CASE STUDIES

As book and journal publishing moved from a regional business to a truly global business, Wiley needed their people, wherever they were located, to be able to work effectively across cultures, distance and multiple time zones. The purpose of the workshops was to skill-up all key global team members and leaders in key countries to become highly effective at managing this new global workspace.

TNK-BP is a 50-50 joint venture and a critical one for BP, representing 25% of BP’s production.  It has around 68,000 mostly Russian employees with only 200 of these coming from BP, who are carefully selected into critical expatriate secondment positions, in a broad range of senior leadership, operational and technical advisory positions.  It is essential these secondees are able to integrate and become effective as soon as possible, in a fast changing and highly challenging Russian business environment.The purpose of the Cross Cultural On-boarding programme is therefore to accelerate this effectiveness, though the use of the International Profiler, pre-event coaching and a 2 day programme designed collaboratively with Global Excellence.    As most of the attendees are also a highly globally experienced audience, it is essential to be able to flex the programme to meet their needs.  The course is therefore highly participative and brings together a range of experienced secondee storytelling, involves secondee partners, cultural change models and knowledge, a Russian culture expert and TNK-BP/BP leadership.

When Tesco opened an offshore service centre in Bangalore, India, a formal change programme was introduced to assist the business in managing the growth and development of the role of HSC. One of the streams of this change programme was the Culture Stream. The objective for this stream was the “identify behaviour that will help the UK and India work as one team out of multiple locations”.The aims of the training programme were to have a greater awareness of India’s culture, history, education political systems, economy and changing trends in life styles in order to manage interactions with Indian colleagues; to understand the differences in norms and values between their own culture and Indian culture – and find solutions to everyday business problems; to have identified key areas for bridging potential cultural differences, in communication, hierarchy and effective working relationships and to have gained specific tools enabling greater efficiency for when working across culture, distance and technology.

Global Excellence worked with the International Medical Education and Development team of international trainers. The objective of the programme was to focus on improving their effectiveness in delivering GSK’s training to global customers.

Global Excellence ran a series of ‘Working with Indian Counterparts’ Lunch & Learn sessions in Shell Global Solutions. The aim of the programmes was to raise the level of intercultural awareness and skills for European staff and their Indian counterparts in teams in Shell India or to outsource organisations in India.

When Tesco embarked on a Diversity and Inclusion programme called ‘Everyone is Welcome at Tesco’ the aims of the programme was to increase awareness of leaders staff and/or customer’s needs around Diversity and Inclusion; build the confidence to deal with staff and customers from diverse backgrounds and impart the knowledge and skills to make staff and customers feel welcome at Tesco.All the Tesco store leadership teams have undergone this programme and it has been cascaded across the stores throughout Tesco. The benefit of the EWAT programme has meant that not only has it increased awareness but it has also created a platform for real dialogue and discussion around this area with continued success and with new initiatives coming out from it such as the Tesco Women’s Network.

Global Excellence worked Volvo’s Dutch and Swedish managers at two centre of operations here in the Netherlands. The aim of the programme was to facilitate mutual understanding particularly in the areas of people management, decision-making and feedback processes between the two groups.

Global Excellence was asked to design a new Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiative. This was a three-day programme for HR managers across multiple business sectors within Shell and was designed to increase the level of D & I knowledge, policies and challenges among the Shell HR professionals worldwide.

The aims of the training programme were to actively support leaders and the business in the implementation of D&I, to enable HR managers to understand systemic D&I issues such as power and privilege, and to use D&I tools and resources with more confidence.