I thought I share another one of my experience during my internship with the company I'm currently with (Li & Fung). This time its relative to the people that I have to work with rather than the company itself. This often involves customers or rather stakeholders that the company has relations with. As I'm only an intern I do not often deal with these people but I usually observe the staff that has been working in the company for over 20 years handle a situation.
Because Malaysia is a multicultural boiling pot of different ethnic groups, often the way we conduct conversations can be seen by outsiders as odd. This adds alittle more into the PR side of things, in one of my days at the office I notice two customers who were searching for the Manager of the office, they were there to enquire on some shipments which they had ordered but have not arrived since last month (they were overdue for more than a month ago).
Therefore the next person to speak with them was a supervisor for the sales management team. The following conversation that came was a mixture of Bahasa Malaysia, several different chinese dialects, some minor shouting and finally a conclusion. From a glance this would seem like very bad situation considering they were shouting and talking really loudly furthermore the body language given by both parties would seem very negative to anyone that wasn't following the conversation.
What really happen was that the supervisor, explained that the boss was away on a trip, and the customer wondered why is he on a trip when he hasn't received his shipment in over a month. The super then explained in a chinese dialect that the shipment is on its way however with holidays through the month of September, everything has been pushed back by several weeks. He then explained that they will get it over as quickly as posisble before the following holiday.
What seemed like a really bad situation where things would have disolved between two different parties and transformed into a fist-fight, was actually how the locals here deal with thier share of issues and problems. Often whats read in western culture as unacceptable in Public Relations, here its pretty much the opposite and I believe that all Malaysian PRs should be careful on how they communicate with others within Malaysia.
1 comment:
Yes i understand this because i have worked in Indonesia before so i understand the cultural background plays really important part in affecting work environment, and language barrier is also important factor for this case eh,,I hope you had fun though with your placement job
Donny Wibowo
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