It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that, for most of us, “work” meant working and interacting with friends and colleagues who all had much in common. We all lived in the same general geographic area and shared many of the same cultural, social, and religious traditions and practices. We tended to work with people of the same nationality, and often of the same race and gender. And for most of us, we didn’t even have a lot of contact with people outside of our own time zone, much less another country. So communicating with our colleagues, customers and suppliers was a pretty straight-forward exercise.
Today the rules have changed. The rise of the global economy has imposed tremendous challenges on all of our communication practices; we must now communicate around the world, not just around the corner. We must also be aware of linguistic, cultural, religious, and social differences if we are to build strong communication channels with our colleagues and our most important business contacts. No company can succeed without acknowledging the changes that have occurred and adopting new approaches and practices for communicating with the global workforce.
As our workforces become more diverse, and our “workplace” takes on more and more of an international flavor, we must be particularly concerned with how effectively we communicate with our own teams of workers spread across the globe. Creating corporate alignment and a consistent focus on corporate strategy, goals, and values is ever more important, and difficult, when we have to make our messages understandable and memorable across cultures, borders, and time zones.
So we must always keep in mind that in establishing sound communication practices, we are now dealing with a ‘”double whammy” effect: our communication strategies require more thought, more consistency, and therefore more effort. A breakdown or failure in executing our communications plan will have an increasingly dramatic and negative impact because of the emerging global scale of our business activities.
So what can we do?
Here are five tips to help business professionals create a culture of excellent communication between global offices, teams, and individuals:
1.)Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
To communicate well on the global stage, communicate often. Major business strategies, policies and procedures, and corporate values must be continually reinforced if the message is to reach all corners of your global workforce. If you are worried that your message is not getting out, you’re probably right. When in doubt, repeat, repeat, repeat.
