How to Develop Cross-Cultural Workplace Skills
Cross-cultural workplace skills are the abilities that allow you to work with people with different cultural backgrounds, communication styles, values, languages, social expectations and expectations of work with coordination.
In most cases these skills are highly needed in international companies, multicultural teams, remote teams and organizations with employees or customers with different nationalities. Working abroad should not be the criteria to develop them.
1. Learn to recognize cultural differences
Knowing that individuals from different cultural backgrounds have their different perspectives on how to approach a workplace is a great first step to understanding cultural differences.
Differences can appear in:
• Communication styles
• Attitudes toward hierarchy
• Punctuality and time management
• Feedback
• Teamwork
• Conflict
• Leadership
• Meetings
• Decision-making
• Workplace etiquette
The goal is to be able to identify individual variations, reducing the risk of stereotypical assumption.
2. Improve your cultural awareness
This basically means learning about your cultural assumptions as well as others.
You probably have your own thoughts about what you see as professional, respectful or efficient mainly because of the environment or circumstance you came from. People from other backgrounds will also have thier different expectation.
Doing this shows that your own thoughts on normal professional behavior might not be the only acceptable way of working.
3. Adapt your communication style
Communication needs effort from both the speaker and the listener, in a cross-cultural work space you have to be able to put in the effort on both sides.
Different cultures have different styles of communication, this basically means you have to be able to adapt each person’s style of communication while retaining your own professionalism.
These differences most likely come in the form of :
• Tone
• Formality
• Gestures
• Eye contact
• Silence
• Email etiquette
• Meeting participation
4. Avoid cultural stereotypes
Stereotypes reduce the effectiveness of cross-cultural skills in a workplace. Just because a workplace values formality doesn’t mean everyone from that cultural workspace communicates formally.
You need to view cultural information as context, not a prediction. Be attentive to the people around you and use their behaviors to create more knowledge.
5. Learn how to manage cross-cultural conflict
Settling cross-cultural conflict can become more complicated when you start assuming things. Learn to focus on the reason for the conflict instead of stereotyping someone’s behavior.
Find out exactly what happened, analyze the origin of the problem from both sides and create a way to solve the problem going forward.
Your goal should be to resolve issues that are work related, not using disagreement as a forefront to judge someone based on their culture.
6. Improve your international communication skills
Good communication is one of the major characteristics of a healthy working environment. Learning an international language is useful but knowing how to communicate with individuals with different proficiency in a shared language is even more useful.
The ability to be able to communicate clearly helps to reduce misunderstandings in multicultural teams.
7. Learn about different workplace norms
Working in a different work space than the one you are used to requires you to develop an understanding of the current existing work style in that environment.
It’s necessary to find out about how they act in your new workplace to avoid looking awkward, find out about their:
• Working hours
• Meetings
• Dress
• Communication
• Management
• Holidays
• Punctuality
• Professional relationships
• Email etiquette
Some companies may have extreme differences even while being in the same country. It’s best to do research on both a national context and the specific organization.
8. Practice working with diverse teams
If you want to truly build cross-cultural skills, working with actual people from different backgrounds is a great way to learn.
Experience like these can be gained through :
• International volunteer projects
• Multicultural student organizations
• Remote teams
• International internships
• Online professional communities
• Collaborative projects
• Language-learning communities
• International conferences and events
Experience is always the best teacher. Practical experience allows you to adapt to the communication and working style instead of just learning about cultural differences theoretically.
9. Develop flexibility
Learning how to adapt is one of the most important cross-cultural workplace skills. Flexibility doesn’t mean you have to abandon your standards, it means knowing which differences are simply preferences and which involve genuine professional requirements.
Different work place settings and team members view things differently, like when it comes to :
• Planning
• Meetings
• Deadlines
• Decision-making
• Communication
• Collaboration
10. Learn to work across time zones
Most international and remote jobs require different working hours. Being conscious of the time-zone difference is a necessity.
Respecting local working hours, using shared calendars, communicating deadlines clearly, helps you maintain a good cross-cultural stance rather than assuming you can communicate with colleagues abroad outside their normal working time.
The main idea
Cross-cultural workplace skills aren’t meant to change your style of working, they help develop you into a more observant, adaptable, respectful professional individual, allowing you to be able to communicate efficiently with individuals whose ideas may differ from yours.
They allow you to be able to work with international organizations without throwing away your professional identity.
