3COM To Fix Cultural Communication within the corporation

In this paper I will be making proposal/suggestions to the 3COM Corporation as if this was a new company. I will try to alleviate the cultural communication differences. This proposal hopefully will furnish the company with ways to communicate with their employees from different region of the world effectively. I also will be using the four elements of effective business communication; audience, content, delivery and comprehension. The section will cover the audience portion of effective communication proposal/suggestions. 3COM has shown in their plans that they plan on hiring employees from 65 nationalities. Of their 1200 employees majority of them will be immigrants. My first suggestion for starters, the company needs to hire some multi-language speaking employees to be able to translate to suspected employees. These employed translators will be hired as workers some what like a team leader. I will say again this is just for starters. (It is impossible to hire translators for all the different nationality suspected) The next suggestion will be to setup the delivery on how to perform the job. A multi-language audio/video training course will need to be incorporated in a training program. This alone will be one of the greatest barrier breakers the company will have to face. The only thing that must be checked with the training video is that the translation is on-point with the video. We all have seen videos that the audio was not in sync which took away from the message. After successfully watching the video the team leader will then demonstrate by hand-on method of training. Once the demonstration is completed each employee will have to perform that task with a high success score of 90%. This will cover two major parts; comprehension and to help eliminate accidents. The focus on safety in a lot of companies is at a minimum. But a corporation likes 3COM with much different type of machineries safety should be a big focus. The next suggestion will be to post poster with directions and explanation how to correctly use the equipment. These posters will have to be large enough to be read from a distance to accommodate all employees of that particular job. Also, these posters will have to support at a minimum all languages of employees working in that area. Because of the mass differences of nationalities 3COM will need to setup periodic training on the different cultural ways of their employees. In order for majority of the employees to get along and respect each other culture training need to be established. Because of the big different of cultures training need to be provided once a month. In a company with not so many different cultures maybe once a quarter. One month should be on cultures and nationalities and next month let some of the employees speak of their culture and nationality. There will be a big language differences but someone will gain from that person. As a result of this, it may help keep down any animosity that may arrive because of not knowing ones culture. The content of these proposal/suggestions hopefully will cover all areas of the initial hiring and training. The content has been broken down will enough that anyone can take it and run with it.

Reference: Babel at Work: A 3Com Factory Hires a Lot of Immigrants, Gets Mix of Languages