Culture, language barriers to leveraging immigrant talent
A new, and free, online game will help managers better recognize the skills of diverse employees and hopefully better leverage the talent of skilled immigrants, according to the director of Hire Immigrants Ottawa.
“With the changing demographics in the Canadian labour force, there’s beginning to be a move by employers to create inclusive workplace strategies to leverage the talent of their employees. This is a tool that would (help) accomplish that,” said Henry Akanko, director of the organization that helps Ottawa businesses hire skilled immigrants.
The game, TalentNet, is easy to use and flexible, allowing users to choose what they want to learn and when, said Akanko. It also teaches them about the different cultures of many diverse groups, not just immigrants, he said.
TalentNet came out of research from the Leveraging Immigrant Talent to Strengthen Canadian Business project at the University of Ottawa, with funding from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.
“Because of the demographic shift in the workplace, there are an extraordinarily high number of immigrants in the workplace. Are you using them effectively? If not, you’re risking failure,” said Linda Manning, director of the project.
To best leverage immigrant talent, managers need to understand what immigrants can contribute and recognize the skills and competencies they have, she said.
How the game works
In the game, users play the role of a manager responsible for seven employees — four immigrants, three Canadian-born. Users must complete three missions as part of a talent management process: engage employees, evaluate their performance and identify high-potential employees.
Throughout the missions, the users get feedback on their decisions and how cultural considerations come into play.
“We all look at somebody — interact with somebody — and make unconscious assumptions about them,” said Manning. That unintended bias drives a lot of mistakes in the talent management of culturally diverse employees, she said.
In the first mission, users learn how and where to talk to employees about work and personal issues. For example, immigrants from hierarchical cultures such as China aren’t comfortable discussing work accomplishments in front of colleagues but also aren’t comfortable discussing their personal lives in a manager’s office, said Manning.
“Managers aren’t even aware that they’re destroying trust between them and the employee by virtue of the fact that they’re asking certain questions, asking them in certain places,” she said.
If trust is destroyed, the employee becomes less engaged and less productive, which hurts a company, she said. Some employees might even leave a company altogether.
In the second mission, users learn how to identify employees’ skills and strengths in a culturally inclusive way. Some employees in the game will seemingly hold up a project while they gather more information.
While the North American culture values employees who move quickly and take risks, this more careful approach will pay off in the long term, said Manning.
The users then complete performance evaluations based on the information gleaned during the first and second missions.
In the final task, users identify high-potential employees.
“One of the places where the cultural misunderstanding is most critical is in the identification of high-potential employees,” said Manning.
The game is intended to help users see how people from different cultures exhibit North American high-potential characteristics in different ways. For example, a Chinese employee may demonstrate passion for a job in a quieter, more subtle way than a North American employee, said Manning.
TalentNet is available online at www.leadershipdiversity.ca.
Tackling language barriers at work
Language is another barrier to the advancement of skilled immigrants in Canada and a large contributing factor to the wage gap between foreign-born and Canadian-born individuals, according to a report from TD Bank Financial Group.
While an employee might be hired for a technical role, where there isn’t a premium on language skills, over time he might be a candidate for a managerial role where communication is more important, said Craig Alexander, TD economist and author of Literacy Matters: Helping Newcomers Unlock Their Potential.
Also, poor language skills can make it harder for skilled immigrants to network, he said.
“An awful lot gets done through networking. If you don’t have strong language and literacy skills, it’s very difficult to benefit from the informal networking that goes on in the business community,” said Alexander.
Only 40 per cent of recent immigrants — in Canada for fewer than 10 years — have an adequate or strong level of literacy in English or French, according to a 2003 International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey, a seven-country initiative. The survey also linked lower literacy levels to lower income, lower employment rates and longer periods of unemployment.
“In many cases, (recent immigrants) are highly literate. They arrive with university degrees. They’re just having challenges with Canada’s official languages because it’s not their native tongue,” said Alexander.
The 2006 census by Statistics Canada found 70.2 per cent of the foreign-born population had a first language other than English or French, up from 67.5 per cent in 2001 and 62.8 per cent in 1991.
As more of these immigrants come to Canada, the wage gap between them and their Canadian-born counterparts has been increasing, stated the report. Recent immigrants earned just 60 per cent of the income of Canadian-born individuals in the early 2000s, down from 65 per cent in the late 1990s and 85 per cent (for men) and 77 per cent (for women) in the late 1970s, found a 2008 Statistics Canada study.
“Raising immigrant literacy scores to the level of Canadian-born individuals might close as much as two-thirds of the earnings gap,” concluded the TD report.
While there are many government- and private-run language programs available for immigrants, there isn’t enough data to accurately assess their effectiveness, said Alexander.
How employers can help
Businesses, too, have a role to play in helping newcomers. Employers can build awareness of the economic payoff of improving literacy skills and either conduct in-house language training or subsidize the cost of community programs. At the very least, employers should provide a flexible work environment so newcomers can take advantage of community programs, he said.
This commitment will pay off because higher literacy levels lead to increased productivity, lower error rates, improved labour relations, increased quality of work and better health and safety records, said Alexander.
“It’s a skill upon which you build all the other skills,” he said.
