Targeted Acculturation Onboarding For Virtual Teams

As the modern workforce becomes more culturally diverse and widely dispersed, the need to build teams that operate effectively regardless of location is of increasing importance. The Human Capital Institute published a relevant white paper in 2007 on this topic called "Comprehensive Onboarding Beyond Line-of-Sight: Integrating Global and Virtual Teams". Author Ross Jones shares a number of insights in this piece that relate to acculturating employees around the globe to form highly productive work units.

Ross reveals a very interesting statistic about how global corporations are currently handling acculturation. Only about 1 in 4 organizations make use of both location specific and internationally standardized onboarding processes to integrate new team members. He argues that more employers should make use of this blended approach.

Local Versus Global Acculturation

A one-size-fits-all program has obvious limitations. It doesn't take into account cultural differences - or the fact that different employees at the same site require varying levels of orientation and training that are specific to their job functions. For example, a worker who will interface with other team members around the world will have different acculturation requirements than one who is expected to interact only with other local employees.

However, when each location is solely responsible for creating and implementing its own onboarding program, corporate cohesion suffers. In order for virtual teams to collaborate, they must have a shared vision and understanding of the goals of the parent organization.

One solution is to use existing standardized onboarding as a starting point. The company's communication network and intranet portal should be accessible to all employees regardless of where they work. Cross-cultural interaction should be encouraged through the use of global team training initiatives. At the same time, each satellite location should have the ability to customize its acculturation onboarding modules to provide relevant information and tools to local workers.

With the AllegroHR Acculturation Portal, flexibility is built into the system making it an ideal solution for employers who mobilize virtual teams across the globe.