Soft Skills for the BPO Sector

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CORPORATE ETIQUETTE AND CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION

or informal. Formal rules are the speci cally taught dos and don’ts of

how to behave in common social situations, such as greeting people on

meeting, dress codes at various formal and informal occasions, table

manners at meals, etc. In contrast, informal social rules are not the spe-

ci cally taught ‘dos and don’ts’ or ‘hows and how nots’, so they obviously

are more di cult to identify and are usually learned by watching how

people behave and then imitating that behaviour. Informal rules govern

how males and females are supposed to behave in public, where to ex-

change business cards, when it is appropriate to use a person’s  rst name,

what  ower and colour of it should be given on what occasion, and so

on. When informal rules are violated members of a culture are likely to

feel uncomfortable, although they may not be able to say exactly why.

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COMMUNICATION (NON-VERBAL) DIVERSITY

As discussed in the previous chapter, communication, especially its

non-verbal aspect, is extremely important when it comes to connecting

with other people, as it is considered more reliable than verbal commu-

nication when determining meaning.  is reliability, however, is valid

only when the communicators belong to the same cultures.  e simplest

of head and hand gestures can be interpreted di erently from culture to

culture, so interpreting non-verbal elements through the myopic eyes

of your own culture alone is de nitely not a good idea. For instance, a

simple thumb-up gesture can have amazingly contrasting connotations

in various cultures. In American culture it is understood as gesture for

hitch-hiking; in Australian culture it is seen as ‘obscene’ (if pumped up

and down); in Nigerian culture it is ‘rude’; and in German and Japanese

cultures it is seen as the signal for ‘one’.

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So it makes sense to deliber-

ate for gaining awareness of communication diversity by keeping track

of the non-verbal cues which get pronounced mainly through one’s

body language (including facial expressions & kinesics or your body

movement), proxemics or your space language, haptics or your touch

language, paralinguistics or the intonation, pitch, pause, etc., of your

spoken language, and chronemics or study of the use of time. See

Fig. 12.2.

Body Language (Facial Expressions and Kinesics): Gestures help

members of a culture clarify confusing messages, but di erences in

body language can be a major source of misunderstanding during

cross-cultural communication. It would be unrealistically optimistic to

assume that someone from another culture who speaks your language

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