Cultural Sensitivity When Communicating Across Cultures
November 30, 2024
In conversation with NetExpat Consultant, Alka
Watch a conversational video with NetExpat Consultant, Alka, and Gabriela Wegloskwa, Associate Director Intercultural Services, NetExpat on the importance of considering cultural sensitivity when communicating across cultures.
Moving to a new country with your working spouse or partner can often feel like an equal mix of adventure and adjustment, but it can also be pretty challenging if you’re not able to work yourself. As an accompanying spouse or partner, you face different challenges than your family members when integrating into a new culture and country. Your partner and children are also adjusting, but while they have the benefit of establishing a daily routine by heading off to work and school each weekday, you’re likely spending far more time alone. This – combined with the loss of your support group, familiar environment, and possibly your career – means it's easy for loneliness to set in, along with a feeling that you’ve lost all or part of your identity. And that can lead to additional challenges that you’ll need to address quickly, so you can avoid serious issues. Challenges Non-Working Spouses and Partners Face When Living Abroad:
Most people are prepared to experience some effects of ‘culture shock’ when they embark on an assignment abroad. However, not many are prepared to experience similar effects when they return to their home country. What is a ‘reverse culture shock’? Does it really exist, what are the signs, do we need to prepare for it and how? Over the years, as a professional coach for people on the move, I’ve learned a lot about expatriates; people on international assignments that everyone in the office looks at with a certain dose of envy as their life is just taking off in some more or less exciting country. For those who stay behind, an international assignment is associated with travel, visiting new, sometimes exotic places, meeting interesting people, earning comfortable income, allowances, and all other benefits that those who stay at home don’t get. Whether an expatriate or an independent migrant, after a number of years in a host country, we slowly slip into memories of friends and family who move on with their own lives, adjusting the best they can. When it comes to our work colleagues and professional networks, we pretty much fall off their radar. I relocated to Australia in 1988 as an independent migrant. The question of repatriation never crossed my mind. Until 12 years later, when I came to Croatia (home country) on an extended holiday. From such a big time distance, walking the streets of once familiar country and seeing friends I haven’t seen for a long time, it suddenly hit me What would it be like if I ever decided to come back? How would it be for me entering the once familiar workforce, social scene, and other aspects of life? Would it be possible to take off where I left it, or would it mean another new start? With a difference of job prospect, repatriation as a possibility is somewhat similar for those sent by a company on an international assignment, and those who embarked of their own choice. Sooner or later the same questions will pop up in their minds: Would I be able to return? What am I returning to? Would there be a job for me? Would I be able to utilise my new skills? How will people react? What social networks are still there? Through my work I get a lot of opportunities to talk to the newcomers. Interestingly, for most of them return and repatriation are not high on the agenda. Consequently, not many are aware of the phenomena called reverse-culture-shock, and its effects.
