How not to offend your colleagues

Many times you would have ended up in a situation where you offend someone (unknowingly) and ask yourself "Why did I say that"...Here I will go through some suggestions and discuss how to avoid this situation where you offend someone unknowingly. Having a health relation with your colleagues is very important in surviving and succeeding in professional world.

Don't indulge in unnecessary discussions at work

If you don't have any control over what you talk and you feel that sometimes you put yourself in trouble by choosing wrong words during your conversation. You need to work on correcting this otherwise you could be in trouble one day.

Don't say something for which you have to regret in future. For example don't make fun of someone at work, no matter how close he or she might be. Sometimes people don't like your joke and you could be in serious trouble. Always refrain yourself from loose talks.

When I landed in the free country (USA), I had done my homework on cross cultures, I had gone thru cross cultural training, but still there are few things which can't be corrected. I am basically from India and first thing we ask when we meet someone in India is: which state he or she belongs to. Whether he is from North India or not or he speaks Hindi or not.

Here I met a Chinese looking lady she was my client and when she was behaving over friendly to me I asked her if she is from China. I could clearly see that she didn't like it, she said I am American. But I didn't stop and I asked her again if her parents or ancestors are from China. I was lucky that she was kind enough to explain me that I shouldn't ask anyone in America tat which country they belong to. All Americans are proud to be called as American so this kind of question is little insulting, unless they themselves are mentioning their home country.

I did some research and I found that there are many Asian countries who don't like China very well and their citizens hate to be called as Chinese. Be careful, every Chinese looking person is not Chinese.

Ok, here I didn't provide you the solution, whenever you have a question on someone's nationality and you can't control yourself. Go to Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, look at their profile and get an idea of where they have come from. This will give you a fair idea of the nationality and other information about the person you were looking more information for.

Asian countries are not good at racism and sometimes we get trapped in our own words when we talk about a particular race. For example we don't have anybody feeling about Black people but calling an African American person Black could be dangerous in professional world. Even if your Black friend is calling himself Black, doesn't give you a right to call him Black, always use African American or just African when you resemble someone whom you think is black.

I don't know who you are talking about

Adopt a habit of saying I don't know, never support or oppose any controversial public figure at work. This may lead to unnecessary heated discussion and you won't gain anything out of it.