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CREATING A CULTURALLY INTELLIGENT COMMUNITY AND PUBLIC SECTOR

In today's world, being able to understand and value another version of 'normal' as legitimate, and knowing how and when to flex our behaviour, is an essential capability.

In multicultural Australia, over a quarter of our population was born overseas and a further one fifth has at least one overseas-born parent. We are also increasingly ethnically diverse. The proportion of migrants born in Asia increased to 33% in 2011 and India was the leading birthplace (13%) for recent arrivals*. Our CALD - culturally and linguistically diverse - community is growing.

Added to this, our workplaces need to consider gender and aged-based diversity.

The implications for community workers and public services is the need to have staff, products and services that are flexible enough to be relevant to our increasingly diverse communities, as well as to employees.

But where do we start? Cultural awareness training, while useful, does not always translate into actual desired behaviours and outcomes. Recent research has provided us with a measurable and academically validated way to improve our cross-cultural capability and highlighted key areas on which to focus our energies.  

We can assist you to:

• Identify strengths and weaknesses with an organisational cultural audit
• Develop culturally-informed business planning and strategies
• Review and develop culturally intelligent human resource policies, diversity and inclusion programmes
• Embed cultural perspectives in organisational capability programmes
• Train leadership and key staff
• Hire and develop culturally-effective people

  

(*those who arrived between 2007 and 2011)