Uncategorized
How overcoming cultural differences in communication benefits business.
Today companies trade goods and provide services to global customers. Many companies have facilities in different countries and most companies, small and large, work already with a highly diverse, international workforce.
Communication is clearly the enabler of any kind of cooperation and business activities – nationally and internationally. Different cultures have particular business communication styles, well accepted and adopted by their population. Other cultures have different ways to conduct business and with that, use different styles to open, discuss, negotiate and close business deals and maintain business relations.
What is the best way to communicate for people of different cultural background? The potential customer’s style or the one that relates to the language used during the communication? Unfortunately there is no clear answer to this question.
Specific communication styles have developed over long periods based on cultural values. Even with the wish to “speak the language of the customer”, these values cannot just be set aside when writing or talking to people of other cultural influence.
Two little anecdotes show the difficulties in communicating internationally. A Japanese corporation hired a professional trainer to teach their people how to communicate with Western customers. The Japanese style uses passive wording, perceived by Western customers “as if they do not want to make business with us”. Nothing was further from the truth; the Japanese corporation was of course very interested in Western business. I witnessed another case of misinterpreted correspondence first hand, when a colleague received an email from another colleague in Europe. When reading it he suddenly murmured: “Why is he yelling at me?” I asked him what he meant and he responded that the colleague’s use of exclamation marks would be equal to yelling at him. A look at the email confirmed what I thought: the exclamation marks underlined great importance – not to scold the reader. Using the exclamation mark that way is common practice in the country of the writer. But the author wrote in English – so should it not be natural using Anglo-American writing styles and rules?
We will have more fruitful interpersonal and business experience, if:
1. Individuals writing in their second or third language, avoid phrases, formulations and special punctuations that are common in their language but might be unknown or sometimes even offending in other cultural regions. Keep it as simple as possible.
2. Receivers of emails not written in the writer’s mother-tongue should read them with extra tolerance. The writer took great efforts to learn this language, but do not expect impeccable wording. Try to understand what the writer had in mind.
3. Openness and willingness to understand different cultures and how they express themselves in business communication, bears a huge potential of additional possibilities. There is benefit in learning the ways of other cultures. Adapting some of them may even give the own company a head start.
In spite of the corporate businesses rhetoric of promoting teamwork and cooperation within the region, there are often unwritten rules that encourage individual employees to outshine their colleagues, urge not to share ideas and know-how and putting individual’s own interest before the interest of the organization or the team. In such an environment, it is rather common that within weeks of joining a company, new recruits learn to talk up cooperation while acting competitively, or in certain circumstances refraining from sharing his expertise with his fellow colleagues.
Considering the diversity of employees and the feel of insecurity, the reality is that employees accumulate knowledge and rarely worked with each others. In fact, some employees tend to group with other employees of the same nationality and ethnic background to draw strength, even at the expense of his team members. Such culture is counter productive and organizations need to foster a culture of cooperation.
Collaboration within the corporate arena is particularly important for regional businesses, particularly considering the pressure to increase the percentage of the national workforce. To raise level of competencies, expatriate skilled employees are encouraged to share their knowledge and experience with their fellow local employees.
The nationalization process of the highly-skilled work force by replacing expatriates with national workforce can be counter productive, particularly if the expatriate employees feel insecure. A better approach would be to increase the level of national workforce through growth or by replacement due to national attrition. The provision of security to the highly-skilled expatriate workforce helps collaboration and productivity at the same time.
In today’s interconnected business environments, working closely with others across boundaries, creatively, and productively propel both organizational and personal effectiveness. It is often expected of employees to work as teams to execute tasks assigned to them. With the advent of advances in ICT, team can now work remotely with colleagues, suppliers, clients, and even competitors they never actually meet. Today’s organizations depend on teams irrespective of the attribution and profile of the multiple teams in the workplace.
Collaborative business culture is best addressed during the hiring process of new recruits by hiring for cooperation. In addition to the normal process of matching candidate’s competencies and experience with the job requirements, companies with cooperative culture give particular care and attention to their hiring practices, as they strive to seek to attract cooperative people and discourage highly competitive and individualistic recruits. To achieve this, companies should review the vacant job’s competency requirements, they should include a proven ability to work in teams, deal with conflict, and share knowledge. If they do not, it’s likely that people who are most capable of working collaboratively are screening out. Companies should ensure that employees involved in the recruitment process are themselves collaborative people who appreciative team work, considering that recruiters tend to employ candidates in their own image. So in order to recruit collaborative people, make sure collaborative people are put in charge of hiring.
Collaborative business culture encompasses new practices that foster collaboration. Hiring for cooperation is crucial because when new recruits joins a company, they tend to bring to their new position their own personality, attitude, and behaviors. But cooperation and competitiveness is a relative term. Depending on the environment, individuals play up or play down their natural tendencies to cooperate. The environment surrounding the individuals has a direct impact on his behaviors. For example if a collaborative person finds himself in a highly competitive working environment, then he is likely to refrain from being collaborative and tend to exaggerate the more competitive elements within his personality and broad working style.
Collaborative business culture supports mentoring process. The experience of being mentored is arguably one of the most strongly associated with highly cooperative people and teams. Mentoring can yield best result under the following circumstances: (a) when both parties volunteer for it, (b) when the mentor is skillful in active listening, and (c) when leadership and senior executives are mentors, acting as role models for the company. To institutionalize mentoring as an important driver for cooperation within a company, mentoring should be promoted and people trained to be good mentors. However, for best outcome the participation of both parties in a mentoring relationship should be made voluntary. Furthermore, senior executives should be encouraged to mentor less experienced team members. Such practices send out a strong cultural message that this is a capability that is valued in the organization.
Collaborative business culture ensures that performance management rewards collaboration. The worst offender is when the performance management system rewards individual achievements and ignore team work collaboration. By the same token, a process that recognizes and rewards collaboration and team work tends to reinforce a culture of cooperation. To verify how well a company’s performance-management process encourages collaboration, a number of questions should be raised: Does the performance management process allow employees to talk abut performance and learn from each other, or is it primarily a one-to-one, hierarchical process? The follow-up that built into the process is also critical, for example is it collaborative in nature and what proportion of recognition and reward is given for individual accomplishment or individual unit accomplishment, and what proportion is given over to recognizing and rewarding intra-unit team effort and cross-unit collaboration?
To cultivate supportive corporate culture, the leadership needs to pay attention to its processes, including recruitment and performance management, to ensure that they favors and rewards collaboration across teams as well as departments. The leadership is also responsible for setting up the right corporate culture by getting involved in the coaching process and collaborating with their fellow colleagues.
Fundraising
Fundraising or fund raising (also development) is the process of soliciting and gathering contributions as money or other resources, by requesting donations from individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, or governmental agencies (see also crowd funding). Although fundraising typically refers to efforts to gather money for
non-profit organizations, it is sometimes used to refer to the identification and solicitation of investors or other sources of capital for for-profit enterprises.Easy event fundraising : Want to know about easy ways of event fundraising? Visit www.crowdrise.com and gather more information about event fundraising.
A recent market study of online retail sales conducted by Machrotech showed a 28 percent increase in sales, penetrating 71 percent of the US population between 2005-2006. In keeping those results in mind, one would be inclined to believe that creating a home business with a healthy residual income stream would be easy. Internet marketing failure rates paint a darker side to this story claiming dismal failure rates so high that it would appear nearly impossible to make any sort of regular income let alone a residual income with a home business.
That being said, making an income online is not only possible but probable if you follow the directions. The problem with following directions is that there are so many people giving them that following them is near impossible. Imagine how difficult it would be if you were driving down a busy street and thousands of people were shouting directions. Turn right, turn left, go faster, stop here! The thought alone is overwhelming, the frustration is exasperating.
Based on that scenario, I doubt if you would get very far either in your car or in your home business let alone make any money today or long lasting income for the tomorrows ahead. That is just one reason why experts claim that only about 3% of everyone who starts an online business will succeed.
The odds seem to weigh heavily against you however before you throw up your arms in despair and dash your dreams of owning your own home business into a million pieces I want you to think of something else. Have you ever been in a casino? If you are like many other people, I am sure that you have. Maybe you have played cards, rolled dice, spun a wheel or pulled the handle of a slot machine. I’ll bet you have even won a time or three three and had great fun i the process.
You may be wondering at this point why I would bring up casino games in the middle of a home business, residual income article so I will get to the point. Casinos rake in billions of dollars each year. There is no denying that fact but did you also know that the Casinos play with a very slight edge by design their games may carry only one percentage point in their favor and that is their draw, you have in some cases high chance of winning except more often than that you walk away with less money than you had before you started playing.
Casinos have the knowledge to use small percentages to earn them piles of long term residual income just as you need the knowledge of the home business market to achieve similar results.
Educate yourself before jumping feet first into the deep end of the marketing pool. Don’t grab the first business you see based on how flashy their ad or fall prey to their claims of huge financial gains in 30 days or less. Be realistic with your expectations, if you have been living in the same house for the last 15 years and driving the same 10 year old compact car why would you think that you would be moving to a mansion by the sea with a new red Ferrari by the end of the month?
I have news for you… Wake up, you won’t!
Like most other things making money from the Internet takes time and persistence and in the case of affiliate marketing it also takes one other thing – a good program..
The type of program that I like best is called a cooperative business model because it offers more bang for the buck than many other programs. Working with a cooperative is full of features and benefits like low startup costs, low advertising costs, easy consumer acquisition at an affordable price from an established customer base without wasting your time or money on purchasing leads. No doubt about it. real paying customers mean real income.
If you are serious about creating a solid home business that will pay you today and provide a residual income for your days ahead, I highly recommend investigating the power of joining a business cooperative. It is sound business principles that make a good business.
An Internet Marketing program has two sides. One is the part devoted to individual customers. The other is the business to business component. E-commerce programs as well as advertising, sales support, customer service and public relations are all elements of an internet marketing program.
Similar companies compete against one another while being only a click of the mouse away. In other words, a buyer can locate numerous sellers offering similar merchandise, similar prices and similar offers in a very short time period. As more people and businesses become comfortable with the internet, the marketing landscape will continue to evolve quickly in the coming years.
Use of the internet has exploded during the last few years in both the consumer and business-to-business markets. Although the experts still debate the future of the internet, no one doubts it is having an impact on how business is taking place in the twenty ‘first century, even with all of the – - dot crashes – - of the late 1990s. Here are some facts about the internet that highlight its tremendous growth and presence in society:
- The most common products consumers’ research online and purchase off-line (at the store or outlet) are: automobiles, computer, hardware, travel, electronics, books, appliances, music, sporting goods and clothing.
- Over 25 percent of all business-to-business purchases are placed through some type of internet connection.
- The five top business-to-business e-commerce products are computers and electronics, motor vehicles, petrochemicals, utilities, papers and office products.
- In 2004, 10 percent of business-to-business advertising dollars were spent on the internet. The total amount spent was $8.7 billion.
- About 54 percent of the e-mail users have responded to an e-mail advertisement. Almost half purchased a product.
- Internet retail sales account for almost 2.5 percent of all retail sales.
Business-to-business marketers were among the first companies actually to make profits using the internet. In today’s marketplace, the web is becoming the communication tool of choice for many business-to-business companies. The internet provides opportunities for communication, customer service, sales support, collaboration and e-commerce.
Some companies use the internet for every aspect of their business including taking orders, inventory control, production scheduling, communications plans, sales programs, service departments and support programs. The change from traditional communication channels such as salespeople, telephone and – - snail mail – -to the internet and e-mail happened quickly in some companies and more slowly in others.
Now, convincing top management of the benefits of internet marketing is essential. There is still a lack of internet expertise in the business community. As a result, many companies are turning to marketing agencies for guidance.
To conclude, the influence of the internet on various businesses and industries has been clearly noted in today’s world. The presence of the internet and e-commerce is so sweeping that the various applications of web technology are now essential elements of a fully integrated marketing communications program.
As I was contemplating on today’s topic for an article, a small business man, that I had the privilege to know and who is the best example of self rule in business, came to mind. His name was Constance Palubicki, my Dad. Today there are many problems both in business and society as a whole. By using my Dad, I think I can share with you the core of where the problem lies. If business and society would adopt his approach, it would solve the problems we see today.
My Dad had a small farm in West Central Minnesota where I grew up. He has had the most influence on me in recognizing the true values in life. He was a man of strong character and very much respected by all those that knew him.
My Dad was a man of great integrity both in his personal life as well as in business. His greatest strength was his honesty and was the cornerstone of his character. In all of his business dealings he never demanded more than he had coming but expected every penny he had earned.
I see four corner stones in his character that are essential to self rule. They are as follows.
1)honesty, we must be committed to honesty in all of our dealings including our self
2)vigilance, always on guard against those who would try to take advantage of us
3)hard work, anything of true value is only acquired through diligent effort
4)kindness, willingness to help others but not be taken advantage of
My Dad lived by these principles. People recognized this and that is why he was so respected. But that is not why he did it. He understood that the greatest value in life is when you can look in the mirror and say I respect myself and who I am.
These corner stones are not automatic to anyone. They have to be developed. It first takes commitment.
Then it takes discipline and hard effort. But in the end it is worth all the effort.
If our politicians in Washington and Sacramento had and applied these principles things could be different. If business was operated on these principles we probably would not be in a recession. And if society as a whole could adopt these principles, we would not have the problems of stealing, cheating, and killing that we see today. The world today could be a much better place. We will not acquire these corner stones in our life by going to church or by passing laws. There is only one way it can happen, by looking in the mirror and making a commitment to our self and to exert the discipline and effort necessary to make them part of our life. The only way this will happen is on an individual basis. That is what self rule is all about. We must guard them diligently as part of our domain. I truly believe this is the only way that we can guard our self rule (freedom).
It is important that each and every one of us take a look in the mirror and make a commitment to honesty and integrity, it is our only hope.