Australia is a multicultural nation with people from many different countries around the world, bringing with them their various cultures.
We also have the deep and rich cultural history of Indigenous Australians that can sometimes be forgotten in discussions of overall cultural awareness in the workplace. When you build deep cultural understanding within your organisation, it contributes to the development of respectful relationships, which allow for more open and honest conversations to occur.
Once respectful and resilient relationships are built, people can have tough conversations about race and culture without creating offence as there is the knowledge that each party has mutual respect and understanding for the other.
So how can organisations increase cultural awareness and cultural competence to build better understanding and relationships at work?
Tips to help build cultural awareness in the workplace
- Truly listen to your Aboriginal staff and look for the hidden meaning of their words.
- Understand that Indigenous cultural humility dictates that saying no is very hard for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander staff, especially saying no to people in more senior positions. This is a common occurrence and often leads to the breakdown of professional relationships and feelings of stress and anxiety for some.
- Take all staff out onto country and learn about the rich local cultural knowledge and wisdom.
- Create a safe cultural environment where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff can speak, be heard and affirmed professionally.
- Acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have a specific skill set that is not held by non-Indigenous staff members and therefore they are highly valuable to an organisation.
- Empower staff to challenge racial bias or racism when they see it occurring within the organisation in a respectful way
- Show respect and support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers by doing things such as offering an acknowledgement of country or demonstrating a high value of their culture through the implementation of a Reconciliation Action Plan
- Probably most importantly trust Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers and acknowledge that sometimes they might do things very differently.
Where there is a lack of cultural awareness and lack of cultural competency in a relationship, the first thing Indigenous peoples will do is shut down. This can then lead to a relationship breakdown which further leads to lack of Indigenous staff retention within the organisation. This can spread throughout the community, reflecting badly on an organisation and turn Indigenous people off not just from joining the organisation, but also in engaging its products or services.
If you want to embed a formal cultural awareness program in your organisation, your first steps should be:
- Engaging your Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff to be part of the process in building any sort of cultural awareness program or engage an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander expert in the field of Cultural Awareness/Competence
- Do research into what is good practice and respected models of cultural competence.
- Develop a process to continually increase staff’s cultural competence and embed it as an ongoing process that the whole company is engaged in.