The level of cultural awareness in your company can make or break your business relationships, sometimes at a critical time of growth and change. When there is a lack of cultural awareness, seemingly small mistakes can be magnified into bigger problems. Relationships can become frosty if etiquette has not been understood; mergers may be more painful and less productive due to cultural insensitivity; potential sales may be lost due to misunderstandings.
Taking that extra step towards understanding your colleagues, clients and associates makes all the difference in keeping business relationships positive. Your understanding of the differences in approach and the thinking behind decisions will improve communication and make your work more effective.
cultural awareness workshopEven where learning a language is not a priority for all your members of staff, holding a cultural awareness workshop can be extremely useful. As with our language programmes, all workshops are tailored designed to your individual business requirements. Our cultural events are based on interactive activities. Lecturers will be invited to talk on a range of subjects selected by your company. Rainbow selects lecturers native to the target culture, and also British lecturers who can give you their alternative perspective. Subjects of the workshops include:
Please find below the outline for one of the above subjects, Cross Cultural Training.
Our cultural training approach aims at developing the participants’ sensitivity to cultural diversity in order to minimise misunderstanding when dealing with people from different cultural backgrounds.
The training method used is highly practical and based on variety of interactive activities between the participants and the trainers. These include short case studies, role-play and seminars followed by question and answer sessions. The workshop itself consists of the following three training stages:
The objective of the first stage is to increase awareness of the participants’ own culture and see how this compares with different cultures. This first step enables the participants to see their own culture from a different prospective and appreciate cultural diversity.
The second stage consists of breaking down some of the issues introduced in stage 1 in order to give the participants an insight into the culture of the target countries.
This follows up the overview of the countries e.g. history, politics, the family, the individual, life aspirations, habits (eating, drinking, celebrations); forms of national behaviour and manners.
This stage also highlights the problems that arise in communicating with people and steps to take to avoid misunderstandings.
The third stage focuses on practical scenarios which may arise in the work environment and how to get the most out of them. This includes areas such as office etiquette, meetings, decision making, accepting, refusing and asserting.