Meet a member - Ridha Mejri

As a business English trainer, coach or teacher, have you ever wondered what it really means to teach communication when the people, tools and ways of working in your learners’ world are culturally diverse? In our second interview of 2026, BESIG interviewer, Viktoryia, chats with BE and ICC trainer Ridha Mejri about culture, communication, AI, and the changing role of the trainer. There’s plenty of food for thought. Read on to learn more!

Bio:

Ridha Mejri is Senior Lecturer in Business Communication & Intercultural Management at Worms University of Applied Sciences, Germany. As an in-company trainer and consultant, he runs seminars and workshops helping executives and expats build intercultural and management competence. He has lived, studied and worked in several countries.

1. Ridha, your biography is a bit of a cultural tapestry! At this moment in time, where do you belong, culturally speaking? 

I grew up bilingual, between Tunisian Arabic and French, in a setting where switching languages and codes was simply everyday life rather than a skill anyone talked about. Later I studied and worked in several countries and my wife is German - so the cultural tapestry kept adding threads. What I've noticed is that living across languages does something to you: it makes you mentally flexible, adaptable, hungry to learn and permanently curious. So, if you ask me where I belong today, I'd say I'm a cosmopolitan, a world citizen. That said, after more than thirty years in Germany, I sometimes catch myself being thoroughly "Germanized" – organized, accurate, punctual, direct and mildly irritated when a meeting starts late. My students find that funnier than I do.

2. I see that your main line of work is in business and intercultural communication training. What are the most in-demand topics or skills among companies right now? 

Three areas dominate right now. First, virtual and hybrid collaboration - distributed teams working across time zones and cultures, without the usual cues that help us read each other. Second, feedback and communication styles, which sounds soft until you watch a German manager's directness land on a colleague from a high-context culture. Third, leading diverse teams - often managers promoted for technical excellence who suddenly face expectations of leadership quite unlike their own. Much of my work is facilitating workshops for international teams on conflict management, trust building, leadership, problem solving and decision making. What's changed is the framing: companies used to book country briefings before an expatriate assignment; now they want skills their people can apply to whoever is on the call tomorrow. That's the healthier ask.

3. Is there anything that you’ve realized isn’t working in business communication or intercultural training, something we should maybe stop doing as trainers?

Yes. We should stop treating national culture as the explanation for everything. Dimension models give a useful starting vocabulary, but too many trainings hand out country scores and stop there. Participants leave with tidier stereotypes than they arrived with - "Germans are direct, Japanese are indirect" - and no idea what to do when the real person doesn't match the profile. Nationality is one variable among many: profession, company culture, generation, personality, hierarchy, whether someone is speaking their third language on a bad connection. And in business communication today, the point is getting the job done, not sounding fluent and correct. So, we need to stop being language mechanics and become learning designers, facilitators and coaches. I'd also retire the one-off half-day workshop with no follow-up: it feels good for an afternoon and changes nothing. Behaviour shifts through practice and reflection over time, not through a single session.

4. If a peer, a business English teacher, approached you to ask how they could ‘branch out’ into intercultural communication training, which they’ve never done before, what would you advise?

First, get a proper qualification. Intercultural training is a field in its own right, not an add-on to a language course - you need the theoretical basics, but also the craft: how to design a training, how to market it and how to deliver it in a room where people may be defensive or skeptical. Second, network with like-minded colleagues. Join one of the SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) organizations where you're based; that's where you meet practitioners, find mentors and discover what the work actually looks like before you sell it. Third, be honest about the shift in role. As a business English trainer you're often the expert with the right answer. In intercultural work you're a facilitator - the expertise sits in the room, and your job is to surface it. That transition takes more unlearning than most people expect.

5. In your opinion, is AI likely to impede or facilitate our job as professional trainers? Why?

Facilitate - but only if we let it. In a recent conference talk I put it like this: AI didn't take our job; it took the part of our job we were never proud of. The endless error correction, the template drilling, the tenth explanation of the present perfect - machines do that faster and more patiently than we ever did. What's left is the harder and more interesting half. AI writes fluently; it does not communicate wisely. It produces correct English, not appropriate communication and that difference is where our value now sits: tone, subtext, relationship, cultural fit, knowing when not to send something at all. The trainers who struggle will be those who defined themselves as language mechanics. Those who become learning designers, facilitators and coaches will have more work, not less.

6. I assume you belong to a number of professional communities. What is unique or special, if anything, about BESIG for you?  

I belong to several professional organisations, but BESIG is the one I keep coming back to. Three words explain why: communicate, collaborate, co-create. It isn't a place where you passively consume content - it's a community where you learn, share, network and, above all, work on projects together with people who care about the same questions you do. What I value most is that BESIG actively encourages you to put yourself out there. Have an idea? Propose a session. Curious about something? Ask and someone will have tried it. That combination of generosity and low threshold is rarer than it sounds. Over the years the people I've met through BESIG have become collaborators and friends, not just contacts. For a freelancer working alone much of the time, that matters more than any single conference programme.

Interview by Viktoryia Zelianko. Edited by Shweta Paropkari.