Introduction
As a trigger to our conversation about the globalization in our group last Thursday on class, we had watched a document American factory in advance. Document tells about the problems of globalization and cultural collisions after a Chinese billionaire opens Fuyao auto-glass manufacturing company in a shuttered General motors factory.
How to raise cultural awareness?
On these days we need to take cultural awareness under consideration more than before. I work in a Nordic company, where I mostly communicate in Finnish with my colleagues. I also have Swedish speaking colleagues, and we have often visitors from our Danish or Swedish offices. Cultural differences are not that remarkable between Nordic countries, and our co-operation is most probably relatively easy comparing to some other countries, but I still notice differences that we need to keep in mind. I have for example noticed, that Finnish people often seem to get right to the point when they negotiate, but the Danish culture this way I find more easy going and relaxed.
First, we should think what cultural awareness exactly means (Career Addict 2019). Cultural awareness is understanding and respecting that someone´s point of view can be different due to cultural background. Cultural awareness is a foundation of communication. Article suggests that when we want to raise our awareness of the cultures, we should understand our own culture and know our history. Which things in the history of our country have made us how we are today? Reflecting our features and behaviour from this point of view will help us to understand other cultures better.
Other crucial thing to learn, according to the article is to treat everyone as an individual, and to ditch your stereotypes about the cultures and start learning about the cultures. For me, living abroad and learning about the work culture and other cultural aspects especially in Central America and Asia, have been eye-opening experiences and have taught me lots of patience and cultural awareness. Also working with Nordic colleagues currently and before, have taught sensitivity, Sweden and Denmark are not Finland. We are all unique cultures.
What affects interactions between the cultures at the workplace?
I used to work for two different Nordic travel agencies some years and my closest colleagues were from other Nordic countries. I noticed that especially Finnish people both on employee and supervisor/management level had problems with interaction with other Nordic people due to the language differences. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages are very similar and in another of these companies our company language was Scandinavian (combined Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) and for the Finnish person, this was often a struggle. How do you communicate, when you can´t understand all the details and you feel isolated from the others due to this? In this case, English as a mandatory company language would have been better option, and it was tried, but it turned out it didn´t work for us. Language has a huge effect on interaction. I think that at multicultural workplaces we should take the language in to consideration. Everyone has a right to feel being part of the group and everyone has a right to get the same information and to be able to understand the language.
Language mastery was mentioned one of the most important prerequisites for successful interaction in study I read (Perez, 2007) At multicultural workplace, misunderstanding and using incorrect expressions can occur and this might cause frustration and mistakes. Another matter are the differences in verbal communication between different nationalities. Whereas some cultures, like Spanish, are communicating in a direct verbal mode, (high context culture) in some cultures, it´s expected to read between the lines and the communication is more assertive and indirect (low context cultures). This can have a strong effect on the interaction at the workplace because of the way how certain messages are communicated, says the study. One more example about this, is, what is considered acceptable or inacceptable way of interacting. For example, Spanish way to get directly to the point, speaking quickly and not taking turns when speaking, can be considered rude and inappropriate in some cultures.
How does the work life change due to globalization?
As we were told to watch the document American Factory earlier, this question and the document made me think about this topic, how I see the future of work and effect of globalization to it.
It´s been the main topic on newspapers lately and according to Statistics Finland, if the birth rate in Finland remains the same in the future, our population will remarkably start decreasing in 2031 and we will be 100000 less populated in 2050. Therefore, the answer would be increased labour immigration and I think this will be one thing that will change the work life more in the future and this is not only in Finland. In this way, I see globalization as a necessary result.
As we could see the end of the document in American factory, I can imagine that in the future, there will be less people working and some of the services will be replaced by technology and human interaction will decrease. As we can see, there are already several services on webpages that you can send easy questions to the bots.
There are some examples (RSA ,2019) what kind of changes there will be due to globalization in the future. Adanna Shallowe mentions demographic dynamics one area that we need to think about in the future in these countries with aging or shrinking population. This will require the government to be flexible what comes to immigration policies. Problems with this can be increasing remittance to original country, brain drain and losing highly skilled labour.
Other things that are crucially affecting on our future work according to article, are technological changes at the workplace and the climate change.
References:
Career Addict 2019. How to develop cultural awareness at the workplace. Micro data. URL:https://www.careeraddict.com/develop-cultural-awareness
Cultura, lenguaje y reprecentacion: revista estudios culturales de la Universitat Jaume I 2007. Perez Canado. Intercultural communication at the workplace: The case of multicultural teams in Spain 2007. URL:https://www.raco.cat/index.php/CLR/article/view/106208/148054
The RSA 2019. Global perspectives on the future of work. Micro data. URL:https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2018/07/global-perspectives-on-the-future-of-work
International Business study blog / Anna 