communication types to explore ways to bridge cultural differences in language, conflicts, feedback and participation.

The project ran over 2023 and 2024 and we facilitated 9 training workshops in total.

Feedback of participants

The feedback via online completed training feedback forms showed close to 80% positive result to the question
Your overall rating of the training workshop (“very good” 42%  and “excellent” 39%).

Some of the written comments: