PMcrunch

More and more companies are becoming interested in increasing diversity in the workplace. Having different kinds of culture in the workplace can make the office more interesting: people will have different ideas, they can interact and find new things to be interested in through interaction with other cultures, and officemates can enrich each other’s work experience through cross-cultural interaction.

Not all people, however, can easily blend in with other cultures, especially if they have long been interacting with people of their own culture and are wary of other cultures’ ideas and behavior. Such beliefs can be reinforced by the images propagated by mass media, where racial stereotypes become points of often unnerving interest, even humiliating humor. As a business leader and project manager, you may need to build cross-cultural communication skills and try to override these mass media influences.

Start out by fostering diversity yourself, not just across cultures, but across age and gender as well. Create a team environment within your office or business where diversity is welcomed, and not merely tolerated. Have staunch rules as well: people need to respect each other in the workplace; what happens outside the office is not your business, but you can hope that effective communication in the workplace can, at the very least, influence how people behave outside the office. First and foremost, you need to be aware of attitudes counter to this and need to step in to declare that diversity is valued, and there is no room for attitudes or beliefs counter to this.

You can also have team building exercises, where people are made to work together in simulated office settings. Have a healthy mixture of different cultures in your group. Different cultures need not mean different nationalities, but perhaps different attitudes, or people from the same country who come from different provinces or socio-economic backgrounds. One thing to highlight is that we have much more in common by our humanity, and set up an atmosphere of curiosity and discovery to drive this point home. The differences tend more to be interesting than substantive.

These are only a few suggestions for building [tag-dir]cross-cultural communications[tag-dir]. If you engender such mixtures in cultures, you will have a more harmonious office in no time.