Elias asked a fair question of his employee handbook: There’s a policy about providing excellent customer service — but just what does that mean?

Nobody answered it. So the recommendation that follows is the one with the most immediate operational consequence in this book.

Onboarding that teaches the second curriculum

Companies hiring immigrant workers should invest in systematic onboarding that goes beyond technical job training to include education on cultural expectations, communication norms, and the unwritten rules of the Canadian service environment. This can take the form of orientation handbooks that, besides telling people what to do, explain how things are usually done here.

Training programs should include culture-specific role-play exercises in which immigrant workers practise negotiating the tensions this research surfaced: balancing personal warmth against Canadian expectations of transactional efficiency, or adapting hierarchical communication habits to flatter workplace structures.

They should also include cultural awareness modules aimed at both immigrant workers and their Canadian-born co-workers, explaining why certain behaviours occur — standing closer while talking, using familial terms of endearment with customers, going well beyond the task to serve someone. Those behaviours are not deficits to be corrected but an expression of deeply held cultural values around hospitality and collectivism.

Training should incorporate guided reflection, giving immigrant workers space to examine their own acculturation strategies and make conscious decisions about which host-country norms to adopt and which heritage practices to retain, rather than leaving that entirely to trial and error.

And such programs would benefit from involving immigrant workers who have already made these transitions as co-designers, so the material is practical and real rather than theoretical.

The cheapest measure on the list is also one of the most effective: pair new immigrant employees with experienced employees from the same cultural background, offering a safe and familiar source of guidance in the crucial first months.

What already exists, and why it isn’t enough

It is worth knowing how far current practice sits from that ideal.

Several cultural competency training programs operate across Canada, but they are often broad in scope and generic in design. At the federal level, employers participating in the Atlantic Immigration Program must complete Intercultural Competency Training before they can be designated, covering topics such as creating welcoming workplaces and supporting newcomer integration. Settlement organizations run comparable programming locally: Hire Immigrants Ottawa provides employers and HR professionals with cross-cultural competency sessions on intercultural communication, problem solving, and adaptation strategies. The Centre for Newcomers in Calgary offers cultural competency workshops for corporate and non-profit audiences, covering newcomer demographics, geopolitical context, and best practices for working with immigrants and refugees. Global Affairs Canada’s Centre for Intercultural Learning went further for one population, building culture-specific training on Syrian culture for government employees working directly with refugees, including cultural manifestations and historical context rather than generic material.

Two things stand out. Most of these programs are built for employers and receiving communities rather than for immigrant service workers themselves. And they tend to treat culture as one large category, without addressing the specific cultural dynamics that shape how workers from a given region actually deliver service.

Future training design needs to move away from generic cultural awareness toward interventions grounded in specific cultural dimensions and real service scenarios. Listen, apologize, fix, thank — four words that changed how Tarek experienced the hardest part of his job — is what specificity looks like at the smallest possible scale.

For settlement agencies and business developers

Settlement and employment organizations can build programs that help newcomers learn what Canadian customers expect without surrendering their cultural background, so that they can apply their skills, protect their own wellbeing, and avoid confusion during workplace integration.

Advocacy work should not stop at recommendations; it should end up inside organizational policy, so that integration happens without psychological compromise or loss of identity. The integration difficulties described by the participants in this study are not generic workplace problems, and they need culturally specific mechanisms. Structured support produced better adjustment than leaving people to work out cultural disjuncture alone.

For business developers, the instruction is simple: make the implicit norms of the Canadian service sector explicit — expected behaviours, communication styles, professionalism standards, customer expectations — and pair newcomers with experienced employees from similar cultural backgrounds so that technical and cultural guidance arrive together.

For policymakers: cultural differences must be seen as assets, not limitations, and company policies should be framed to leverage incoming cultural values rather than flatten them.