How cross-cultural workshops can increase team collaboration and performance

Context

French video game company Ubisoft is a global leader in its field. Headquartered in Paris, France, it comprises over 18,000 employees across 28 countries, with a very multicultural and international outlook. As part of their Diversity and Inclusion initiatives, Ubisoft organised the Diversity and Inclusion Week in November 2019 and wanted to focus two of their conference sessions on cross-cultural inclusion.

Challenge

As part of the D&I week, Ubisoft called upon Creative Culture to help raise awareness of the benefits of working with culturally-diverse teams, how to better attract new international talent moving forward and how to tackle possible challenges that come with multicultural teams.

Solution

The conference was a great opportunity to get involved with the teams, and the client wanted us to offer a format that could work within this framework. For this event, we invited Dutch cross-cultural management expert, Fons Trompenaars, known all over the world for the development of the Trompenaars’s model of national culture differences.

Results

Fons’ vast experience in intercultural management and effortless storytelling skills allowed his audience to embark on the path of cross-cultural understanding in two sessions of less than two hours each. The feedback received was extremely positive and provided immediate actionable insights and tips.

“Diversity and inclusion was at the forefront of our corporate strategy in 2019. For the cross-cultural chapter of this initiative, it was only natural that we would turn to the best experts on the market to help us support it internally: Creative Culture and Mr Fons Trompenaars. Advised by Creative Culture throughout the process, we opted for a customised conference format where Fons shared his experience and expertise with a lot of finesse and humour. The output was excellent, memorable and impacting. Participants felt the takeaways were very clear and easy to adopt on a daily basis. Following the event, the satisfaction survey showed a 9.9/10 rating!”

Anaïs Lopez Real, Learning and Development Manager, Ubisoft

Cultural awareness workshops are effective ammunition to help support a more inclusive corporate culture.