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One of the critical elements for any successful health and safety programme is clear and effective communication. But as workforces rapidly become more diverse, how do you ensure that everyone understands your messages? Dr Mark Newson-Smith guides us through the multicultural maze.
Cultural diversity brings into the workplace a range of beliefs, values, perceptions, expectations, attitudes and assumptions, all of which present a significant challenge in how to communicate risks.
Particular issues arise in terms of risk perception, analysis of the impact of risks and the most suitable vehicle for communication. Each of these factors will vary between cultures. Therefore, effective communication will involve delivering messages at a number of levels, and using a diverse range of methods at each level.
The variety of people from different cultures employed by the oil and gas industry in the Middle East must rank among the highest in the world. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the larger companies in this sector often have employees from more than 40 countries, with a similar number of first languages spoken.
Most employees originate from the Indian subcontinent, closely followed by the Gulf states. However, it is not unusual to have representatives from all the world’s continents at a single site. Despite English and Arabic being the most commonly-used languages, a significant portion of employees are likely to have limited oral and written fluency in these languages. This in itself presents a major challenge in how to communicate risk.
The diverse nature of businesses in the oil and gas industry also brings with it a diverse number of risks. Ergonomic problems ranging from manual handling to computer-workstation use are a common issue, along with the risks from heat stress, and the handling and use of hazardous substances. Other commonly encountered issues include exposure to noise and problems related to shift work. Communicating these risks and how to deal with them, across such a broad spectrum of cultures, requires considerable thought and planning.
Have a clear message
The first steps in addressing communication of risk in such an environment are: defining the risks; determining their relative importance; and then defining the key messages for each of these risks. These messages need to be simple, easy to follow, and no more than three to four messages should be used per communication. To back up the key messages, core supporting information – again in clear and simple form – needs to be identified.
Know your audience
The next step is to determine the cultural background and norms of the target audience, along with their educational levels. Within the businesses found in the Arabian Gulf there are not only a range of cultures but also a range of religious backgrounds within those cultures. This means that great care has to be taken when selecting the phraseology and visual material used to communicate risks. For example, while using references to impotence as a side-effect of smoking may be acceptable and effective in some Western cultures, it would be unacceptable and offensive within many cultures from the Indian subcontinent and the Gulf region.
Cultural profiling can assist in identifying the strong motivating factors within the target audience. Gulf nationals place a strong emphasis on the role of family, so communications which emphasise the negative impact on the family, if the employee were to become ill or injured through work, could be more effective than stressing the direct impact on the individual.
Choice of media
How then should the messages be delivered? With the more educated and literate workers, computer-based interactive multimedia presentations tend to be particularly popular and effective. The challenge really comes with the less-educated and less-literate workers, who also tend to have very limited access to computers. Even when they do have access, their limited user skills and literacy prove problematic.
For this group, workshops and presentations could be more appropriate. While it is important to keep messages clear and straight to the point, it is also important that each point is communicated in several languages to ensure that the message has been understood by all.
Animated audiovisual materials, such as the Napo series produced by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, have already produced some effective results for this group, and serious consideration is being given to develop similar materials in the UAE, with characters representing the cultural groups within the local workforce. Practical demonstrations linked to multilingual commentaries for the presentation and treatment of heat stress, for example, have also proved useful.
Body gestures
Where personal presentations are given, it is important to be aware of the range of meaning that non-verbal signals can have across different cultures. Eye contact in British culture is used to emphasise attentiveness or honesty, but it can indicate aggression in South-Asian cultures. Folded arms indicate someone being relaxed and friendly within many Asian cultures, but in the West it suggests defensive or even aggressive behaviour. Bringing the tip of the thumb to the tip of the forefinger to form an “O” means OK in the US and in Britain, but for Russians it means zero, for the Japanese it means money, and for Brazilians it is simply an offensive gesture.
Appropriate verbal communication styles also vary between cultures. Arabic cultures tend to use elaborate styles which use detail and description, whereas German and English cultures are more exact and focus on precision. Asian cultures, meanwhile, tend to be succinct, using fewer words.
Graphics
For hard-copy materials, such as leaflets and posters, the graphics become particularly important, and text should be kept to a minimum. Here, as with interactive multimedia and audio-visual presentations, symbols and colours require careful selection. For example, in Western cultures, owls are often considered to be a symbol of wisdom. In many Asian cultures they are considered to be a symbol of death. Similarly, in many Western cultures, the colour white is associated with purity, while in many Asian cultures it is associated with death.
One useful concept, originally developed in the early 1990s, is that of the cultural palette.1 Helping users to select visual material for multicultural risk communication, the tool stores and formulates images and colours used within relevant cultures into an image bank. The images and colours are then rated in terms of their appropriateness, how representive they are, and what their potential is to offend.
Inappropriate symbols are removed from the lists. Each list is then compared, and colours and symbols that appear on all the lists are therefore appropriate for all cultures.
Effective communication of risk in a multicultural workforce isn’t simply a case of translating words into other languages. It involves a high level of awareness and understanding of cultural values and norms, backed up with relevant communication methods and skills. It is demanding but the benefits are well worth the effort.
References
1 http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/
cultpalette.html
Dr Mark Newson-Smith will be speaking on this subject at the IOSH conference on 19 March at 11.20am.
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