Cultural Sensitization

Anyone who has been involved in offshore based outsourcing for some time, in any way, will surely have interesting stories of how lack of cultural awareness led to serious and some times just hilarious incidents. Fact of the matter is that while the common denominator that drives work to remote locations is the fact that at least in technology services, these are finally technical stuff which can be delivered by anyone technical, these closely linked to cultural aspects too.

What is not often factored in, is that these technical services are needed and provided through human interface and these provide the cultural tone to services, through the consumer or provider of these services. If there is no adequate sensitization on both or at least one side of the equation, it can often lead to misinterpretation, service deficiency or frustration. Most companies which provide offshore based services have understood this now, many the hard way, but there is still a big gap to cover and most measures are not comprehensive and do not tend to address the root cause.

Now, it is also true that it is not easy to change the cultural affiliations of people so easily and so, ultimately it comes to making people appreciate the cultural gap and having them be aware of the major socio-cultural aspects through learned behavior in an effort to match what comes naturally and effortlessly to the other party as it is part of human social and behavioral manifestation.

Bottom-line : it is very important to ensure that both enterprises and service providers appreciate this aspect and jointly work to address this in a way so that it at least neutralizes the obvious rough edges fairly consistently and is baked into the fabric of service delivery enablement.