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Unsurprisingly, Daniela Oprea prefers to attend work meetings that make use of her presence and provide space for her input. Meetings that are structured; facilitated by a moderator; and, “really short!” While virtual meetings are a reality of her global workplace at a Japanese global supplier of automotive parts, she would choose face-to-face meetings if she had her choice so that she could see “behind the language.” With 50+ different types of topic-specific meetings at her company, there’s a high probability that Daniela and her workmates have spent a good amount of their workdays in meetings.

Creating a value adding „Meeting Culture“

At YAZAKI, they’re working to change the trend in favor of meetings that necessarily add value. Leadership has adopted „Meeting Culture,“ an organizational development approach towards changing expectations about meetings and their outcomes. Co-developed and facilitated by Dr. Marcus Hildebrandt and Stefan Meister, the two-day Meeting Culture training and host of accompanying consulting services focus on three simple elements: People, Purpose and Setting. The underlying assumption of the approach is that meetings are the vessel through which organizational change can occur regularly and throughout an organization. Daniela Oprea, a Human Resources professional at YAZAKI’s Arad, Romania branch (YAZAKI Component Technology), shares that, “Through these trainings, we also wanted to make people aware that they can contribute to make progress in business and [that] everybody should be involved in this process—not only HR or Management.” Her accountabilities include recruitment, training and organizational development for a local organization of approximately 1,100 employees. In Arad, four trainings of mixed groups of upper and lower management from the Design and Manufacturing sides of the business have been completed and are counted among dozens of similar trainings carried out at various locations in Germany, Morocco, Portugal, Sweden and the UK.

“Ah, again I have a meeting!”

The “pain points” experienced by YAZAKI employees at the start of the Meeting Culture intervention were many. According to Daniela, symptoms of a less-than-healthy meeting culture included miscommunication and misunderstandings; frustration after “very, very long phone calls” that ended with no conclusion; and stress. “People were not very attracted to go to meetings. They were ‘afraid,’” she says, of investing their time and attention in meetings that were frequent and felt fruitless.

Why go intercultural?

Deciding upon an intercultural intervention can be a learning process. “Somehow,” says Daniela with confidence, “we understood that it’s really important to pay attention also to the subject of interculturality. We understood that we needed to invest more time in knowing others; in knowing the culture they’re coming from; and, the culture we want them to come into.” Around the time of this decision,YAZAKI was offering regular, technical and language training to their staff of engineers and had refined other, process-oriented aspects of working globally in their nearly 75 years of operation. They recognized that while they did their best to interface with clients, there wasn’t as much preparation put into interaction with colleagues from other countries. Further, the transmission of information sometimes failed because of culture-driven behaviors, language and words that got in the way of their own meaning. All things considered, perhaps it was a process of deduction that led the company’s Japanese leadership to “go intercultural” in order to blend their “one big family…from different countries” through a united approach towards the meetings that brought them all to the same table.

Meeting with Purpose

Real and perceived benefits of building Meeting Culture at YAZAKI are plenty. As a result of the Meeting Culture intervention at YAZAKI Component Technology, Daniela Oprea cites increased efficiency and structure in the implementation of international projects; improved experience of leadership as a result of managers making themselves better understood; improved decision-making; gained trust on the part of customers; and a heightened sense of personal satisfaction on the part of employees who attend meetings with purpose. Meetings are now characterized by greater structure, including the designation of roles; invites to the „right people“ for the purpose; and, directives for post-meeting follow-up and dissemination of information. Overall, Daniela reports “feedback on every training session…[as] very positive,” due, in part, to the participants’ enjoyment of how the trainings have been delivered by facilitators.

The Future of Meetings at YAZAKI

While anticipating that YAZAKI Component Technology in Romania will continue Meeting Culture training with intercultures, Daniela envisions that the same knowledge and skills will be incorporated into internal induction training. Participants will include new recruits, high potentials, subject matter experts, those working internationally and additional levels of management. Starting with the crème de la crème, says Daniela, “Even this sector of high potentials…in our organization have to be aware and trained on these topics—on interculturality—because we all think that we cannot be good professional people if [we] don’t have those skills.”

Thank you to Daniela Oprea at YAZAKI for her interview and for making this article possible. Email intercultures to learn more about „Meeting Culture“ solutions.

 

The following article was included in the Jan. 2015 intercultures e-newsletter.

 Picture Credit Title Picture: Stefan Meister.