The United States is often referred to as a melting pot with incredible cultural diversity. And with such diversity, it’s essential for organizations to foster cultural competence and sensitivity. Workplaces should give their employees the skills needed to increase cultural knowledge and boost social awareness. Here’s what you need to know about cultural competency training.
What is Cultural Competence?
Cultural competence is the combination of cultural knowledge, awareness, and social skills. It enables people to communicate effectively and collaborate with individuals from different cultures.
It’s essential for workplaces to give employees the cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills to increase cultural knowledge and boost social awareness. Here’s what you need to know about cultural competency training.
Here are five skills that can be obtained through education and experience.
- Mindfulness: This is the ability to be aware of how communication and interaction with others are developed.
- Cognitive Flexibility: This allows you to create new categories of information rather than old categories.
- Tolerance for Ambiguity: This helps you maintain focus in situations that are not clear, rather than become anxious, and methodically determine the best approach as the situation moves forward.
- Behavioral Flexibility: This is how to adapt and accommodate behaviors to a different culture.
- Cross-cultural empathy: This is the ability to visualize another person’s experience from both an intellectual and emotional point of view.
Cultural competency training provides instruction on positive behaviors, attitudes, and policies.
What Are the Benefits of Cultural Competency Training?
Some of the biggest benefits of using cultural competency training at work include:
- Increases cultural understanding and skills
- Boosts customer satisfaction
- Improves work outcomes
- Creates more open-minded employees
- Encourages active listening, empathy, and overall better communication skills
- Fosters a variety of diverse perspectives, ideas, and strategies
- Prompts productivity and cooperation
What Are the Key Points of Cultural Competency Training?
To enhance cultural training in your workplace, use these six key points as a layout for your program and build from there.
1. Define Diversity
Ground your entire cultural competency program with an initial discussion about diversity. What is it? How has it impacted your organization? How does it impact others with different identities? How do we develop an understanding of ourselves with others? The process of socialization deeply impacts our behaviors, values, and interactions with the world.
Celebrating diversity is made easy with our best-selling DEI calendar – respectful and inclusive scheduling made easy!
2. Improve Self-Awareness
Spend some time exploring social groups and how they impact the lives of participants. This can be an interesting part of your session as some people deeply identify with their social groups, while others don’t take the time to think about how they belong to them. Either way, boosting self-awareness will allow your participants to see how they are connected to a greater system.
3. Unpack Cultural Baggage
While most people don’t like to admit it, we all have biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. Discuss your unconscious biases, unpack your cultural bias, and understand the unintended impact that comes with that especially as it pertains to someone’s individual professional role.
4. Explore “isms”
“Isms” are attitudes, actions, or institutional structures that can oppress certain individuals or groups. What are the most common “isms”? What is the relationship between these systems of oppression and the assumptions people make about others?
Explore more with our training on microaggressions at the workplace.
5. Understand Privilege
Spend some time unpacking the complex web of privilege. Different types of privilege interconnect, and most have a systemic origin. Start broadly and then get more specific about the types of privilege that benefit some and not others.
6. Create Allies
Cultural competency training seeks to create allies. Spend some time discussing actionable ways that you can address issues when they arise, or if diversity, equity, and inclusion are threatened.
How Cultural Competency Training Improves Your Business
Cultural competency training can improve your team’s knowledge, understanding, and skills. These benefits show when they’re working with both customers and coworkers from culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. Take this step to ensure everyone in your organization is protected!
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FAQs
What do we consider cultural competency training?
Cultural competence training focuses on the knowledge and skills that value diversity and understand and respond to differences among cultures. It is necessary to increase awareness of cultural norms.
What are the five main areas of cultural competence?
Cultural competence first values diversity which means accepting and respecting differences between others. Next, it makes you to take a cultural self-assessment, which allows you to understand your differences with others too. It also gives you the cultural knowledge you need to navigate working with and understanding others. The last step is to adapt to diversity naturally.
What is one example of cultural competency?
In education, educators must respect diversity and become culturally competent by having an understanding of the different histories, cultures, and languages of children to teach them properly in the classroom.
What is the difference between diversity and cultural competence training?
Many people confuse cultural diversity and cultural competency. Cultural diversity is the existence of different cultural or ethnic groups in an organization, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there is cultural competency in serving those groups.