Work Better with American Clients with Culture Training

Posted On: September 19, 2015

If you work with US citizens from offshore, you may be wondering how to bridge the culture gaps to work more effectively and efficiently. We help you to work better with American clients. In fact, in a recent cross-cultural sensitization program for remote teams, Authentic Journeys, the following question was asked:

How Does Culture Training Help Us Work Better with American Clients?

[Answers below are given word for word from the feedback forms.]

The session was to inform us about the US culture and the basic differences in Indian and US culture that stand out when we are required to interact with US clients. The session trained us about how to have conversations with US clients (we had role plays for this). We did role plays about the various holidays in the US.

The US culture training is all about helping you to have an easy way to communicate with an American client. Understanding the differences between the Indian and American cultural differences while communicating.

The US culture training taught us about how we can effectively communicate our ideas to our US client and how we can understand them. It gave me an idea about the topics that I can discuss with the US clients when making small talk, about the topics that should be avoided and the topics that should be talked about with caution.

The US cultural training gives us an idea about how the Indian and US cultures are different and how they are the same.

The US culture training helped me to differentiate between the dos and don’ts specific to each culture, acceptable habits, and also the common habits between the cultures. I also learned about how to make small talk.

This session covers things like how to communicate with the US client, understand how they behave in different situations, what are the common small talk topics we can use to start and end conversations.

This training helped us to know about how Americans and Indians are different when it comes to greet each other and make small talk. We learned about American holidays. We also learned how to write formal e-mails.

This training was all about learning the differences in how behaviors and words are perceived between Indian citizens and American citizens. We talked about what is ideal etiquette in business interactions with Americans and what to avoid. We also compared some common requests in India and how those requests are perceived in Americans and how to ask those same requests in a culturally appropriate way to Americans. For instance, in India if we request someone to ‘bring something’ as a statement, it is acceptable in India, but we should ask it as a question with to an American.

The US culture training is all about how to communicate to Americans, how they react, how they see situations, and how it is entirely different from our perspective. The training trains us to communicate with them without offending anyone. Normally Indians say ‘bring something tomorrow’ which according to them is rude. American also have the tendency to thank everyone, which Indians may or may not do. When there is a meeting, Americans will start on time, where as Indians may or may not. We also leaned exactly what it means to be late to a meeting with a US stakeholder and what they may think about us.

Notes: This feedback was given by participants in Kerala, India, that attended a two-day US Cross-Cultural training program for offshore and virtual team interaction. A majority of the participants will be interacting with American counterparts via email, conference call and phone call during daily status meetings. A handful of the participants may have business visits onsite in the US in the future. For more information on this program, click here. Contact us for more information. We coach anyone regardless of location over the internet to individuals and small groups.

Thank you to all the participants for your active participation and articulate feedback. You are awesome!

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