Blogs for Culture Vultures

What would you draw to illustrate the meaning of 'culture'?

This is a little exercise we commonly use in cultural awareness training courses to get people thinking about how culture works.

Foreigners working in Thailand can misunderstand the local culture in many ways.

Thais tend to be judged against values and standards that are alien to them which leads to their behaviours and actions being seen incorrectly.

Does Cultural Awareness training work?

Will investing in such training really offer any sort of ROI and help your staff?

Where did 'culture' come from? What does 'culture' do?

In order to get to heart of cultural difference, you need to understand what culture is, how it works and why it exists.

Culture is a complex thing.

It affects everything we do from the way we raise our kids to the way we do business.

Working with the Japanese in a professional capacity can be tough.

For some cultures, such as for Americans, Canadians, Germans, Australians and British, the Japanese culture can seem a little alien.

Need examples of cultural misunderstandings in business?

In this blog, we are going to share real-life examples of cultural misunderstandings from our cross-cultural training work.

Would you sacrifice one life to save many?

This is the question researchers posed to people around the world, gaining some fascinating insights into values, beliefs and cultural differences.

Doing business in China? Then you'll be attending lots of meetings!

If you’re attending meetings in China, then it’s important to understand a little about Chinese culture and how meetings are run.

Over the past 15 years a continuous theme, which has never ceased to amaze us, has been the way in which businesses significantly underestimate the impact of cultural differences.

It typically takes something to go wrong before stakeholders take notice.

Evey company working on the international stage needs to prepare their staff with the skills and knowledge to work across cultures.

Where online cultural training is not an option, then it’s essential to provide staff with easily accessible, bitesize, digestible materials.

There is no better way to understand the impact of cultural differences upon business than to look at real-life examples.

No matter what business, sector or market you are in, if you deal with people from different cultures, then cultural difference is going to impact what you do somewhere, somehow.

A common misconception people have of cultural awareness is that it’s about “the other”; that its main focus is learning about other people and how they do and don’t do things.

Although this is certainly part of it, cultural awareness also relies heavily on self-awareness.

Google Search Engine data provides a fantastic window into the cultures of different countries by giving us an insight into online searches.

By understanding what people within that country or culture are searching for, we can start to appreciate the topics and concerns that bind them together.

The training world is evolving at an incredible pace.

Indeed, discussions of blended learning by L&D professionals have quickly moved beyond ‘why do we need it?’ to ‘how do we do it?’

Self-awareness is fundamental in raising cultural competence.

If you are unable to understand yourself, it will be difficult to understand another.

Why focus on culture?

When working across different cultures it's critical that you understand the rules and cultural expectations of others.

If you don't, you can make mistakes. These mistakes can be harmless, or, they can be very serious.

A common misconception held by many is that cultural awareness is a skill you either have or you don't have, or, at the very least, is a skill that can be learned through training.

Well, this simply is not true.

For many Western cultures, witches are an innocuous subject.

Long gone are the days where innocent women were dragged from their homes to be burned at the stake.

As cross-cultural training specialists, we sometimes come across resistance from delegates who have been obligated to attend a cultural awareness session by their boss, HR or the Learning and Development department.

Resistance may stem from many factors, not least of which may be that the benefits and background to the training course have not been fully communicated.