Head line news GBL Research Project Intercultural workplace 2017

With Mr. Fang and Ms. Matsuno from Procter & Gamble KK we conducted a workshop on 29th November 2017. All students reported that they learned something concrete and gave a firmly positive assessment for this workshop. Logan, an international student from the USA, commented that students received an awesome presentation by the managers. The communication in this workshop has been motivating to him and the other students. Under the supervision of Professor Dr. Rolf D. Schlunze the students build a model to evaluate diversity in the intercultural workplace and prepared questions accordingly. Students evaluated the speech of the P&G managers and found that they apply a vision about managing diversity in the intercultural workplace. Managers discussed diversity and inclusion as an important idea for work-life balance. The management system and style at P&G became clear to our students. Student found that diversity management at P&G is an important Human Resource Management (HRM) tool.

Mr. Fang strongly supports diversity. P&G is far above the average employing female staff. The company enables work-life balance by flexible working hours and telecommunication from home offices. Personality management and diversity inclusion was perceived as an important practice. Diversity is implemented as a business strategy at P&G respecting individual differences of all employees. Knowing and acknowledging personality differences is the best way to build cross-cultural teams. P&G employees need to decide their working goals and will be assessed by the fulfillment of these goals since everything is decided by the employees’ performance, not your gender, nationality and practice. Our students learned from the Mr. Fang and Ms. Matsuno that diversity and inclusion can be perceived as strategy making a company more competitive.

We conducted a workshop with Mr. Obe from Sysmex Corporation 6th December 2017. All students were eager to learn from the manager about the intercultural workplace. Mr. Obe said he does not have “vision”.  Nevertheless, students found that has a strategy to implement diversity management. His purpose is to improve the company’s Human Resource (HR) quality. Students noticed that Mr. Obe is actually focusing on performance and outcome, and not so much on cultural differences. His vision can be explained by the corporate philosophy and history of the company. He does not judge people on their culture but more on their personal experience and background. He sees the sociability of employees within the corporation as an important challenge of new employees’ challenge. An important practice to deal efficiently with diversity is to implement international business standards. Providing a kids room for employees’ children is one important step. On the other hand, he believes that highlighting local advantages is actually more effective when adapting to different markets.

Students learned from both company cases that successful HRM in the intercultural workplace depends more on knowing the people than on a policy. Nevertheless, they realized that successful HRM is guided by a HRM policy that aims for diversity and inclusion.