How To Create a Sense of Community Throughout a Multinational Organization

• Creating unity across offices and across borders is a challenge
• Select benefits that reinforce company values
• Create consistency through reinforcement
• Help employees to understand and practice company core values

There is nothing more important than the health and wellbeing your employees. For every company, it’s vital to create a culture where employees feel safe, valued, appreciated, and where their wellbeing is supported.

But for multinational companies, creating a sense of community is always a challenge. Ensuring that company culture extends to all offices and all countries is no easy task.

There is, however, a way.

Being Consistent

To provide an example, let’s look at employee benefits and how multinational companies can administer them across multiple countries.

First and foremost, the benefits offered to your employees should be based on your company values. Let’s say, for example, one of your company values is the understanding that, while what employees do at work is important, what employees do outside work is equally important to their wellbeing. As a result, you decide to offer your employees benefits that support their wellbeing.

In order to implement a successful benefits strategy in a multinational organization a global-but-local approach is required. The overarching theme of your benefits is based on your company values (in this case, employee wellbeing) and is globalized and extended to all countries and offices. However, the specifics of the benefits are localized, depending upon the country.

In this example, we can see consistency carried across all markets, based on the company values. A consistent message helps align employees, regardless of location, around a central idea, which contributes to creating a sense of community.

The One Common Thread

Across offices, across countries, your company values are the only constant, and they play an integral role in shaping your company culture. It is your company values that provides consistency in all that you do, across offices and across countries.

Therefore, to create a sense of community in a multinational organization, you must reinforce your company values at every opportunity.

“Determine what behaviors and beliefs you value as a company and have everyone live true to them. These behaviors and beliefs should be so essential to your core, that you don’t even think of it as culture.”
– Brittany Forsyth, VP of Human Relations, Shopify

Creating Community Through Unity

To create a sense of community, first, you must communicate and align employees with your company’s values. To do this, you must show employees that what they do matters. Help employees “connect the dots” and see that what they do has value.

As we suggest in our post 4 Tips for Creating a Culture Where Employees Thrive, organizations would be wise to find ways to help their employees understand and practice the company’s core values. One way to do this is to make it part of employee onboarding. During the onboarding process, employees should be given ways to understand the company’s core values and personalize the values in a way that resonate with them.

Regardless of location, regardless of country, employees who align themselves with the company values, and who feel part of a community where they feel valued, appreciated and supported, are more engaged and more connected to the organization.

“Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much”
– Helen Keller

Want to learn more about the importance of employee experience? Download our e-book, The New Employee Experience: How to maximize and optimize every step of the employee journey.