Someone from a different background as you could perceive your actions or words as rude when you meant to be polite. Hopefully, you’ve never experienced this. But if you have, you know how awkward this can feel. It makes for an uncomfortable situation that could be difficult to get out of.

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But feeling humiliated isn’t the only result of a lack of cultural awareness. If it happens in the workplace, your business can also end up suffering. For instance, offending a potential supplier, corporate partner, or customer could result in losing a business deal. You’d hate to miss out on these opportunities because of a misunderstanding that you could’ve prevented.

You need to implement good training to make sure you don’t find yourself in a situation similar to the ones I described above. The easiest way is to incorporate cultural awareness quizzes into your training programs.

Everyone has different learning styles. It’s important to use a variety of methods to boost engagement. This applies to your training programs for cultural awareness. For example, only using the problem-solving questions I discussed earlier might not be effective for your entire team.
To change things up, adding real-world examples and case studies can also help people understand the materials better. Therefore, you should incorporate this style of question into your cultural awareness quizzes.

In 2008, President Bush had shoes thrown at his head while in Baghdad for a news conference. A television network employee chucked his shoes while screaming, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” The journalist later reported that he wanted to express his rejection of Bush’s words and political goals in Iraq. Why might the Iraqi employee choose to throw shoes at the President? What do shoes represent in the Middle East?

L’Oreal had to adapt its company culture when it expanded to Latin America. In France, they openly disagree and debate with coworkers as a means to create new ideas, generate creativity, and strive for excellence. Why would a Latin American employee interpret the same behavior as offensive and rude?

In the 1990s, NASA launched a mission to Mars. The Orbiter would deploy a Martian Polar Lander on the surface of the planet to collect measurements. The team that created the Orbiter used the metric system to build the machine. The Lander team used the imperial system. The measurement problems caused NASA to lose contact with the machine.

How could other companies avoid a similar misunderstanding due to different measurement units?

The Dutch shipping company TNT was task-oriented and had a flat organizational structure. This was true until it expanded into the Chinese markets. How are Chinese businesses organized compared to TNT? Are they also task-oriented?

During the Korean War, a British unit overlooking an important river had a miscommunication with American superiors. The commander reported to his superior that “Things are a bit sticky, sir.” The term “sticky” actually meant “desperate. So what he really meant was, “Things are desperate, sir.” The Americans thought this meant the situation was difficult but manageable since that is how they interpret the phrase “sticky situation.” But really, the situation was urgent and fatal (hence desperate). What could be the potential consequences of this miscommunication?

Effective lessons engage everyone in the classroom by using different teaching styles. They also use questions to guide students in formulating better answers and help them come up with their own questions. That’s why incorporating case studies in cultural awareness training is vital.

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