Blog: Know Your Client's Culture

Culture? What Culture?

Do you think about your client’s culture before you meet with them the first time? After you meet with them the first time? After you’ve met with them the 10^th time? Ever?

Way back in the last century I was a French major in undergrad, had a freshman year roommate from Singapore (who I'm still friends with on Facebook even though she moved home decades ago), spent a semester in Paris, worked on widely disbursed teams within international companies, and almost moved to Sydney, Australia (after five business trips there over 13 months). At the turn of the last century, I was working on my MBA and got the opportunity to work in a team made up of two Americans, one Korean, one Canadian, and one Mozambican. I surrounded myself with a wide variety of people and loved it.

One of the companies I worked for in the late ‘90s had a distributor in Japan. Whenever he emailed me, he addressed me as “Mr. Freeman” (my maiden name). About a month before he came to the U.S. for his first visit, I asked his contact in our office how to handle letting him know I’m “Ms.” I did it as tactfully and gently as possible, but there was much apologizing from him (which is what I was trying to avoid him doing when we met in person). Today, those kinds of things can be more easily handled by including “she/her,” “he/him,” or “they/them” in your email signature block.

At one point in my career, I was interested in studying communication between cultures in corporate environments. With the adoption of social media, people all over the world can exchange ideas anytime they want. But I wonder if they ever really reflect on the cultures of those they are interacting with to see if there’s anything we can learn from one another, instead of just being critical of things we don’t understand.

I typically assume that anyone from outside the U.S. is following politics and world implications much more than myself or most people I interact with. (I think this comes from whether or not you've had physical warfare on your home soil, but that's a different blog topic...) I enjoy getting a perspective of life in America from people who observe it from outside -- perspective is important and I think the only way to understand something is to try to see it from as many angles as possible. I use this when putting together ID projects -- what will the end-learner be experiencing, have I truly represented the situations they will encounter when applying the content in real life?

As someone who grew up with a strong sense of wanting to understand other people – not to compare them with "my" culture and values, but to maybe learn something new that I might be able to use in my own life – I’ve always kind of assumed that most people think differently than I do in some way, shape, or form (likely the result of having a philosophy professor for a father). I’ve learned to ask questions and try to educate myself.

Culture and Instructional Design

Culture should be more than a passing a consideration in instructional design. Taking into consideration demographics of learners is a simple acknowledgement that different learners have different experiences and different needs. For example, if you know you’re designing for tech-savvy millennials, you can use a higher level of computer interaction in your courses than if you’re designing something for AARP.

When you work in a corporate environment, you will be familiar with the corporate culture, corporate branding, corporate expectations, and corporate social norms. Your instructional design work is conducted within those corporate parameters. If you are a consultant and work with multiple companies on different projects, you cannot make these kinds of cultural assumptions about any of your projects, let alone all of them.

Within a corporate structure, you also know who your learners are going to be – and they are aware of all the same corporate norms that you are. For better or worse, expectations are somewhat aligned.

When working with new clients, in new industries, with new learner profiles, you cannot make any assumptions about what these learners will need. This is where you will need to work closely with the client to identify learning goals, learning structure, learning environment, learner expectations, etc. We’re not there to tell the client how to run their business, we are there to help them solve a performance problem and make things go more smoothly for them.

Check In

Some of the cultural things that you should take into account when working across multiple cultures are use of different graphic images and icons, use of colors (red can be offensive in some cultures), numbers (I worked for a company that had to modify its logo because it included four objects, and four is not a good number in some cultures), verbiage/language (some words aren’t appropriate cross-culturally), music, fonts, self-identifiers...are you seeing a pattern? If you don’t know these things about the cultures you’re working with, you could inadvertently offend someone when that is the last thing you intend.

Many of the areas that I've noted to watch culturally correspond to things to watch when creating accessible materials (colors, fonts, labels, etc.). Which makes sense -- cultural differences, physical ability differences, these are both things that most white Americans overlook on a daily basis.

If you work with multiple clients, you may find you need to have multiple strategies for accomplishing the same work – knowing that some processes are better for some organizations and cultures than others. You need to be able to work within your clients’ processes instead of trying to force them into yours.

Keep Culture in Mind

Regardless of where you are in the instructional design process (just starting a needs analysis or fully in course development), it’s important to take a moment to reflect on your culture, your client’s (or corporation’s) culture, and the culture of the end-learner. How materials are presented, and how they align with the anticipated culture, will have a big impact on the overall success of an instructional design endeavor.

America is an even more diverse community than it was back in the 1990s – which is fantastic but creates some challenges that might not have been considered before. If you are working as an independent consultant or contractor, understanding more than basic demographics about an organization and its learners is critical for your success.

References

Cottonbro. (n.d.). People engaged in their phones image. https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-engaged-on-their-phones-8088495/.

Hassan, M. (n.d.). People in cogs image. https://pixabay.com/vectors/gears-humans-teamwork-people-5688996/.

OPWL 537 Course Instructors. (2021). Instructional Design Course Handbook. Boise, ID: Boise State department of Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning.

Rothwell, W., Benscoter, B., King, M., & King, S. B. (2016). Mastering the Instructional Design Process: A Systematic Approach (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.