RELOCATION BLOG
There will come a point when it is time to meet face-to-face with your international counterparts e.g. you may need to make market visits, arrange meetings, undertake negotiations, attend trade shows or conferences, or even relocate under your organisation's employee relocation programme. As with any relationship, it's important to make a good impression and build trust.
Building relationships is essential to international sales, and an awareness of cultural considerations is hugely important when relocating overseas or selling your products and services into international markets.
What may be acceptable in the UK could deemed as inappropriate, insensitive or even offensive in other cultures, and a little understanding of the culture you are selling into goes a long way.
Understanding and responding to cultural differences enables employees who find themselves in an unfamiliar environment to achieve mutual understanding, leading to improved efficiency and profitability.
There are several cultural models that help us understand the complexities of culture and how to adapt our communication style for different cultural contexts. One of the simplest of these models refers to low and high context cultures.
1. We love the middle lane of the motorway
Our road sense is so bad in Britain that the Government produced a set of guidelines - The Highway Code, which applies to England, Scotland and Wales.
Many of the rules in the Code are legal requirements, and if you disobey these rules you are committing a criminal offence.
Welcome to our second instalment in our "about Britain" series. For the uninitiated, Britain can appear to be a pretty odd place. We have odd habits, odd food, odd weather, odd taps and an even odder sense of humour. It's nothing that a good bout of cultural training can't sort out, but I'm going to run a series of posts about what makes the Brits so wonderfully weird - or weirdly wonderful - which may help our non-indigenous friends to understand what the heck we are all about.
For the uninitiated, Britain can appear to be a pretty odd place. We have odd habits, odd food, odd weather, odd taps and an even odder sense of humour. It's nothing that a good bout of cultural training can't sort out, but I'm going to run a series of posts about what makes the Brits so wonderfully weird - or weirdly wonderful - which may help our non-indigenous friends to understand what the heck we are all about.
There may be the odd bit of colourful language and perhaps even some controversial ideas, so in the unlikely event you are offended by any content, Celsium would like to make it absolutely clear that we are very sorry you aren't a little more laid-back.
