On June 4th, our organization had its first anniversary. A meeting facilitated by the important digital tools we have today brought together our volunteers that helped build this great organization and the movement behind it that looks over women in Haiti. It was quite the view; 14 countries joined to share their experiences, motivations, and wonderful things about their culture, food, and traditions.
We shared our favorite traditional food from each of our countries; some Collard greens for Angela from the United States. Katiana’s favorite is Legume, a food straight from Haiti. Our co-founder Elizabeth's favorite is Chapati, a type of bread from Kenya and many other African countries. And finally, Senska, our great CEO, shared Diri Djondjon and sos poul ti malis, a few delicious dishes from Haiti.
Although it is challenging to interact with coworkers since we are in a fully virtual environment, we constantly communicate, which helps us exchange ideas with others and make improvements every day.
Here are 5 ways in which a multicultural team strengthens our organization:
Stimulate Imagination
Our culture has an impact on how we view the world. A multinational team's diverse opinions and extensive personal and professional experience provide fresh ideas that encourage coworkers to look at our work and the world we live in with a new perspective.
Innovation
It has been proven that diversity of thinking encourages creativity and propels innovation, helping solve issues in new and exciting ways.
Out-of-the-box thinking can result from multiple voices, viewpoints, and personalities interacting with each other. Keep in mind that workers with varied backgrounds will have a wide range of experiences and abilities on the personal and professional levels. Diverse perspectives will give the organization a range of options for achieving its primary objectives. An organization with different points of view will execute plans and strategies more quickly, becoming efficient at executing these objectives.
Improved productivity
A varied workplace can improve problem-solving skills and increase productivity because of the variety of experience, knowledge, and working styles it offers. According to studies, organizations with a culture of diversity and inclusion are happier and more effective.
Healthy competition
Working in homogeneous teams may look more straightforward, but it might lead a company to accept the status quo. Contrarily, diversity can foster healthy competition, pushing a team to perform to their highest potential. Optimizing processes for better efficiency will result from an environment of healthy competition.
Personal Growth
Working with people from different cultural backgrounds may be a genuinely interesting experience that teaches others about viewpoints and traditions worldwide. By overcoming prejudices and an ethnocentric worldview, you can become a global citizen and give up prejudices, which is a skill that is becoming more and more valuable.
Womenful Voice takes a multicultural approach, and being true to our strong values, compassion, honesty, and trust will help us move towards the achievement of our goals and to bring into reality our vision.
Multicultural teams research: