What goes unsaid at work and why it matters

How do communication styles, decision-making processes and professional expectations differ between Austria and Ukraine, and what role does intercultural competence play in everyday working life? These were the questions at the heart of a workshop held by the Safawi Institute on 12 May in Vienna.

Anyone who has worked in an international team knows the feeling: conversations drift past each other without anyone being quite sure why. The words are right, the intentions are good, and still something grates. A direct statement intended as clarity can read as rudeness. Silence offered as consideration can be taken for agreement. These are not edge cases but routine occurrences in binational teams, and it was precisely these moments that the workshop set out to examine.

The session was led by Yaryna Eliash, a communications expert whose career has taken her from Ukraine through a series of international organisations to her current role at Erste Group in Vienna, where she oversees communications for Central European markets. Having worked professionally on both sides, she brings a perspective on intercultural difference that is grounded in lived experience rather than theory. The workshop was deliberately designed as an interactive experience. Rather than cataloguing cultural differences in the abstract, it made them tangible through real examples drawn from everyday professional life, a method that does not merely inform but actively sharpens the way participants observe and interpret the situations around them.

"Misunderstandings rarely arise from ill will. They arise from different assumptions about what goes without saying."

A central theme was context-aware communication: the capacity to hear not only what is said but to understand the circumstances in which it is said. In Austrian professional life, shaped as it often is by indirect communication and formalised structures, that capacity carries a different weight than it does in the Ukrainian context, which tends to be more direct while also remaining acutely sensitive to hierarchy. For many participants, the session was less an analysis of others than a reflection on their own culturally formed assumptions, on what they take for granted, on what they instinctively read as professional, on how they respond to authority or criticism. The Safawi Institute designed this format with that intention in mind: not simply to pass on knowledge, but to create a space in which intercultural dialogue becomes not only possible but genuinely productive.