Creating a Multicultural Work Environment at Fluido Oy

This thesis studies the case of Fluido Oy. A Finnish company looking to improve the way in which their non-local employees can be integrated into their company culture. This research question is supported by two additional questions: Is the current company culture ready to accept international employees? How to assess the integration level of the non-local employees to the company’s international culture? The conceptual framework for this study is based on five main topics: resourcing and onboarding, company culture for shaping multicultural work environments, management in a multicultural organisation, employee engagement, trust and communication as skills for a multicultural organisation and, the utilising the Multicultural Organization Development Model (MCOD) as a strategy for creating a fully multicultural company. Throughout one year, I collected and analysed the related literature and, qualitative and quantitative data from 56 persons across five different countries where Fluido has its offices. Each of the topics from the framework was used to collect the data mentioned above, and by triangulating the analysis of the results with the available literature, four improvement areas were discovered against which, four development ideas were proposed. The development ideas are focused on improving the company’s multiculturality, focusing on solving the main research question: how to integrate international employees into Fluido’s company culture. The development ideas discussed in this thesis, also include the implementation plan for applying each of them to the company. The proposals are the following: 1) Train managers and employees on how to engage with other cultures and how to manage culturally diverse teams. 2) Transform Fluido into a fully multicultural organisation through Holvino’s Multicultural Organization Development Model. 3) Increase cultural sharing activities. And 4) Define and officialise mobility programmes for the company