Image source: Woodgreen Community Services
Newcomers to Canada offer huge opportunities to the local business landscape, especially as entrepreneurs and company founders. Often, the perspectives that they bring can lead their enterprises to levels of success above and beyond those of home-grown businesses. In fact, Statistics Canada found in 2010 that 5.8% of immigrants who had lived in the country for between 10 and 30 years owned private, incorporated businesses with employees. In contrast, the figure was 4.8% for Canadian-born business owners, despite immigrants’ businesses being generally smaller in size.
It is important, however, for newcomers to Canada who are building start-ups or entering the workforce to understand the nuances of professional communication. This is an area of focus for WoodGreen Community Services, a United Way Anchor agency in Toronto, and its Community Connections programme, which provides career coaching and mentorship to recent immigrants.
As part of this programme, WoodGreen convened a panel on Cross-cultural Communications in Canadian Workplaces, to provide attendees with insights on how to communicate effectively in Canada’s culturally-diverse workplaces. Teresa Tao, WoodGreen’s Community Connections Group Activities Coordinator, describes cross-cultural communication as “a learnable skill… and a key foundation of any successful career.”
Moderated by Darrell Pinto, Interim COO of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA), the panel consisted of professionals from diverse sectors, professions, and cultural backgrounds. They discussed topics ranging from their experiences as first- and second-generation Canadians, to the challenges of developing workplace diversity and inclusion in a meaningful way.
Yvonne Felix, Technology & Innovation Lead for the CNIB Foundation, provided her perspective as a person who is legally blind and discussed the importance of non-spoken communication and the use of empathy in a professional setting.
Similarly, Lionel Laroche, President of MultiCultural Business Solutions, Inc., and author of the book, Recruiting, Retaining, and Promoting Culturally Different Employees, emphasised the differences between Canada’s more conservative business culture and that of more socially expressive countries. In his view, newcomers from more socially expressive cultures may need to adjust to the propensity for Canadians to shun emotions in the workplace.
Speaking from the perspective of enterprise HR management, Katerina Zhukova, a Talent Acquisition Lead at Manulife, educated participants on the challenges of prioritising diversity and inclusion in the hiring process. Zhukova pointed out that when hiring managers develop job descriptions, they often build in requirements which favour candidates who share elements of their own backgrounds. As such, despite efforts to foster gender and cultural diversity, leadership in Canadian businesses can lead to homogeneity of ideas. As she put it, “Even if we are so [culturally] diverse but went to the same university and we studied the same curriculum, we make similar decisions.” This inability to foster the communication of differing perspectives can stifle both employee development and innovation, preventing start-ups from coming up with disruptive market solutions and making established corporations slow to adapt to changes in the business landscape.
Building on the discussion of diversity and inclusion, Panache Ventures Analyst, Althea Wishloff, reflected on her experiences as an Indigenous Canadian working in large multinationals and in smaller teams within the technology sector. Wishloff has found that especially in small tech companies, in addition to her gender, her ethnicity “is identified quicker and matters more.” This presents both opportunities and challenges in terms of asserting one’s ideas.
Finally, Adaora Ogbue, Principal of Venture Catalyst, LLC, provided her insights as a visible minority who was born in Canada. As a former Investment Underwriter for Village Capital, a US-based venture capital firm, and with her experience as a leader in technology and finance across Africa, Europe, and North America, Ogbue expressed disappointment in the tendency of Canadian managers to allow talent to languish. While accounting for contrasting management styles, Ogbue emphasised that it is important to give employees an opportunity to display their talent, allowing them to communicate how their experience can add value to the enterprise and to demonstrate that value in the long term by applying their past experience. “Too often,” she said, “companies demand years of Canada-focused experience and education on the job description, but fail to capitalise on talented employees who have developed meaningful skills elsewhere.”
Furthermore, as a visible minority, Ogbue described the unspoken biases around race in the Canadian workplace and in the investment ecosystem. In the US, where race within a business context tends to be discussed more openly, studies have shown that venture capital investment suffers from pattern recognition and funding bias. Specifically, the Center for Global Policy Solutions found in 2016 that the US lost out on more than 1.1 million minority-owned enterprises due to biases and discrimination favouring investment in businesses owned by white males. Consequently, the country stood to lose more than nine million jobs and $300 billion in national income.
Similarly, Statistics Canada has found higher rates of self-employment among immigrants to Canada owing to their inability to find gainful employment. Of those who were self-employed because of a lack of job opportunities, immigrants (33%) and recent immigrants (40%) vastly outnumbered Canadian-born entrepreneurs (20%).
During the networking session after the panel, audience members were abuzz with praise for the panellists’ shared insights and experiences. They also praised WoodGreen’s support for immigrant job-seekers and entrepreneurs.
For more information on WoodGreen Community Services’ upcoming events, visit their Eventbrite page and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.