The Importance of Communicating with People from Different Cultural Backgrounds
Globalization integrates people from different cultural backgrounds working and living together. Doing business in such an environment can be a little bit tricky. The bosses of multilateral companies have realized the importance of understanding different cultures for a long time, and bosses of local companies also realize this point since they are also recruiting more and more employees from diverse culture backgrounds within the border of their country.
Any company wants to expand its business to other regions must comprehend the culture there. We can see many examples of companies fail to grab the market with local brands just because of the lack of the understanding of the local culture.
Business people from a high affect culture may misunderstand the ones from a neutral culture who don’t express their feelings much, and the one from the neutral culture may think those from the high affect one are too emotional and not accountable. People even meet each other with very different forms of greeting form the beginning. All of these can lead to misunderstanding and business is too hard to be done like this.
As the employee ourselves, we must always keep prepared to learn different cultures since we will work with collegues from different cultures as a team at any time.
We are used to think about things in an established manner, while people from another culture may bring you a brand new perspective which can draw us out from a mindset where we have been trapped for long.
Communicating with people from different cultures can also make us more inclusive. People who have never been exposed to another culture are very likely to consider their own culture as normal and correct while see others’ alien and incorrect. The sea is vast because it is inclusive to millions of streams and the world will be harmonious if each of us becomes inclusive.
But to understand every culture is an impossible task to complete. And the easiest way for us is to respect their differences with ours.