Nordplus 2014

Essay from Estonia

                                     Multicultural teamwork

To start with, we must admit that the topic is very difficult to be discussed concerning our school situation as the majority of our students are Estonians and we lack the opportunity of studying in multicultural teams. Therefore, we are going to look at a broader meaning of multicultural teamwork.

We live in the era where the workforce and capital constantly moves, which is normal, and is one of the principles in EU. And when human resources move, they take along their language, culture and beliefs. Furthermore, when different cultures mix, one has to change its way of thinking and needs to learn multicultural teamwork skills. In this essay, we will discuss whether and how the Estonian society and businesses benefit from multicultural teamwork skills.

To begin with, why is it so important to know how to socialize and behave in multicultural world, why is it so important to socialize? For young people, socializing is everything; it is discussions, talking to each other, expressing themselves. Our world has been built on socializing. But let us look at the situation in Estonia. We do not have many different ethnic groups here. Mostly it is just Estonians and Russians. According to the statistics of 2011 the population of Estonia is 1,294,455, 69% of which are Estonian, 25% are Russian 6% are of other nationalities like Ukraine, Belarus, Finnish and German. So Estonia is not as multicultural as some other nations, like UK or Germany.

But even if there is only one large ethnic group besides Estonians, there are still problems that we just cannot get along with. There are somewhat huge language and cultural barriers between the two groups. The barrier stays strong because both, the Estonians and Russians are unable to stay open minded and lack social skills. If we could overcome this barrier there would be numerous things that would benefit our society. For example, there would be much more workforce. At the moment a lot of Russians are unable to find suitable and satisfying posts because they do not speak Estonian, and employers avoid Russians because the employers do not speak Russian. It is a loss for both sides. We believe that whilst having multicultural work environment, the outcome would be better. That is because different cultural background means different way of thinking and different way of solving problems. If we had such teams, we would have flexibility to solve lots of problems in the society.