Cultural awareness training is highly crucial for companies with diverse employees, to create a better and more positive workplace. However, often employees consider this training boring and do not focus much on understanding the basic motive behind Cq cultural intelligence. We have curated a guide of seven creative ideas that can help you improve your training sessions. These cultural assessment tools and ideas can improve learning, workplace ethics among employees.
Here are the top 7 Ways for Cultural Awareness Training:
Start a professional development club: To encourage your diverse employees to share ideas and innovative ways to deal with challenges, you can start a professional club in your organization where employees can share their ideas, discuss new perspectives. Start a new club, ask your employees to participate, arrange conferences or get together for the club once a month or after every two weeks and encourage your employees to share new ideas and perspectives. Create a special room for conferences or take meetings to outdoor facilities, ask your employees to wear casual clothes during club meetings, and help them feel comfortable with other employees to share new ideas. A cross cultural trainer can also ask them to share challenges they are facing, and other employees can give their input.
Integrate gaming in large projects: generally, during large projects, various departments of a company have to coordinate with each other for successful completion. You can pair up team members from different departments rather than one department, including one expert that can handle their queries and deal with other important aspects. Such activities can improve teamwork, coordination, and make tedious tasks fun. A Company culture consultant can organize a healthy competition between these teams and offer incentives, rewards for success. It would make employees feel valued, they can learn to work with people from different backgrounds, creating Harmony.
Taboo topics challenge: To create cultural awareness in a company, trainers can include taboo topic challenges in cultural awareness training. Ask employees to discuss or share their views about topics that are considered taboo in the workplace. You can start from easy topics to difficult topics to improve discussions and encourage employees to speak up. Such challenges can help employees share things they are scared to share with their superiors, and companies will know what their employees are expecting or experiencing at the workplace.
Invite influential speakers or someone from the entertainment industry: Some people will find it weird to invite comedians or entertainment persons at the workplace for motivational speeches, but as they say, learning in a fun way. Sometimes people learn easily when communicating in an entertaining way, moreover, your diverse employees will find a way to deal with hesitation to speak with different employees. You can create a professional yet positive workplace environment if your employees work together, understand each other, and respect different opinions, so it’s great to invite someone who can motivate, but make it easy.
Play or skit: Often at the workplace people are unconsciously biased, sometimes a situation occurs where they do not understand where they went wrong or what needs to be done, so cross cultural trainer can explain in such a way that they don’t feel bad or insulted, but subtly understand where they went wrong and try to improve their behavior. Theoretical plays or movies with social messages can be great ideas to include in cultural training. You will find a list of movies that have hidden messages behind them to teach employees. Organize such activities once a month or after a few weeks.
Convey policies and important messages through guess games: include guess the policy or punishment in Cq cultural intelligence training for employees. You can remind employees about your company policy, harassment policies, work culture ethics through guess games. Ask your employees what they would do in a certain situation and let other employees give their opinion on answers. It would help them understand the gravity of the situation and also remind them about the policies of the company.
Start “bring your pet to work” day once a year: Pets are always considered as family, especially dogs. People love dogs, it can be the way to initiate communication. You can start to bring your pet day once a year at your workplace and organize a special place for pets to stay and employees to communicate. While they work, their pets can enjoy themselves, and again, employees can spend some time together with other pet owners. It can be a memorable experience and can be the beginning of many communications and team works.
Conclusion: These are some effective and creative ideas that can help you make your cultural awareness training interesting and more impactful. Employees can break the ice and start to be involved in group activities and thus improve the workplace environment.
