People engage in communication in several ways, the words and actions of individuals are means of communication and the choice of words reflect the culture of the individual. Culture is a set of basic ideas, practices and experiences shared by the people in the group. Communicating with other individuals of different cultures is known as intercultural communication which deals with the interactions among speakers of different cultural backgrounds speaking a common language for the purpose of understanding. A workplace is one of the common places where communication functions both positively and negatively. It is a place where employees perform the jobs with the concept of organization toward goals as Larsson (2010) refers to it as a systematic established union of people. With the presence of different cultures forming the workplace will in many ways be both harmonious and conflicting sometimes that requires the employees to struggle and adhere to strategies in order to possess the ability to communicate well in an intercultural situation. The communication serves as the basis of communication in the workplace to keep the organization in place. Hence, Mariani (2013), states the importance of possessing the strategic competence, the mastery of communication strategies that may help enhance the effectiveness of communication or to compensate for breakdowns while getting one’s message across. In this manner, strategies in communication are employed for better understanding. The study analyzed how communication takes place in a workplace. It sought to find out the ways faculty members in a workplace communicate with one another along with the struggles and difficulties in understanding each other’s culture. The study made use of descriptive qualitative design with an in depth analysis of the data following the communication accommodation theory through the short narratives of the respondents along with the profile. The result shows that communication in the faculty workroom is made effective and efficient through the process of understanding each other’s culture. However, as conflict is unavoidable, it still exists in a working environment in one way or the other. As a reflection of the individual’s culture, language seems to be one of the causes of conflict. Majority of the respondents are encountering difficulty in the workplace in terms of communication due to the intercultural situation while less than half of the respondents expressed that there is no difficulty communicating interculturally. The implication of the no difficulty may suggest that a common language among the colleagues create better and deeper understanding during interactions with speakers of the same language speaking in the same tone. This interpretation leads to the idea that language and practices are the root of conflict of the colleagues in the workplace. The results serves as awareness to individuals in a workplace as to how intercultural communication functions and how people engage into it.

communication, intercultural communication, workplace, working environment, communication strategies