L'Oreal Education and Training Plan, Managing Across Cultures

L’OREAL
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Introduction: Managing Across Cultures
Managers at most international companies often have challenges in managing a multi-cultural workforce. These challenges become worse when an organization is either ethnocentric or parochial. An ethnocentric organization is one whose management views its way as always the best option. In such organizations, diversity is taken as negative to the point that the management thinks it will lead to serious problems to the organization (Thompson, 2004). A parochial organization is one in which cultural diversity concepts are not recognized. In other words, the organization’s management views its way as the only way in decision-making processes. However, there is often a third type of organization, the synergistic type, where the management has a balanced approach between its way and that of its employees. A synergistic organization can be affected either positively or negatively depending on how its management views diversity in the workplace.
L’Oreal USA is considered the synergistic type due to its recent focus on corporate diversity innovation strategies. This recent drive indicates that the company has already taken the first step in addressing opportunities and challenges that may arise as a result of cultural diversity. In the long-term, the synergistic organizations like L’Oreal USA offer many benefits and few risks to both employees and company management unlike the parochial and ethnocentric types.
For L’Oreal USA, the workforce is bound to be multi-cultural given the many cultures present in the United States. Such a workforce brings in a positive dimension in terms of diversity but may also pose challenges to the chosen education and training plan. The challenge that may arise out of the multi-cultural background of the company may be viewed in terms of language barriers. Language barriers may hinder the progression of education and training at the company and therefore hamper skills and competencies impartation to employees. Further, language barriers may divide the workforce into various groups depending on the number of ethnicities present in the workforce and result in failure to achieve competitive advantage for L’Oreal USA (Branine, 2011). As a result, an effective and concrete plan for education and training should be in place to counter this negative effect and drive progression, efficacy, and competitive advantage in the company.
Education and Training Plan
Managers at L’Oreal USA should focus on building cultural diversity awareness and understanding in their education and training plan. The specific education and training plan should ideally target three major elements of diversity as follows:
* Creating awareness of employees’ culture and their cultural differences.
* Skills building through identifi...