No matter whether you are running a global company virtually from behind your desk or by doing regular visits to your overseas sites, managing a multicultural workforce effectively is a big challenge. For your company - and your career - to thrive, you need to know how to address the needs and concerns of those who work for you (whether they are based in California, Taipei or Frankfurt) and be able to use the diverse talents available to you. Failure to do so can lead to high employee turnover, low productivity, poor morale, bad company image and more costly operations. For the manager or executive, it can also result in additional stress.

Author and business consultant Paul Tulenko suggests the following steps in making the most out of a multicultural workforce:

1. First of all, identify the diversity - collect data about your workforce. You'd be surprised at the number of identifiable culture groups and subgroups within your company, all of which gather and process information in different ways.

2. Discover the norms. Get detailed information on your employees' cultures from consulates, reference books, people who have lived and worked abroad and cultural change consultants. Get first hand information from your employees themselves.

3. Discover the differences. There will be plenty. What seems a logical way to process information for one culture may be unbelievably unreasonable for another. Some cultures require a step-by-step approach while others make giant intuitive leaps. If you do not understand these differences and cannot use the information in a meaningful way, effective communications between you and your employees cannot likely take place.

4. Develop a plan. Unfortunately, no business school or course can teach you specific, foolproof ways on how to deal with different cultures. This is something you learn by finding out about the different cultures yourself. No amount of technology can take away the need for you to visit your foreign offices and meet with your local people. Plan to make such visits more regular, making sure that you cover different grounds and issues and meet with other people and departments each time.

Another solution is to hire managers with excellent multicultural management expertise and recruit staffs who have also had exposure to multicultural work settings. If you sense a deep cultural conflict within your organization, consider hiring a culture change agent. There are a few consultants who focus on solving multicultural management problems. The most successful have programs that extend over a period of weeks or months to guide management in understanding the diversity of culture in today's workforce. Although such programs can be expensive, the long-term rewards will far exceed the cost. Check references, then attend a few one-day seminars to determine which consultant's approach will fit best with your company.