Cultural agility: The inclusion skill global businesses can’t afford to ignore

Global organisations rely on people working across different countries, cultures and backgrounds every day. That brings innovation and diversity of thought, but it can also lead to moments where people unintentionally misread or confuse each other. Cultural agility helps people navigate these moments with more awareness, care and confidence.

What is cultural agility?

Cultural agility is the ability to recognise how your own background shapes the way you communicate, give feedback, make decisions, navigate disagreements and lead a team. It also means understanding that others may approach those same situations differently.

It encourages people to reflect on how their expectations and working styles are shaped by their background – and consider how adapting their approach could help avoid conflict or misunderstandings when working with others.

Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map is a useful reference here. In her work on feedback, she contrasts the Dutch tendency to give direct criticism with the Thai tendency to avoid criticising colleagues openly or in front of others. Without cultural agility, their differing views of what helpful feedback sounds like could easily create tension.

However, despite the name, cultural agility is not only about nationality or geography. A person’s background can also be shaped by upbringing, social class, age, education, neurodivergence, lived experience and more.

It’s important to note that cultural agility should never mean stereotyping people or expecting everyone from a similar background to work in the same way. It’s a life skill that helps people better understand what others need from them, so colleagues can do their best work together.

Why inclusion needs cultural agility

Inclusion is about ensuring people can contribute fully, and that their perspectives are heard, valued and reflected in decisions. Policies help support this, but they cannot do that work alone.

That is where cultural agility plays an important and practical role. By helping people understand how background can shape different ways of thinking, communicating and working, it supports a stronger sense of inclusion for all.

Why cultural agility matters for global businesses

Across a global organisation, regular misunderstandings can quickly become business issues. A few seconds of conversation can be enough to create confusion or frustration. And when those moments happen across teams and markets every day, they can have a significant impact on business performance as well as culture.

This matters even more during periods of change. When people are navigating new or unfamiliar expectations at pace, it becomes harder for people to stay aligned. Cultural agility helps to reduce the chance that pressure or confusion turns into conflict.

The impact also extends beyond internal teams. If customer-facing colleagues misread local expectations around hierarchy, communication style or decision-making, it can affect the customer experience and weaken brand perception in that market.

This is where communication matters. Cultural agility cannot rely on good intentions alone. People need clear language, relatable examples and practical tools to understand what cultural agility looks like in real life.

Strategic People and Culture communications make that possible. They give people the confidence to spot those moments, understand what may be happening beneath the surface and respond in a way that builds trust rather than tension.

Communication turns cultural agility into everyday practice

So how do we make cultural agility part of the workplace toolkit? The first step is awareness: helping people understand what cultural agility means and why it matters. That means translating a broad, abstract idea into practical workplace language. Not theory, but real situations people recognise, such as giving feedback, joining global meetings, managing disagreements, leading hybrid teams or working with customers in different markets.

From there, communication can make cultural agility easier to practice. Manager guides, case studies, reflection exercises and scenario-based tools can encourage people to pause, question their assumptions and adapt their ways of working.

This is not about giving people a script. It’s about making cultural agility visible, practical and relevant enough to influence how people work. Done well, communication does more than explain cultural agility. It gives people the ability to act on it.

Making inclusion work in practice

Cultural agility helps inclusion move from awareness to everyday behaviour. It supports people to recognise when their usual way of working may not fit the situation, and to adjust their approach to build stronger working relationships.

For global businesses, that matters. It shapes how teams collaborate across markets, how leaders communicate, how quickly change is adopted and how customers experience the organisation.

For People and Culture communications, the opportunity is to make cultural agility feel less like an abstract concept and more like a practical skill that quickly becomes second nature.

If cultural agility is becoming more important for your organisation, we can help make it practical and relevant. We partner with organisations to create strategic people and culture communications that help people work better together across teams, markets, cultures and lived experiences. We turn important workplace skills into communication that people can understand, relate to and use in their day-to-day work.

If you’d like to explore how communication could support cultural agility in your organisation, we’d love to talk.