How cross-cultural workshops can increase team performance

Context

Decathlon is a French international sporting goods retailer with outlets in 54 countries. Headquartered in Lille, the company does a lot of business with their Indian teams, including employees and external suppliers. However, the HQ teams often struggle to communicate effectively with their local Indian counterparts due to cultural differences, causing confusion, mistakes and inefficiencies. Decathlon decided that something needed to be done to improve communication in a practical and effective way.

Challenge

In June 2018, Decathlon asked Creative Culture to design and manage a workshop to address the lack of communication and understanding between French and Indian teams.

The need was to design a workshop that could work for a range of employee profiles, ranging from engineers to sales managers and designers.

A moderator was deployed to lead the workshop, with a clear understanding of what problems and issues the attendees were experiencing and how these relate to their Indian counterparts.

Solution

Creative Culture designed and delivered a day-long cultural awareness workshop on India for 12 key employees at the French HQ. Attendees completed a survey prior to the workshop, so that the training could specifically target their needs in understanding their Indian colleagues and suppliers.

With an expert French anthropologist acting as a moderator for the day, the workshop successfully provided interactive activities, group discussions, role play scenarios, key learnings on online tools and further research direction.

A debriefing session was later organised between Decathlon and Creative Culture to provide feedback from the workshop participants along with learnings to be implemented in the next workshops.

Results

Through the comprehensive and practical workshop, each attendee gained a deeper understanding of Indian culture and of the best communication strategies to use when addressing their Indian counterparts.

The client was so happy with the workshop that they later asked Creative Culture to organise other employee workshops, including new target cultures of Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Bespoke, carefully crafted cultural awareness workshops really do work