Working with Diverse Cultural and Ethnic Backgrounds
Many clients in community mental health centers represent a range of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and one should manage and overcome any obstacle relating to these diversities. A diverse cultural and ethnic background has clients of different origins speaking different languages. In addition, such clients have different beliefs, traditions, and norms, meaning that one must manage all the aspects of a multicultural environment cautiously (Sunny Tsang, 2021). Thus, employees should deliver quality services effectively to all clients irrespective of their beliefs, values, attitudes, language, and behaviours.
Effective and quality services in a multicultural community mental health center demand that one overcome the language and cultural barriers. Communication is essential regarding the quality and effective delivery of services. Employees must learn a few phrases or sentences of the commonly spoken language or as many languages as possible. Additionally, asking clients to repeat themselves cautiously and politely is important. An employee should also feel comfortable when a client demands a repeat. Therefore, both parties should feel comfortable asking one another to repeat themselves to overcome language and cultural barriers.
Another important way of ensuring one delivers quality services in a multicultural health facility is by avoiding stereotyping. An employee must be careful with the language one uses. It is equally important to avoid making assumptions based on a client’s behavior. Irrespective of the client’s cultural upbringing, individuals are autonomous and must be handled as such. Thus, as an employee, it is necessary to appreciate that clients communicate and make preferences uniquely.
Practising empathy in the community center enables one to understand and share the clients’ feelings. Making the clients appreciate that one understands them and shares their feelings enhances good interpersonal relations (Reiter, 2021). For this reason, the employee will ensure that the community mental health facility achieves the desired goals faster. Lastly, practicing empathy helps reduce cultural and ethnic conflicts, which hinder the growth and performance of any institution.
The Acculturation Process
The acculturation process entails adopting, acquiring, and adjusting an individual to a new cultural environment after being placed in a new one. Employees in a community mental health facility try to incorporate themselves into a more prevalent cultural setup by participating in such aspects as clients’ traditions while holding onto theirs. The acculturation results include changing religious practices, food, language, clothing, customs, norms, attitudes, and behaviors. Additionally, the employee is likely to portray changes in numerous physical and psychological attributes (Reiter, 2021). Therefore, acculturation is a culture learning process that affects an employee’s way of doing things in a workplace, eventually enhancing service delivery to the clients.
Moreover, the acculturation process is long, with some physical forces sometimes controlling it. Social pressure and constant exposure are key catalysts for its prevalence. Clients are likely to behave in a manner that forces an employee to quickly adopt their behaviour and way of doing things. Likewise, the employee will keep interacting with society, which makes it easy to assimilate and integrate with the host community.
The acculturation process enhances work performance because an employee assimilates and integrates with clients. They build more trust with the employee and seek more services, which yields better results. Assimilation and integration also enhance work relations and promote communication and diversity, making clients feel valued and appreciated. In addition, acculturation enhances daily organization activities favourable to clients and the workplace, which promotes the achievement of the center’s goals. Therefore, good relations and understanding between employees and clients play a critical role in enhancing performance.
Challenges in Forming Trusting Relations
Trusting relationships between employees and culturally different clients is essential in achieving the centre’s goals. Where trusting relationships exist, service delivery is efficient, which enhances the centre’s performance. However, as an employee, cultural difference is the biggest challenge in forming trusting relationships with culturally different clients. It is so because an employee’s interpretation of the norms differs from the clients. Some employees’ values and beliefs may be right, while the same for the client may be wrong (Oswald A. J. Mascarenhas, 2019). For example, an employee may place a great deal for valuing time while to the client; it is a non-issue. Therefore, a client may be late for an appointment and find the employee has already left or engaged in other matters that make it difficult to attend to the client. This miscommunication brings about a big challenge in trust relationships. Thus, the fact that the employee relates time with money and the client does not is a fertile ground for intercultural conflict.
Cultural differences bring about communication differences where employees may communicate issues differently from the client. The employee’s culture may emphasize more on spoken words, while that of clients may be more on non-verbal communication. The clients’ way of expressing themselves may be through facial expressions, silence, body gestures, or even what is not said instead of what is said (Reiter, 2021). Thus, cross-cultural communication is another fertile ground for forming trusting relationship issues between employees and clients.
Therefore, employees and clients must recognize their cultural frameworks and assess the values that drive their behavior. They must understand that one’s way of doing things is only sometimes right and manage cultural differences positively. Managing cultural differences like cross-cultural communication promotes trust between employees and clients. A trusted relationship leads to satisfaction for both the employee and the clients, which enhances the achievement of fundamental goals.
Reference List
Reiter, M. D. (2021). Multicultural interviewing: Working with diverse clients. Therapeutic Interviewing, Routledge.
Oswald A. J. Mascarenhas, S. J. (2019). The ethics of trusting corporate relations. Corporate Ethics for Turbulent Markets, Emerald Publishing Limited.
Sunny Tsang. (2021). 9 ways to manage a multicultural team. Fond. Web.