Cultural competence is the ability to interact and communicate with people from different cultures easily. It entails; respect during communication, acceptance, and adaptation to other people’s cultures, awareness of one’s own culture and beliefs, Accepting skills, knowledge, and talents, and accepting and celebrating other people: ‘s success. As people within an area become more diverse, it’s important to pay attention to linguistic and cultural barriers. Cultural competence benefits are wide, and vast. They include; an increase in collaboration, especially in workplaces, better provision of health care services, better communication, especially between people from different cultures, enhanced customer satisfaction in businesses, and creating a welcoming environment and acceptance of similarities and differences between people of different cultures.
When people from different cultures work together, more ideas are created. This creates more solutions to problems in creative ways. Companies also have access to broader options in terms of services and customers. Active listening and eloquence in speaking are important in communication between people of different cultures. We all are responsible for conveying our thoughts clearly.
Cultural competence also promotes empathy toward the people we communicate with. This allows adaptability in workplaces in case of changes. To improve cultural competence one can do the following; create a reasonable and workable plan, Provide information, or provide training classes to better understand others’ cultures, develop communication skills, and develop good manners such as saying “thank you”.
In this day and age, the society is increasingly becoming more globalized. Technology today has made interactions very common. Industries and companies have global collaborations making it so that people from different countries work in the same places. The youth and children today should learn and respect other people’s cultures since at some point in time they will have to interact with people from different cultures.