How international is your office?
February 11, 2008 by Jean Mercedes
Filed under Business
In my office of about 75 people, we now have a dozen nationalities represented and a few more on the way. We have folks from all over the globe – Americas, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. All this in an office located in Germany, a country not especially known for a large amount of immigration. (Only about 8% or 6.7 million of the population in Germany is not native German. This palls in comparison with the US, which has around 1 million legal immigrants every year.)
Sometimes I like to think that my company’s opennness to diversity is the reason we attract so many different nationalities, but to be truthful it probably is just a reflection of the reality of globalization.
Take enrollment of foreign students in the US, for example. Although the number of foreigners atending US universities declined after 9/11, the enrollment numbers for the current school year are back up to about 580,000 or around one-third of the total student enrollment. One-third of students enrolled at US universities are not US citizens! And most of them are studying science and engineering. It’s no wonder that the offices of technical companies are getting more diverse.
What do things look like in your office? How many folks born outside of the US do you work together with?
At one point we had a small office with an awful lot of different religious denominations, if only three nationalities. We had Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Jewish (two kinds), Muslim, and Greek Orthodox, which made religious holidays challenging.