Getting to Inclusion: How Professional Communicators Can Pull Organizations to Cultural Safety

By Caterina Valentino

Caterina Valentino provides a view at diversity through fresh eyes; charting a different course to achieve organizational DEI goals.

Professional communicators, you know the drill. It’s the end of the quarter and you need to assess how successfully the organization achieved its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals. What objectives remain unfulfilled, and more importantly, chart a plan of engagement activities to achieve those outstanding goals.

For professional communicators willing to see the world of diversity with fresh eyes, there is an opportunity to chart a different course of stakeholder engagement to achieve organizational DEI goals. That’s shifting one’s thinking from cultural competency to cultural safety.

Culture Competency

Cultural competency is being aware of one’s own cultural beliefs and values. Culture is defined as the total of one’s expectations and patterns of beliefs of how to think, act and feel, and most importantly, that one willingly passes on to others as a best practice.

Addressing cultural competency is easy – it’s DEI education. An organization hires a DEI consultant to provide a prescribed curriculum of diversity education and sensitivity training semi-tailored to the organization’s business and its employees’ needs. This education  would provide employees with awareness of an attitude toward knowledge and skills that allow them to interact harmoniously with diverse people and communities.

DEI training is an easily assessed KPI (key performance indicator) grounded in measuring how well employees have acquired the diversity curriculum with respect to:

• A basic understanding of one’s own culture and ethnicity;
• An understanding of the cultural practices of people and communities that differ from themselves; and,
• A willingness to accept and respect these differences.

Cultural competence isn’t a skill that can be mastered. People, places and things are not static. Culture is not a monolithic category of like characteristics that describe a homogenous community. Dynamic environments usher in new dimensions of a culture and create opportunities for new organizational stories to be told. But employees schooled only to be culturally competent will navigate interpersonal communication, socioeconomic status and cultural barriers superficially.

When an organization strives to achieve cultural safety, then every part of the organization works together to reap the benefits that grow from embracing diversity. Who better to plan, design and implement organizational wide stakeholder engagement activities than professional communicators who are at the heart of every organization.

Cultural Safety

Cultural safety is centered on the concept of creating an environment that is safe. Cultural safety transcends cultural competency because it moves beyond knowing to appreciating the differences. Cultural safety is about making real efforts to involve, collaborate with and empower those who are different from ourselves. Cultural safety creates an environment where people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds feel respected and safe — spiritually, socially, emotionally and physically — from discrimination and denial of their identity and unmet needs. Cultural safety, a term widely used in the health care sector, can be successfully applied to an array of organizations and communities to foster inclusiveness.

Ward, Branch, and Fridken (2016, para. 9) describes cultural safety as developing an ongoing personal practice of critical self-reflection, attention to how social and historical contexts shape understanding, and honesty about one’s own power and privilege.

Engagement: The Professional Communicator’s Role in Cultural Safety

Communication professionals are experts in designing communication plans, strategies and tactics that engage audiences in clear, unbiased, open and respectful ways. When it comes to pulling diversity through an organization, professional communicators fulfil three strategic objectives: involving, collaborating with and empowering its diverse employees and communities to action.

Involving: Preparation & Planning

Here professional communicators are tasked to plan and create opportunities for its diverse stakeholders to become directly involved in offering their input, concerns and aspirations to the planning process. This step is critical. It lays the foundation for and provides the assurances and promises that the process is an upward channeling of information rather than a downward sharing of predetermined information.

Collaboration & Decision Making

Professional communicators must find ways to partner with diverse audiences to involve them in the decision-making process. The professional communicator’s goal is to provide its diverse stakeholders the power to make informed decisions and recommendations on the best courses of action.

Professional communicators who pull cultural safety through their organizations:

• Focus their messaging on acting and relating authentic stakeholder stories.
• Create opportunities to speak out against racism and promote allyship.
• Promote cultural humility that is a humble acknowledgement of oneself as a learner when it comes to understanding another’s experience while recognizing the power and privilege that each individual carries.
• Encourages leaders to model listening without judgment. Being open to learn from and about others with the aim to promote a culture of mutual understanding, successful partnerships, and cultural safety.

As organizations become increasingly more diverse, we will be called upon to use our expertise to build a culturally safe workplace – a space where staff can form respectful, professional relationships and engage in authentic conversations about challenging subjects.