Топики 1 курс / топик Cultural awareness in business

Cultural awareness in business

Nowadays people all over the world take part in globalization. People need more information. They need to know more about politics, economy, science, culture and other things, because the world consists of many countries that have special customs and traditions.

It’s also important for business people, because most of them do business internationally. How companies prepare people to this depends on the task that they’re undertaking on behalf of their organization. Firstly, if you go to live and work as an assignee, you will be provided with some programmes covering such issues as: cultural awareness, practical issues of living in, working in, as well as how to deal with culture shock, which everybody goes through when they go on assignment. Some people go to other countries for schooling or health care and they are also provided with such programmes. Secondly, nowadays many people aren’t going to live overseas, but they have international responsibility. They need a different set of learning tools and that is, first of all, a general cultural awareness and understanding of how they should really operate when dealing with people with other cultures; teaching how to negotiate contracts; different types of communication. The words that people choose have a different effect on the recipient depending on which culture you’re conversing with. Finally, another important thing for people nowadays is presentation skills. For example, business people used the same presentation for multi-cultural audience some years ago, but nowadays people should choose the worlds they use on the slides, the colours they use and how to deal with questions and answers because they receive different responses from different cultures.

Summing it up, I want to note that nowadays almost all people try to learn English language to communicate with people all other the world and of course to do business with them, but to do this more effective, they must know traditions and customs of other countries. It really demonstrates the important of cultural awareness for modern business people.