How Cultural Differences Affect Business Communication
It’s essential for companies to understand cultural differences especially those involve in international business. Nations vary across a number of dimensions, influencing workplace values. Understanding cultural differences and encouraging cultural sensitivity will assist ensuring that communication across the borders is much efficient and that business transactions are triumphant. Every country has different cultural standards of being, acting, and thinking, and these cultural dissimilarities powerfully influence business communication and workplace values. Whatever might be chosen as perfectly satisfactory and natural in the workplace of one country might be measured as perplexing or even unpleasant in the workplace to another country. The following are the effects of cultural differences in business communication:
Language barrier, it is had to pass a communication between two different culture without having one major language, if the two groups doesn’t have a common language which they can use to pass the communication then it is very impossible to pass ideas and also this may led a business to collapse, for example, if an employee can’t communicate effectively with his workers, he can give them instruction and regulation to follow in the business and also if employees can not communicate with their customer, this might result to fall of demand and supply of goods. This will happen because employees will not be in a position of persuading new customers to buy their merchandises and moreover, if it emerge a similar product in another business and there is an effective communication all customers my shift to this one and the type of business that has language barrier will automatic dissolve. Also, making decisions will tend to take more time before an agreement is reached. When there’s a culture difference in business communication, the decisions making will take a step-by-step process, this has an effects if perhaps there’s a critical decision that have to be passed. As a result of slow decisions making, it will lower the work efficient of the business, and will result to low production. Whatever decision is made, it will influence short-term and long-term progressing of the business, and if it’s hard to reach a common decision due to culture differences, then business will led to dissolution.
Moreover, behavior patterns, preferences, values and common areas of cultural difference affect business communication. Some culture have a strong believes on values, preferences etc, this affect business communication as they are operating the business as two distinctive things. In a workforce, it’s necessary to work jointly in order to bring different ideas together, various communities has different ideas and when they come together they combine the ideas and come up with good ones, this help the business a lot in the side of management and decision making. It also helps of attraction of new customer, if there is a good communication between the employees and the customer, the employees are able to persuade the customer on the product on the market and if there is an improvement of quality or quantity he/she is able to create awareness to his/her customers and as the same time if customer may have a problem on the product they are able to pass their complains to the owner for necessary changes to be made. However, if there’s a cultural difference in communication, the business will be unable to build a strong relation with its clients, because there’s a communication barrier that block the communication betwixt buyer and seller, and so, the seller can’t here buyer preferences. In summary, culture difference affects business communication in many ways such Language barrier, (when employees aren’t able to speak in one language, that’s language barrier). Etc. this affects business in various ways such as slow decision making, lack of client respond (language barrier betwixt seller and buyer) etc. Therefore, it’s necessary to have an effective communication in workplace and if there’s a cultural difference, there should be a translator.