WELCOME TO THE G&D SPACE DEDICATED TO HELPING US WORK WITH DIVERSITY IN MULTICULTURAL TEAMS EFFECTIVELY. The following tutorials and articles have been developed to help you generate the attitudes, knowledge and skills needed in order to create the most value from working together with different multi-cultural, multi disciplinary team members.
How can we best understand each other? lessen the chance of miscommunication? of getting frustrated and of tiring conflicts? How can we best build together a strong enough base from which to generate rich and creative solutions that work for all?
To answer these questions, we offer on-line tutorials on 'Managing Multicultural Time’ and 'Managing Multicultural Team Meetings' and more. We will be adding over time to help us all work with diversity everyday.
Managing Multicultural Time Tutorial-
The concept of 'Time management' assumes that 'Time' exists in measurable periods or units (years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds) and what you do in those 'periods' is deeply related to fulfilling your personal values, needs and goals. These are different for each of us so 'making the most of 'my time' means different things in different cultures.
Managing Multicultural Global Meetings-
Cultural differences in meetings can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, and stress. Building trust is a critical first step. As a leader or member of a multicultural team, it is helpful to acknowledge the different ways in which trust can be established. It is also important to be fluent in how different meeting processes and patterns of interaction can generate reflective and open participation... with a little gentle shared humour along the way of course.
We post this material to make our ideas for everyday methods for working with multicultural teams freely available. You are invited to use this information with your own teams providing due respect to the credits. Acknowledgments
Working With Diversity in Virtual Teams
In this section, you will find original articles developed by our team for G&D’s Online Course for High Performing Scientific Teams. These articles are part of a full course experience which includes not only theory, but audits to help surface key issues and team work to put learnings into practice, all in a safe and facilitated environment.
Creating Scientific Knowledge Online
- Starting with Compelling Vision and Purpose
- Modes of Online Communications
- Tips for Effective Email
- Developing Trust Online
- Effective Online Decision Making
- Understanding Cultural Differences
- The Power of Differences
- Creating Working Norms and Agreements
- Working Through Difficulties
- Review of Pilot Online Course
See also Working with Diversity in Collaborations: Tips and Tools (G&D Working Paper No 39 available in Arabic, English and Spanish).
For access to excellent materials on gender and diversity in virtual teams developed by other organizations, please see our Cybrary of Best Links on Gender and Diversity in Vitural Teams.
