The ability to communicate effectively with people of various backgrounds and cultures is known as cultural competency. In the era of globalization, cultural awareness training is progressively vital in today’s multicultural work setting. Cultural sensitivity training will facilitate organizations and increase cultural ability. It will also stop conflicts that may result in incidents of discrimination and harassment.
Here are the five reasons why cultural awareness training is needed at the workplace:
- Raising Cultural Awareness
Sensitivity and diversity training will facilitate workers to acknowledge and respond to their unconscious or hidden bias. Most of the time they will be based on stereotypes and unfair assumptions. Culture is everywhere. Understanding culture is crucial because, otherwise, it is simple for folks to underestimate anyone. There is a significant impact that cultural differences will have on people. Underestimating culture is the starting point of things going wrong. Although it’s going to be simple to know the facts and do’s and don’ts regarding completely different cultures, this can be essentially not what cultural awareness is all about.
- Changing behaviours
People should connect with other co-workers at work successfully. It can be anyone too, whether or not it’s with coworkers, vendors, customers or shoppers. Connections with people depend a lot on having a positive perspective and behaving suitably. However, what constitutes acceptable or offensive behaviour will mean different things to completely different people. Cultural assessment tools will help in making sure that all workers understand what your organization is about. It will help them in understanding what is considered acceptable and inappropriate behaviour towards people based on their race, ethnicity, age, gender, faith or sexual orientation. In addition to the list of characteristics that are protected against discrimination and harassment, cultural assessment tools help in teamwork too. It explores the kinds of comprehensive actions that may improve teamwork.
- Making better decisions
When a human brain has to categorize and store huge amounts of information, it will result in stereotypes and unconscious biases. While everyone can have unconscious biases, it can create conflicts between employees when surfaced in the workplace. For example, when a qualified graduate isn’t offered a job or a very good employee doesn’t get a promotion because of their accent or gender, not because of their capabilities. Through cultural sensitivity training, employees see how unconscious biases can hinder their decision-making. They will learn what they can do to avoid making such biased judgments about people. Usually, these judgements can hurt the organization and lead to discrimination claims. The companies can also have a cross-cultural trainer. A cross cultural trainer helps the employees to develop and build cultural awareness. They also provide information and insights on cultural values and attitudes through personal experiences.
- Improving communication skills
A lack of cultural sensitivity can hinder the employees’ ability to communicate effectively with different groups. It can be both internally and externally. This will lead to alienating or offending customers, associates and co-workers working in different regions, countries and cultures. Cultural sensitivity training can help employees understand the variation of cross-culture communication. All employees should know the importance of words, actions, gestures and body language when it comes to relationships with different people and groups.
- Speaking up
Effective cultural awareness training should initiate discussions and debates among employees on how to deal with bias and insensitive comments and behaviour. Cross cultural trainer should also motivate employees to speak up, ask questions, raise issues and report actions of any kind of problem they experience or observe.
An important learning point that everyone must know is that employees should be culturally aware. This doesn’t mean that one should compromise their own culture or sacrifice their values or identity for others. It is more about understanding how we can best adapt our thoughts and decisions. These approaches towards a culture can help the organization create positive outcomes in cross-cultural interactions. Cultural awareness training is about respecting others’ cultures as well as our own. The organizations can also take help from cq cultural intelligence. Cq Cultural intelligence can be understood as the ability to relate and work effectively in a multicultural environment. Culturalq is one of the cultural intelligence centre tools which is used widely by different organizations.
Due to the company’s mismanaged culture, thousands of dissatisfied employees and unicorn companies are crushed under this weight. A major shift should happen at a workplace to bring back things in place. So, if any company is ready to transform their organizational culture, they can seek help from company culture consultant. These consultants have a lot of experience with evaluating company culture and identifying areas for improvement Not only this, but they also provide a real plan of action on what to do next. Some of the best company culture consultant are Daimler partners, Table group consulting, Culture Circle and so on. Having a workplace where everyone is being culturally aware will help the company beyond lines.