Cross-cultural training for a diverse workplace

When your organization spans borders and cultures, you benefit from diverse perspectives that inspire creativity and drive growth. It’s important to build an environment that encourages collaboration by enhancing awareness and sensitivity among your teams.

Cross culture training helps a multicultural workforce promote inclusive behavior, cultivate empathy, and understand differences. In this article, we’ll go through the benefits, best practices, and cross-cultural training programs that you can use to remove barriers and keep teams connected.

What is cross-cultural training?

Cross-cultural training helps teams understand the cultural differences of people from different parts of the world. It trains employees to navigate the values, traditions, and communication styles that may vary from one culture to another. It’s also essential for transforming diverse perspectives into powerful assets rather than viewing them as obstacles to overcome.

This training comes in handy in situations as simple as having a conversation with a workmate from a different background to making important decisions across cultures. It equips a diverse workplace with the ability to build better relationships, resolve conflicts, and collaborate smoothly.

Benefits of cross-cultural training

Intercultural training helps your business grow in more ways than one. Find out more reasons why you should give your teams this type of training with the list below:

• Raised cultural awareness and sensitivity: Increased cultural awareness is undoubtedly the ultimate goal of cross culture training. Employees are trained with the end goal of developing cultural sensitivity to promote inclusivity in the workplace.
• Better communication: Cross-cultural communication training targets increasing your team’s ability to communicate effectively across cultural boundaries by familiarizing them with differences in language, gesture, and context.
• Less conflict: Enhanced cultural awareness and improved communication ultimately lead to reduced conflicts for multicultural teams. It also teaches teams about resolution strategies that take cultural dynamics into account.
• Higher employee satisfaction and retention: Cross-cultural training helps employees feel respected, valued, and understood in the workplace leading to better employee satisfaction and increased retention.
• Enhanced customer relations: Your teams will also deliver better service to a diverse customer base when they can better understand cultural preferences and expectations.
• Improved business outcomes: Global companies need cultural training to foster better partnerships and negotiations. Improve operations by understanding cultural differences that can affect decisions and projects.
• Improved global competence: For teams that deal with international clients and customers, cross-cultural workplace training teaches them how to navigate global markets.

Examples of cross-cultural training

Cross-cultural training covers a wide range of topics that you can incorporate into employee development. Here are some examples to give you an idea of what to include and expect when training your teams:

Communication training 

This cultural training example focuses on improving your team’s ability to communicate appropriately and effectively across cultures. It develops their knowledge and skills related to cultural norms, non-verbal communication, active listening, language barriers, and more.

Improve how you deliver cross-cultural communication training with e-learning providers that have in-built translation services. SC Training (formerly EdApp), for instance, houses a powerful AI translation tool that smartly transforms training content from one language to another with artificial intelligence.

Conflict resolution

Manage conflicts that arise from cultural differences with cross-cultural conflict resolution training. Help your teams avoid misunderstandings by teaching them how to respectfully navigate differences in cultural norms, values, and conflict resolution styles.

Interaction management

Develop your team’s social interaction skills by facilitating training that encourages them to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds. Let them have conversations that focus on cultural values and norms. These inspire empathy and respect while naturally allowing them to become familiar with the cultures of their workmates.

Adaptation strategies

There are also a variety of adaptation strategies that you can use as a training approach to teach teams about foreign cultures. For leaders handling people of different cultures, manager training can look like sending them on an international work trip. It’ll help them quickly adapt to local customs and better understand culture-specific business practices.

Emerging trends

There’s no one-size-fits-all manner of conducting cross culture training, so it’s best to identify what your team needs and see how training can address this. You can also deliver training that targets pressing contemporary issues such as effective cross-cultural collaboration in a remote work environment.

How to deliver cross-cultural training in the workplace 

To kickstart your cross-cultural training journey, here’s a list of tips and best practices that you can use to get the most out of this learning experience:

Gather feedback

Getting feedback from your teams is a sure way to identify existing and potential issues. This will help you identify your training needs and plan your training courses.

Communicate the why

Cultural training isn’t only important when there are underlying issues. Lay the foundation on why you’re conducting this training. You can present it as a form of cross training for employees to improve their skill set, so it doesn’t imply that there are existing cultural issues in the workplace.

Consider the context

If your employees are mostly American but they cater to customers or work with teams from Japan, you’d want to familiarize them with Japanese customs and values. Make training flexible so you can adjust it as your organization’s needs change.

Use interactive and engaging learning methods

Cultural training should be efficient to maximize your team's productivity and focus on strategic objectives. You can use tools like gamification and microlearning to train your employees quickly but effectively using interactive learning management system (LMS) apps like SC Training.

With game-based assessments, your teams finish training faster while retaining key information better as they swipe and drag their way through the lessons. On the other hand, microlearning delivers highly targeted lessons that’s built to work with, and not against, short attention spans.

Keep communication lines open

Let your employees know that your doors are always open for conversations on cultural diversity and inclusion even after training is over. An open-door policy signals that cultural understanding requires continuous learning and shows that you’re committed to fostering an environment of trust and inclusivity.

5 Cross-cultural training courses

Jumpstart your path towards a more inclusive and cohesive team where every employee is heard, valued, and respected with these five cross-cultural training courses.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

This DEI course offers comprehensive cross-cultural awareness training with 10 engaging and effective lessons. It starts by defining what diversity, equity, and inclusion are. Then, it delves into unconscious bias and microaggressions.

It’ll also give an overview of how to stand up for yourself and your co-workers and how to commit to inclusion. It also features lessons on how to make the workplace a safe space for people of diverse backgrounds.

Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Awareness (AUS)

This SC Training course gives a closer look into the culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It aims to teach teams in Australia about their history and challenges. It also orients employees on workplace cultural sensitivity, First Nation people, and respect and equality.

Operating with Empathy

An empathetic culture improves trust and collaboration in the workplace. Use this SC Training course to orient managers and supervisors on leading with empathy and fostering this value within their teams. It’ll also delve into how empathy develops and adds to the overall company culture.

Diversity and Inclusion

Deliver diversity training in the workplace with this course that’ll introduce your teams to inclusion as a vital component of each organization. It aims to eliminate unconscious bias and cultivate a diverse organization. It’ll also develop how your teams communicate by promoting the use of inclusive language.

Collaborator

Last but not least, this course on encouraging collaboration has a special lesson on culture and diversity. Specifically, it talks about mutual respect and the importance of focusing on these two vital aspects. It’ll also give helpful insights on positive reinforcement, encouraging input, developing trust, handling conflicts, and more.

Embrace inclusivity with cross-cultural training. Sign up with SC Training now!