The ability to interact effectively with culturally different employees is increasingly important for overall growth for both employees and organizations. Companies with diverse cultures, talents have the advantage of performing better than a homogenous group. While many believe in cultural diversity, several organizations are now looking to bring variety to increase creativity, productivity, and teamwork.
Cultural competency has now become the long-term strategy for customers as they directly link with customer satisfaction.
Cultural Competency
Cultural competency is an umbrella term used to effectively communicate and cooperate with other employees to combine cultural knowledge and awareness. Companies can achieve cultural competency by organizing regular cultural competency trainings that positively outline and embraces attitudes, beliefs, behavior, and policy. This training helps employees understand and communicate with each other effectively. The more employees are comfortable with each other, the more beneficial for organizations.
How Cultural Competency Training Can Help You
Now you know what cultural competency is, cultural competency training can be highly beneficial for organizations in the long run. To achieve cultural competency, diversity training for the workplace is the key.
We have created a list of reasons how a diversity training program can help your organization and employees:
Improve Harmony: A workplace having cultural competence has more balance and productivity than others. Employees who can freely communicate and share their ideas, beliefs, and issues, irrespective of background, are more likely to coordinate and improve teamwork. Cultural competency trainings help employees understand each other, become more adaptive to workplace changes, and cooperate. A culturally competent environment will bring more productivity and creativity to your workplace.
Brainstorming: bringing employees from different cultures and backgrounds can enhance producing, problem-solving, and new innovative ideas. For instance, employees from different religions or races will have different perspectives or ideas to solve a problem. When culturally competent employees come together for brainstorming ideas, it boosts creativity among the workforce.
Improved Communication: Training for diversity in the workplace can enhance communication among employees. Initially, employees might hesitate to express themselves due to different backgrounds; cultural competency brings them to one place. Cross-cultural training brings them to one platform to ease communication with each other.
More Career Prospects For Employees: cultural understanding is an important element to conduct business efficiently. The diversity training program can help you improve career aspects, just like language fluency. Employees with diverse knowledge can handle international businesses more effectively. Cultural competency can help them understand different ideas, perspectives when dealing with international clients. Cultural competency generates more global leadership roles, Thus creating more international assignment opportunities.
Wide Talent: Nowadays, employees are more interested in growth, challenges than typical 9 to 5 jobs. That’s why a company that provides cultural competency can attract talented candidates looking for a progressive environment. According to a survey, 76% of employees and job seekers admit that they look for companies with wider talent, background, and progressive workplace. However, it’s always on your business how you choose your employees, but culturally different employees will bring more to the table for you.
Better Performance: When employees feel comfortable and acceptable with people from different cultures, they will perform better than they were. If employees feel they are not themselves, they will underperform. Therefore, a Diversity training program can help you bring employees together to understand each other and work as a whole. Culturally diverse employees are like a breath of fresh air; they will bring new ideas, perspectives to everything, employees will get to learn a lot from each other.
New Innovative Ideas: Employees with homogeneous backgrounds are most likely to have similar problem-solving habits and thought processes; this places blocks new ideas and creates boundaries for brainstorming. On the other hand, a heterogeneous group will think differently about problems and bring more unique ideas to the table. According to the survey, a business that supports training for diversity in the workplace generates better and innovative products and services.
Improve Decision Making: everyone has unconscious biases that can have consequences when they come in between workplace decision making. Implicit bias decisions lead to betterness and lack of appreciation among employees. Managers or leaders who decide based on stereotypical views will affect your company in the long run. For instance, department managers support male employees more than females unconsciously because they think women underperform. Even if they don’t do it intentionally, their subtle actions will affect female employees mentally and decrease productivity. Companies need to encourage their managers to take leadership tests before joining. Cultural competency trainings at the workplace can help you understand how unconscious biases occur, recognize them, and manage such issues.
Abstract: organizations that support cultural competency trainings can retain talented employees with productive and excellent performance. Moreover, they have better harmony and peace at the workplace and can develop creative ideas by unlocking employees’ true potential.