alt Hacker NewsIt’s also incredibly cultural.
Swearing in the workplace is much more normal here in Australia. In my first job at an American company, I was shocked how prissy people were about swearing. In my head I thought “these are adults, right? Why is everyone acting like a blushing teenager?”. I’m sure I sounded rough as guts to them. It took ages to learn to scale it back depending on who I was talking to.
Swearing with someone about / at work is kinda an Australian way to say “I trust you and feel relaxed around you”. Forcing myself to not swear felt at first like I was pretending I didn’t like my coworkers. It was weird.
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This is a great real world example of why we need cultural competency training. Here it would be an HR led class where we practice swearing while talking to the new Aussie coworker(s) in order to make them feel comfortable and improve their performance and ease onboarding.
Similar thing in the US. I was in a company that merged with a company in Texas and several of the executives would use the F-word in every other sentence. HR asked if we were offended in California and I said that I personally don't care but would be nice if they would stop doing this on customer calls customers that pay millions of dollars per quarter and are professionals. Our new CEO showed up late to a meeting with a big customer wearing his biker outfit and he too swore a lot. In the end we lost a lot of customers from this. The CEO did not care, he was a Chicago mobster and expected everyone to kiss his butt.