Think locally
Before growing an office in a new market, Rodriguez always begins by looking at the local community and seeing how to adapt Eulen’s culture in a way that drives business and keeps employees loyal.
“One of things we usually do is to learn first about the culture of a country,” Rodriguez says. “Sometimes multinational companies don’t have a set strategy to do that because they are so big. You have to embrace the diversity that comes with being a global company.”
By listening to the local people that make up your business’s employees and customers, you can understand the keys and the barriers to succeeding in an area long term.
“We are not magicians, but the best way to improve a service is to listen to the employees who are the ones who really know what the day-to-day problems are,” Rodriguez says. “Sometimes the multinational companies do not have the ability to do that. They are so big that they lose the focus of getting to the little problems and the day-to-day business, and at the end of the day, those are the ones who see death in the growth of a company.
“Being involved with the communities offers you an opportunity of how to solve those problems, where you can search for labor or how to deal with local issues that appear of how to solve problems that maybe somebody from the community knows better than you, that coming from outside they are going to tell you how to solve them.”
Every city and its people are different, and business leaders need to study those differences in order to find the best ways to motivate and lead employees in diverse areas. By learning the cultural features that distinguish a community, you have a better understanding of what matters to the people you hire and can then adapt employee recognition programs, operations, training and incentives accordingly to fit that.
“Incentives programs with employees work 100 percent, but the programs have to take into account the people who you are working with,” Rodriguez says. “When I was in the Dominican Republic, the incentive program was completely different from what we are doing now over here or what we used to do over in Chile or Colombia or Peru.”
