MANAGING DIVERSITY: Grappling With Change in the Work Force. A SPECIAL REPORT : Northern Telecom : Firm Helps Employees With Communications

The photograph projected on a classroom screen at Northern Telecom’s semiconductor components plant in Rancho Bernardo showed a farmer piling hay into a wagon drawn by two plow horses.

“Where do you think this picture was taken?” instructor Linda Kirby-Nichols asked her 15 students.

China, one called out. Texas, said another. Indonesia, Mississippi, Russia, the class of assembly workers and technicians guessed.

The answers reflected the global span of the employees’ backgrounds. Seven were American-born Anglos. Four others were Filipino, two Latino, one black and one Pakistani.

Prism of Experience

No one was correct. The picture, Kirby-Nichols told them, was snapped in Ohio. But her point was clear. Everything we view, she said, is viewed through the prism of our own experience.

“Just because of the way we are brought up,” Kirby-Nichols said, “we can see how we have problems communicating.”

Northern Telecom, the Canadian-based maker of telephones and related products, is convinced that by ironing out communications problems among the 420 workers--of more than a dozen nationalities--at its San Diego factory, it can restore productivity levels that started slipping not long after the plant opened in 1981.

Getting to that point is the objective of such “effective communications” classes as the one taught by Kirby-Nichols and co-instructor Brenda Coates.

As part of 16 hours of training, Northern Telecom workers discussed how their differences in cultural background affected the attitudes they brought to work.

Privately, they completed a work sheet that asked for snap impressions of groups represented in the plant work force, including blacks, Anglos, engineers, New Yorkers, gays and women. “We might have stereotypes about those (groups),” explained Terry M. Dearstone, the plant’s training and education manager, “and stereotypes can get in the way of good communication with people.”

Differences in Behavior

Drawing from the research of international experts on cultural diversity, Kirby-Nichols described some of what she said were widely noted differences in various ethnic groups’ behavior.

Americans, she said, tend to be overbearing. Latin Americans are “very laid back, and things don’t get done as per schedule.” Like Middle Easterners, they often stand very close to the person they are talking to. Asians are reluctant to express their opinions; Chinese, in particular, do not make waves. Indochinese do not look directly at a supervisor, as a matter of respect.

Workers nod in agreement with the descriptions and join in when the instructors encourage discussion.

Rick Van, an Anglo electronics technician, asked Fe Javien, a Philippine-born assembly worker, if she finds white Americans too brash.

“I just worry I’m too shy, and sometimes I cry,” she answered quietly. “I just worry that my English isn’t good enough.”

Kirby-Nichols asked the group why it was important to improve communications across cultural lines.

To Rachel Matthews--a black who said she had never met a Latino or Vietnamese until she moved to San Diego from Tennessee--the answer was obvious.

“Because,” she said, “you have to work with them.”