It is helpful for employees to be flexible in their approach to work as the workplace becomes more diverse due to increased interaction across different branches of worldwide firms. These abilities are valuable since they may greatly enhance your communication and help you establish solid relationships with partners or clients from a wide range of backgrounds. Read on to know more about what intercultural competence communication is all how about. We also added some tips on how to build intercultural competence. Enjoy the ride!
What Is Intercultural Competence?
One must have a high level of intercultural competence to be able to communicate effectively with people from other cultures. It’s a must-have for any hybrid workplace if it wants to see high levels of employee engagement, productivity, satisfaction, and performance. Customers and clients can be offended, marginalized or underrepresented staff can be alienated, and the company’s bottom line can take a hit when there is a lack of intercultural awareness in commercial transactions.
Insufficient attention is paid to the behavioral aspects of how individuals interact and collaborate in today’s increasingly varied and complicated workplace, which is a major contributing factor. Growing your company and accomplishing your most critical business goals through full inclusion requires a methodical strategy for developing intercultural competence.
Companies are more likely to locate the ideal employee in the form of a culturally competent and in-demand expert if individuals demonstrate flexibility and adaptability in the face of changing circumstances.
Examples of intercultural competence
The following are examples of intercultural competence:
#1. Teamwork Skills
Teamwork requires the ability to focus on a common objective. This is a fantastic method to embrace multicultural environments, especially when the team consists of members from a wide variety of backgrounds. When you work with people from different cultural backgrounds, you open yourself up to new perspectives and ideas for solving problems.
#2. General Cultural Sensitivity
Sensitivity and awareness of other cultures and backgrounds are essential when working in a diverse setting. Beyond basic empathy and tolerance, cultural sensitivity may need familiarity with the practices and values of several societies. Having an understanding of your coworkers’ religious beliefs and the times they observe prayer are two examples of how understanding and respect may foster productive environments at work.
#3. Fluency in a Non-native Tongue
Learning a new language might be quite useful if your job takes you to another country. Even if most of your coworkers are fluent in English, speaking their language can help you break down any remaining hurdles in communication and forge better bonds with your team. If you know more than one language, you can have more effective conversations since you can grasp what the other person is saying.
#4. Adaptability
It’s crucial to be able to quickly adjust to novel circumstances in an intercultural workplace, where you may encounter a wide variety of ideas and methods with which you are unfamiliar. It’s crucial that you and your team are willing to consider the possibility that the methods you’re already familiar with aren’t the only ones available to you. Keeping an open mind to the prospect of alteration can greatly enhance your work environment.
#5. Active listening
It’s crucial to be an active listener in the workplace so that people of all backgrounds feel respected and valued. This is giving others your undivided attention when they are speaking and asking clarifying questions to help you grasp their points of view. This leads to a lively discussion in which you are both involved, strengthening your bond. One aspect of active listening is paying attention to nonverbal cues, such as a coworker’s obvious discomfort.
#6. Qualities of Empathy
To thrive in a multiethnic setting, one must be empathetic toward others and the challenges they confront as a result of their unique histories. When you practice empathy at work, you open yourself up to learning about and respecting others’ perspectives, even if they differ from your own. Empathy, for instance, can help you remain patient with a coworker who is having trouble articulating their actions in a language other than their own.
#7. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is essential in any profession, but in a multicultural setting, it can be extremely useful. This enables you to do things like deal with team issues by stepping back and thinking of a solution that benefits everyone involved. Creative problem-solving is a byproduct of critical thinking, as the ability to recognize patterns facilitates the development of novel approaches.
How to Build Intercultural Competence
It is very important to build strong intercultural competence. The following are ways to build intercultural competence:
#1. Develop Your Listening Skills
The first step toward developing intercultural competence is learning to listen carefully. Having a sense of community at work is good for morale, productivity, and the quality of relationships among coworkers.
Consider yourself the manager of a consultancy firm. Observe how employees interact with one another in the workplace, or better yet, solicit and respond to direct input from employees. How do people in a team discuss their findings? How are they working together on joint projects? What motivates and discourages them from their job, respectively?
If you take the time to listen to your staff, you’ll gain insight into team dynamics and employee compatibility, allowing you to put together more effective teams. Potential disputes can be addressed before they even start to boil over. Training employees in active listening can help them connect more deeply and collaborate more efficiently.
#2. Enhance Cultural Awareness
When you have a deeper understanding of other cultures, you can look past employees’ surface behaviors and actions and into the ways in which their ideas, values, and traditions inform their communication styles. To promote unity between staff and management, this is crucial.
Recognizing and appreciating the unique cultural backgrounds of one’s staff members is also an important part of cultural sensitivity and understanding. These actions can boost your company’s multicultural communication skills and provide your employees a sense of community.
Keep in mind that the key to successful cross-cultural communication is an appreciation for one another’s cultural norms and practices. Therefore, it is imperative that your staff increase their cultural awareness in order to foster productive teamwork.
#3. Be Careful with Word Choice
Improving your team’s and your own intercultural communication skills requires staying current on terms and expressions that could offend or embarrass coworkers of different cultural backgrounds.
If you want to set a good example and teach your coworkers to avoid using offensive language, you should find out what words are considered offensive in the cultures of your team members and clients. In addition, if you overhear a coworker using such language, please explain its significance and encourage them to stop using it immediately.
In order to promote successful intercultural competence communication, you should encourage your team to use their words wisely and responsibly and stress the need of understanding the context of language.
#4. Have an Open Mind
The willingness to develop intercultural competence is very important, and this may involve reflecting on one’s own culture and history and how it affects one’s behavior in the workplace. You can improve your communication skills and gain insight into how a person’s cultural background affects their work by studying this topic. Learning about various cultures through books, films, and documentaries is also highly beneficial.
#5. Normalize Clarifying Instructions
Mistakes on the job can be avoided when workers do not feel awkward asking you or their coworkers to elaborate on instructions. By making it clear to your multicultural coworkers that it’s acceptable for them to ask for clarification or a more straightforward version of instructions, you can improve their intercultural communication skills in the workplace.
Misunderstandings often arise in multicultural groups because people from different backgrounds tend to speak at different speeds and in different tones.
#6. Visit Other Countries
Many people find that traveling and living in foreign countries is the best way to learn about various cultures. Anyone can benefit from gaining firsthand experience in intercultural communication and engagement in the workplace. Learning a new language or at least gaining a basic understanding of another language is another benefit of working abroad.
#7. Improve Multicultural Policy
Company policies help maintain uniformity and responsibility in the kind of conduct you demand from employees. Therefore, you can improve your staff’s intercultural communication skills by creating policies that encourage acceptable communication between personnel of diverse cultural backgrounds.
Talk to employees from different cultural backgrounds to get a sense of the common biases they encounter, the local cultural norms that are hard to understand or make them feel uncomfortable, and the respectful behavior that they appreciate in the workplace when developing intercultural policy guidelines. Based on this information, you may develop effective, individualized policies that are tailored to the specific needs of your business.
#8. Engage in Multicultural Activities at Work
Participating in multicultural events can help you gain a deeper understanding and respect for people of different backgrounds. Members of the team may feel more comfortable discussing their histories if the workplace celebrates cultural holidays that they personally observe. Bringing up the topic of diversity in the workplace with upper management can lead to good transformation.
How to Draw Attention to Your Intercultural Competence
It’s crucial that you know how to best highlight your intercultural competence skills in any job application and interview situations. Some suggestions for emphasizing intercultural competence on a resume and in an interview are as follows:
#1. Highlighting your intercultural competence on your resume and cover letter
Include intercultural competence as one of your skills on your resume and highlight it with other relevant qualities like language proficiency, analytical thinking, and the ability to communicate effectively across cultures. It may be necessary to highlight your multicultural experience in your resume and cover letter, especially if the position you’re applying for requires it. Your interest in travel or various cultures might be included under “Personal Interests” on your CV, and you could also indicate how your prior position required you to adjust to new settings.
#2. Intercultural competence skills during your interview
The recruiting manager may inquire specifically about your overseas experience, such as the extent to which your travels have broadened your linguistic and cultural horizons. Engaging with the interviewer can be a great way to display your active listening abilities, as well as your ability to communicate and connect with new individuals in a short amount of time. If relevant, you may want to emphasize the time you spent traveling and the experience you gained as a result. You might also talk about a moment when your team had members from many different walks of life.
Why Is Intercultural Competence Important?
Employees frequently exaggerate their own intercultural skills, according to available research. This exaggeration highlights the ongoing nature of progress in the realm of intercultural competence training and the implications it has for organizations in terms of employee receptivity.
Workplace diversity and globalization (together with the increasing prevalence of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives) make intercultural competence an increasingly important and desirable trait. Teams will be able to work together with greater efficacy and effectiveness towards business goals if members possess intercultural competence and are committed to continuing to learn, grow, and progress in this area.
What Are the 5 Components of Intercultural Competence?
The following are the 5 components of intercultural competence:
- Attitude.
- Knowledge.
- Skills.
- Internal outcomes.
- External outcomes.
What Are the 4 Characteristics of Intercultural Communication Competence?
- Empathize.
- Accumulate cultural information.
- Listen.
- Resolve conflict.
- Manage anxiety.
What Is the Purpose of Intercultural Competence?
It helps people of different languages and cultures communicate with one another, which fosters understanding, appreciation, and friendship.
What Are the Basic Behaviors of Intercultural Competence?
The basic behaviors of intercultural competence are; the display of respect, interaction posture, orientation to knowledge, empathy, role behaviors, interaction management, and tolerance of ambiguity.
Final Thoughts
The goal of Intercultural competence Communication is to teach people how to connect with people from other cultures in a positive and productive way. And when leaders in the corporate world promote and foster this behavior in the workplace, they benefit from increased productivity and pleased customers.
Language is also an important part of intercultural competence communication because it facilitates communication between people. It’s essential for avoiding misunderstandings and disputes with coworkers and customers who come from different cultural backgrounds.
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