Audience Adversity

In today's business environment, an awareness, appreciation and understanding of cultural diversity is absolutely vital. Whether you're working with clients or colleagues in different countries, or have people from different cultures in the same office as you, cultural awareness will help create a productive, cohesive and positive working environment. Without an understanding of cultural differences, it's easy for offence to be caused and misunderstandings to occur.

Routinely we all are serving communities that include a very diverse audience. If we are to communicate effectively with each audience, it's important to learn the "cultural norms" for respectful communication within varying groups, whether diversity relates to ethnicity, ability, or birth origin. While we usually think of diversity in terms of cultural uniqueness, it can also relate to working with groups with specific unique needs, such as those working an unusual shift or working in a particular type of industry.

It is crucial to focus mostly on developing respectful and authentic skills for face to face communication with diverse audiences. Cultural or ethnic diversity implies that a good number of families will vary in their values and attitudes toward child rearing, daily routines and even working with staff as authority figures. It's important that we learn of those values and what they imply out our program interactions with families.

References:

Schauber, A. C. (2001a). Effecting Extension organizational change toward cultural diversity: A conceptual framework. Journal of Extension.

Svecz, A. (2010). Gender Communication: The Impact Gender Has On Effective Communication. Retrieved from http://www.suite101.com/content/gender-communication.

Cultural differences can be daunting enough to overcome without also making allowances for tendencies in gender communication. While there are no absolutes and individual differences in communication types vary across employees groups, general identified trends can assist managers in elevating simple gaps in communication styles.

Robin Lakoff, author of "Language and a Woman's Place," studied differences in how boys and girls are taught and reinforced to communicate throughout their early childhood development. Essentially, Lakoff observed that girls are taught to use passive, empathetic voices and are more encouraged toward active listening. Boys, however, are encouraged toward competition, using forceful, active tones.

Since we all pay much more attention to non-verbal communication than to spoken words, it's important to explore have varying people talk with their hands, posture, face, etc. Cultures vary on preference