01 Apr, 2024
In today’s demanding global market, organizations go to great lengths to ensure their compliance with a variety of laws, regulations, and ethical standards. But since all three of these vary from country to country, have you ever considered the value of intercultural dexterity on an employee’s ability to ‘be’ compliant in countries other than the ones they were raised in? Or an organization’s ability to truly understand the reasons behind negative outcomes when something has gone wrong? Miscommunication and misunderstandings during intercultural exchanges can be costly, resulting in lost sales and business opportunities, hefty fines, sanctions, or being banned from doing business in critical markets altogether. Conversely, being culturally compliant saves businesses time, money, valuable resources and, in extreme cases, even lives. Developing cultural agility — the ability to understand different cultural perspectives and adapt one’s behavior to various scenarios to navigate smoothly across diverse cultural landscapes — is often overlooked, but it’s as crucial to being compliant as knowing and understanding each country’s rules and regulations themselves. Incorporating cultural agility into compliance training and readiness — what we call “cultural compliance” — has therefore become mandatory when it comes to the success and sustainability of global organizations, worldwide. In this topic paper, we discuss why cultural compliance, which addresses training in cultural agility, should be a mandatory component of every organization’s compliance plan. Thanks to technology and a wealth of experience, NetExpat is able to provide this training easily, on a variety of platforms, with as little commitment as half a day for expats and an hour for global business travelers/employees who interface with individuals from cultures other than their own. Why should cultural compliance matter to organizations?