What practices are in place at an efficient workplace?

This week I worked on creating a culture-specific manual in order to help new employees get integrated into a company that has teams working in different countries. Whenever people are working in a company that has employees in different countries there are bound to be cultural disparities. I have always known that customs and traditions vary from culture to culture, but I never thought to put that into business terms. I always assumed that business terms and ways just translate from different countries and it is very easy to work cross-culturally. This week I worked on the onboarding system at a company and my mentor, Ana, focused a lot of our time on how to integrate new people into a team. She pointed out to me that this is a very fragile time for people. They have high expectations and it is easy for them to get discouraged if they don’t see positive progress quickly. We also spent a lot of time talking about the importance of building a successful relationship between people from different countries. One thing that is important during this process is making sure that there isn’t a gap such as them and us. It is easy when talking about people who are not necessarily from the same background as you to create a mindset of separation. This is how we operate and this is how THEY operate. One of the things I didn’t really know was how easy it is to make this scenario happen. I learned that it is important to integrate those little things about cultures slowly into the conversation. It is important to make it natural, and if any conflicts arise that bring up cultural differences, to tackle them head-on. For example one of the scenarios that we talked about is racism. When talking to the New York teams racism is one of the things that comes up and is a topic people want to talk about. While in Croatia, racism is never brought up. This all has to do with the history of the countries. Racism has been engrained in America’s history, while Croatia never had a conflict such as that one. Croatia’s population is majority white, just like most of Eastern Europe, and slavery and racism aren’t talked about because they were not a part of that culture. In America, the story is different and therefore racism is much more prevalent. Ana explained to me that sometimes the way we interact and the way we speak might be a shock to a different culture because of the fundamental cultural differences. This isn’t something I knew before starting this project. I knew that cultural differences existed but I didn’t think they translated to the business world. This is changing my perspective of my essential question. I tried to craft a project around assumptions of what I knew about psychology and businesses. However, only one week into my project and I have found that what I have set out to find during this process isn’t actually what I will find or even what I want to find anymore. With what I know, I feel like my essential question is changing. There is much more I don’t know about my project and that is why I think my essential questions will just keep changing.