Cultural sensitization in the corporate world

Why addressing cultural differences makes our firm better (and what we've learnt so far)

The need for cultural sensitization

In our daily consulting lives at BearingPoint, we have the chance to interact with so many people from different countries with various cultural backgrounds. We are a company that seeks inclusion of diversity, because we know about the potential benefits of the many perspectives, for example cultural experience (local market knowledge and cultural sensitivity, bigger talent pool and so forth). 

Yet, we also know that the expected positive outcomes of diversity seldom just happen. On the contrary: difference may, in the first place, lead to misunderstanding, barriers in cooperation and dysfunctional team dynamics. With collaboration being a key success factor of our work, accordingly, a company like ours does well when addressing potential pitfalls due to cultural (and other) diversity but also, for example a physical separation of teams.

For the specific diversity aspect “cultural sensitization”, we consider it valuable to create awareness that, probably, people from different cultures communicate and consider ideas at work differently. With BearingPoint as a European company with global customers and intercultural and international teams, it is an on-going task to ensure productive teamwork. We are convinced that becoming aware of differences and commonalities helps to build meaningful relationships and, thus, ensures effective communication and successful project work. Yet, how to tackle the intercultural cooperation challenge? – by starting to understand what cultural diversity is and what to consider when planning interactions for your people.

What we mean when we say “cultural sensitization”

Culture means learned and shared values, beliefs, and behaviors of a group of interacting people according to Bennett (1992). Thus, it has reference to different entities and groups, from organization to the region you grew up in. When a company longs for cultural sensitivity it means that the company aims to be understanding, knowing, and managing about different cultures while ensuring a joint organizational set of values and behaviors. One shall not forget that cultural diversity aspects are not limited to origin and socialization, but extend to areas of religious views, traditions, or sexuality, too.

Our training approach

So, in our Romanian BearingPoint practice, the Career & Leadership Development team together with an external provider, designed training that aims to support our colleagues working in international projects to better understand and collaborate in intercultural contexts. We identified this need while running our internal training survey in the previous year and we started exploring the options from there. For us, we decided not to have cultural training, but a cultural sensitivity training to address various ambitions with the training. If done right, such a training is not about promoting stereotypical assumptions further. One prominent author in the cultural diversity literature, Erin Meyer, opposes this potential contra-argument on cultural (diversity) trainings, that organizations raise: “If you go into every interaction assuming that culture doesn’t matter, your default mechanism will be to view others through your own cultural lens and to judge or misjudge them accordingly.”

The goals the training achieved addressed both diversity sensitization and, following that, business success by

-         … creating awareness for the idea of stereotyped thinking and actual differences between groups, based on the example of cultural norms and behavioral differences.

-         … reflecting on one’s own internalized values and behavioral patterns that people are generally taught.

-         … learning how to make differences a topic of respect and appreciating communication for better team collaboration, embracing the potential of different perspectives and, thus, project success.

-         … defining solution strategies to manage identified differences that may challenge team dynamics. For example, if colleagues fast during Ramadan, one can avoid holding lunch meetings.

How did we address these topics in the training? In 2018, we started with a one-day voluntary training session with the objective to help us understand present cultural differences and their potential effect on our professional team successes.

In a group of 12 participants from Analyst to Senior Consultant, we applied two competing, established methods to analyze cultural differences: the “Culture Map” by Erin Meyer and the “System of cultural differences” by Hofstede. The participants explored these schemes via a plethora of interactive activities – from role plays to analyzing the ways cultural difference sometimes show in their daily professional lives, all the time gathering feedback and insights from the trainers. Both methodological approaches proved to be a valid foundation to start observation, comparison, and discussion.

Participants discovered how cultural backgrounds may come with different working styles, communication and so forth. They experienced what it means to change perspective and that the same setting can be perceived differently due to your socialization.

From cultural to intercultural trainings

In 2019, we expanded the target audience of our training. We invited some colleagues from Germany to attend, too, since there is a lot of collaboration between German and Romanian colleagues – and we wanted both practices to get the best out of the intercultural working experience. The German participants found the training to be useful: “The intercultural training was very useful for me. Mostly, getting in touch with the Romanian Business culture was very useful to understand my team.”, as one participant commented.

With the experience of this training format, we saw a learning opportunity: Having this (culturally) mixed group helped us to enrich the content of the training with real life examples and to raise awareness, create empathy and start a bilateral exchange. Overall, through this training we managed to understand one another better and we had the chance to use this understanding to make our work more efficient and more inclusive, as colleagues who participated confirmed later.

We will continue the training with mixed group settings in the future, having a group consisting of at least two different cultural backgrounds in the same (virtual) room. This will allow our training to start a real conversation and challenge of perspectives instead of promoting stereotypical thinking. While we find it challenging to come up with a virtual approach, since the main aspect is about real observations, trusting communication and dialogue, we are working on having a virtual version of the format due to COVID-19 and CO2-emission goals in the future.

We found that as a company with culturally diverse employees, offices / locations in different countries, intercultural teams and with diverse clients in different countries, we would certainly benefit from addressing the topic of cultural sensitivity proactively. Yet, to be completely bold here: We are convinced that globalization brought us to a point where all (!) businesses can generate value from cultural awareness building.

While conceptualizing the training, we ensured that it does not enforce existing stereotypes. Where possible, we give reasons, share the tradition or idea behind observations. Even simple things such as a handshake or eye contact may be seen differently, so it is important to learn about cultural cues. We saw that the mixed group version of the training helped us to not give stereotypical thinking room and jointly elaborate on differences – and commonalities.

The goal of the training (apart from awareness building on actual differences in etiquette and social learning) is for people to learn how to start an open and respectful conversation on potential misunderstandings and blunders that may be due to cultural differences. Such a training can only be a starting point or a single intervention. We as HR / Diversity and Inclusion People need to work on reminding materials and accordant communication for our colleagues to not forget about cultural sensitivity in their daily work. For example, you may reach out to your participants after the training monthly with small, entertaining emails where you invite them to reflect on the training again with small quizzes, “did you know”-fun facts and so forth.

The challenge with voluntary diversity trainings is that it will mostly be the people with a certain openness that participate, while the ones you would especially like to address refrain from following your invitation. Many companies react directly and make their training mandatory. The flaw with that: It is likely that you cause reluctance or unengaged attention. Who wants that? To solve that, some ideas: make the intercultural aspect part of team kick-offs or general onboarding sessions or frame your training in a way that people get curious. For example, an unconscious bias training can be framed as “why you are not as smart / rational as you think you are – Insights into Brain Research”. Another spin might be to insert small doses of intercultural or general diversity interventions in regular, subject-driven trainings or development programs.

A training shall be part of an individual development case and / or an organizational ambition. Anything else will be perceived as a waste of time by your target groups, especially in clearly performance-driven companies. Thus, have diversity and inclusion or an international orientation of your business anchored in the firm strategy that details in a diversity policy. When you promote the training with your people, show how that training serves the formulated individual and organizational goals.

Every aspect that you want to promote as a standard within the firm must be actively backed up by leadership. Meaning that supervisors and managers participate and serve as a role model, that they discuss cultural (here we mean organizational culture) aspects with people or that they, for example, send out the news or invitation to the training. Without leadership support, it will hardly be possible to promote cultural change.

Feel free to share your experiences of intercultural sensitization, how your organisation approaches this, and your experiences – we’d love to start a discussion with you! (again, or similar, just a suggestion)

The authors of this Blogpost:

Laura Barbu

Senior Professional “Learning and Development” (Bucharest)

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Dr. Wiebke Rasmussen

Global Diversity Manager (Berlin)

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