A few years ago, I was training some Japanese men who were visiting the United States. They were in a multidisciplinary training program and were housed in a dormitory on a college campus along with traditional students. Needless to say, these Japanese picked up some inappropriate words that they heard being bandied about by the 18- to 22-year-old male undergraduates. The problem was that the Japanese did not know when they could get away with using bad language and when they couldn’t. In one embarrassing incident, they used the worst of all expletives to the president of the college at a formal reception. It was decided that someone had to spell out for them what they could say and what they could not. I was chosen for this dubious task.

I quickly found that the trickiest part of the explanation was teaching
them discernment. Why is it okay to say “darn” in public if you drop
your book on your toe but not a similar expletive? Eventually, I had to read aloud to them the nastiest words in the English language and all their combinations and say, “Don’t say these words.”

In a way, teaching employees who are ignorant of appropriate language and conversational topics is much the same. Even for Englishspeaking employees, you must spell out what your culture finds offensive, because that really does change from environment to environment.

Thus, conversations that are appropriate among nurses at a hospital
would not be appropriate in conference rooms. And just because an
employee’s conversation was not considered inappropriate in her last company doesn’t mean that she will be able to make discerning choices in her new company.

Taken From: 201 Ways to Turn Any Employee Into a STAR Performer