Cultural diversity is our competitive advantage

As many astute HR business leaders already know, cultural diversity is an exceptional source of innovation and business growth. It’s far more than simply the right thing to do, embracing cultural diversity can lead to creating a unique competitive advantage.

At Aeroklas Asia Pacific Group, the owner of 4x4 adventure brand TJM, we have a truly diverse workforce and see the opportunity to think differently and embrace diversity as part of our company's DNA.

Actively promoting cultural diversity across geographies is much more than the opportunity to access a different talent pool. Through expanded thinking and embracing more diverse experiences, it offers businesses a range of opportunities. It can:

• enhance sales opportunities
• create business efficiencies
• expand emotional intelligence
• build leadership capabilities, and
• develop ideas that further product and business innovation.

TJM Australia recently hosted dealers and distributors from across Southeast Asia for two weeks on a unique tour culminating on beautiful Moreton Island. This offered the opportunity to improve relationships and give dealers the chance to leverage ideas from the Australian market in their own region.

I view this opportunity as a key starting point that will help to reinforce our strategy of leveraging the benefits of Aeroklas Asia Pacific Group’s diverse culture and the business’ future ability to improve collaboration.

The tour to Australia was really valuable. It brought the business and the region closer together while also broadening our perspective, encouraging us to challenge current thinking and to take a global mindset. This will help to deliver better outcomes in the future.

We’re doing a number of things to harness our cultural diversity, one example of this was the session we held that focused on cultural understanding and differences in communications between Thailand and Australia; the uptake of this session was particularly strong, people genuinely want to understand how to improve communications across geographies.

While the outcome of this trip is yet to be seen, it was great to start to explore ways to enhance communication and relationships and to expand our organisational mindset and ultimately drive business innovation and growth.

The aim of the tour was for dealers across the region to get a better understanding of TJM products and services in Australia. It also brought a diverse group of people together to encourage different ways of thinking to further enhance a future global approach to product innovation.

My colleague, Shamsul from TJM in Malaysia, discussed what the tour was like, the experience and what he took away: “It was the first time I had been to Australia and had the opportunity to camp on the beach, Moreton Island was simply stunning and if I have the opportunity I’d love to go back.

And my group general manager, Greg Kelly from TJM parent company Aeroklas Asia Pacific Group, discussed the tour and importance of bringing diverse groups of people together to foster innovation: “To be at the forefront of our industry we need to be constantly working on ideas that will enhance the off-roading experience for our four-wheel drive customers. To achieve this, we need to explore different ways of thinking about our products and services. Bringing [together] dealers from across the region offers a host of perspectives and sheds a whole new light on how we develop, manufacture, distribute and market our products.”

“We’ve found if we embrace diversity and work hard to connect and communicate, we can unlock real innovation and develop products and services that are unmatched by our competitors."

Vanessa Tooley is the group people and culture manager at Aeroklas Asia Pacific Group